In 1855, Jefferson Davis — then Secretary of War, Mississippi slaveholder, and future President of the Confederacy — ordered sculptor Thomas Crawford to remove the liberty cap from the figure that would crown the United States Capitol dome. The cap was the pileus: the soft felt cap placed on the head of an enslaved person at the moment of manumission in Roman antiquity, a symbol so freighted with the meaning of emancipation that Davis understood it immediately and refused it immediately. His stated reason: "Americans were born free." The crested eagle helmet that replaced it remains on the dome today. Freedom, as installed, wears a suppression.
Pileus is a photographic and sculptural project that names what was removed and begins to return it. It is the direct companion and descendant of Pocahontas Revised, Second Edition (2026) — eight color analog photographs shot inside the Capitol rotunda on Lomography 800 CN film, tracing the iconographic program of colonial encounter, forged diplomacy, dispossession, and orchestrated surrender that decorates the interior of the building Davis helped to build. Where Pocahontas Revised maps the existing iconographic wound, Pileus proposes the object that was prevented from existing.
The pileus version of Freedom was never built at monumental scale. Crawford made small clay maquettes showing the design; Davis rejected them. What was cast in bronze and installed 288 feet above the Capitol floor was always the revised, helmeted figure. The only full-scale built version of Pileus Freedom exists in marble on the Senate wing's east pediment — the Progress of Civilization sculptural group (Crawford, 1863), where the sculptor retained the liberty cap in stone even after Davis forced the substitution on the dome. The pediment figure is the only monument to what was refused.
This project fabricates, for the first time, a bust of Pileus Freedom at dome-head scale — approximately 2.5 to 3 feet from chin to crown, the proportional size of the dome figure's head. The bust bears the artist's own face. The artist is Salvadoran-American; Becoming Sticky, the collective whose cosmological framework her practice inhabits, holds Mesoamerican cosmology at its center. Making her face the face of the suppressed figure is not a substitution. It is a completion: the woman of the Americas, whose emancipatory symbol was edited out of the nation's monument, returned to the scale she was prevented from reaching, wearing the cap she was always supposed to wear.
