This is one of the sculptures in the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. It is called Puellae (Girls) by Polish born Magdalena Abakanowicz in 1992. I found it fascinating.
Over the last 30 years, sculptor Magdalena Abakanowica has created a compelling and highly emotional body of work, largely drawn from her personal experience of World War II and its aftermath. She is best known for her "crowds" (as she calls them) of headless, rigidly posed figures whose anonymity and repetitious presentations have been regarded as the artist's personal response to totalitarianism.
Trained as a textile artist, Abakanowicz first used burlap in her indoor sculpture to achieve modulated, deeply incised surfaces for powerfully expressive ends. Each of the 30 bronzes in Puellae is a unique cast, made from a burlap mold that the artist individually worked during the casting process. The work refers to an account the artist heard as a child in Poland during World War II about a group of children who froze to death as they were transported in cattle cars from Poland to Germany, as part of the "Arianization" process.
