Robert Senkpiel (1946-1975)

Robert Senkpiel’s Edwin Booth Construction has a memorial votive quality in its assemblage of small objects in the style of Joseph Cornell. Edwin Booth (1833-1893) was an American actor known for performing Shakespearean plays, especially his portrayal of Hamlet. He became the co-manager of the Winter Garden Theatre in New York in 1864. Booth was a Unionist and supported Abraham Lincoln. He did not agree with his brother John Wilkes Booth, who has a secessionist—and ultimately, Lincoln’s assassin on April 14, 1865. Interestingly, about one or two years earlier, Edwin Booth had saved Lincoln’s son Robert Todd from falling off a railroad platform as a train began to move. --NW