It was August 1993. She had just been confirmed to the Supreme Court — the second woman in our country's history to take that seat — and before she flew back to Washington to be sworn in, she did something that still astonishes me: she walked into the Bristol Gallery on Larimer Street in Denver and stopped in front of my work.
The piece was called Virgin Queen. I had carved it by hand from a single block of stone. I remember where my hands were when I finished that one. I do not remember where my hands were the day Diane Rulis, the gallery's director, called to tell me who had bought it. To celebrate her appointment to the highest court in the land, Justice Ginsburg had chosen my work.
Almost a year later, after the sculpture made its way to Washington, she wrote to the gallery. The letter is dated August 26, 1994:
"The Virgin Queen arrived yesterday, and she looks made to order for our home. I am not sure we can follow the artist's instructions in case of a scratch, so one or both of you must visit us in D.C. to make sure we are maintaining her properly." — Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Diane Rulis, Bristol Gallery
And in a note to me, in her own careful hand on Supreme Court chambers paper:
"To LeeAnn Seaburg Perry — With appreciation for the Virgin Queen, a work we will treasure." — Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg · 8/17/94
I have spent thirty years listening to the stone. Six grits of diamond sandpaper, a hammer, a chisel, the slow patience of revealing what is already there. I have carved a lot of quiet hours into a lot of quiet figures. But nothing I have ever made felt heavier, or lighter, than Virgin Queen did, once I understood where it had gone.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not choose that piece because it was mine. She chose it because it was a woman, revealed from a stone, made by another woman's hand, at the moment she herself was being revealed into history. She understood, I think, that carving is a kind of dissent — a slow refusal of the block to stay a block.
She treasured the work. I have treasured the note.
I am not the only one she carried with her. She carried us all. And she left us, as the best ones do, something still to finish.
