Across the Bering Strait

“Across the Bering Strait is about the past, but it is also about the present. Populations are shifting all over the world today, refugees from battle or oppression, hopeful immigrants and adventurers pursuing dreams. They carry their nationalities and their cultures with them just as they carry their possessions. We may have our hopes for an information superhighway and our dreams of an interconnected world in the technological twenty-first century, yet it is still the movements of peoples that makes us aware of each other around the world: migration is arguably the strongest force towards the creation of a global village. Just as it made the world larger thirty thousand years ago, it is still people moving, migrating, and even literally walking, that is making the world smaller today.”
– Mary Ann Unger, Artist Statement for Across the Bering Strait, c.1994

“...diagonal movement is prominent in Unger’s migration sculpture...there is a sense of mission. Unger’s procession, however, is not remote; the viewer can wander and move with the participants, and in a sense, become a participant. Unger’s ability to engender this sense of unity—of the viewer, the site, and the sculpture—is what makes Across the Bering Strait so compelling.”
– Judith Page, Sculpture Magazine, 1998, “Mary Ann Unger: Beneath the Skin”

Across the Bering Strait preparatory drawing