AFTER THE “MONUMENTS”: PUBLIC ART AND POST-WAR MEMORY

Gary Shapiro

Monuments and memorials are situated at the caesura or hinge of life and death. We were

reminded of this by the violent August 2017 demonstrations in Charlottesville around the Robert

E. Lee statue. A white supremacist drove his car into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer and injuring

about twenty others. Monuments and memorials have a sleeping potential to make us confront

questions of life and death, territory and public space, political conflict, legal authority, and their

entanglements with art. Only the dead should be eligible for monuments. Autocrats who

encourage statues of themselves may fear, quite rightly, that their chances of posthumous

monumentalization are slim. While many people typically pass such landmarks daily without

giving them much thought, they harbor possibilities of unsettling the public. They are perpetual

provocations for the return of the repressed. It’s probable that until recently few people walking

or driving by the statue of a man at 103rd Street and Fifth Avenue in New York thought much

about it. After all, the city is dotted with statues in public places, and many of those honored are

obscure to most residents and visitors. Dr. J. Marion Sims in New York was placed on a pedestal

for pioneering gynecological research. Now we must respond to the fact that much of his

research involved brutal experiments on women of color. Sims’s statue is slated to be removed to

an appropriate museum.

At Charlottesville, Neo-Nazis and their allies fought with counter-demonstrators.

President Trump said there were good people on both sides. His chief of staff John Kelly

doubled down on Trump’s claim that the Civil War could have been avoided by a compromise –

foolish at best, possibly meant as a nod to white supremacists. It was repeated compromises on

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slavery that led to the War. How do you compromise about some people owning others? Along

with other defenders of the statues, Trump and Kelly say that taking down the so-called

monuments would be erasing US history. If there’s any place where I agree with them in this

controversy, it’s that this history should not be erased – but I maintain that the very purpose of

these statues was to falsify history by making it appear that the War was not about slavery and to

give a deceptive, heroic mask to the white supremacy and Jim Crow policies that increasingly

came to dominate the South in the period from about 1880 to 1920, the period when these bronze

Confederate horsemen were installed on their pedestals. Our knowledge and sense of US history

suffers from a severe case of deferred maintenance.1

“Save our history” say the statues’ defenders. They range from old line Southern

traditionalists to neo-Nazi opportunists. So what is the history? Here things get complicated

because the statues are not just “part” of history but were meant to embody a particular view of

what that history is. The Richmond statues were erected in the period from 1890 to 1920. I

continue to be surprised at how many people, otherwise reasonably educated, know so little

about US slavery, the Civil War, and its aftermath. The program of Reconstruction aimed at

incorporating African-Americans into the political and civil mainstream of Southern life. There

actually was biracial government in Virginia for a few years (1879-83) and there were

analogous, all too sporadic and short-lived democratic (small “d”) developments in other

Southern states. Reconstruction was terminated in 1877 – following one of those catastrophic

elections in which the majority and the electoral college were stymied by conflicting vote totals

in Florida. Like the 2000 vote where the Supreme Court selected George W. Bush -- arguably

setting the conditions that led to 16 years of warfare (and counting) in the Middle East. We still

1 A briefer preliminary version of this essay appeared in The New York Times on May 15, 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/opinion/the-meaning-of-our-confederate-monuments.html

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suffer from the crooked election deal of 1876 which capitalized on the vagaries of the electoral

college.

Political communities typically define themselves by public images in public places.

States celebrate their founding and victorious wars, while memorializing their losses. I gave a

talk on Confederate monuments at a Virginia public university. One man asked whether the best

solution to arguments about having them in public spaces might be to eliminate the public spaces

– that is, sell them to private bidders. I understand this suggestion as a reductio ad absurdum of

neo-liberalism with its drive to minimize the public sphere. It’s true that the city government of

Memphis, Tennessee followed such a path when they were stymied by state law in attempting to

remove Confederate statues, but such tactics are best seen as ad hoc expedients, rather than

hopeful promises of general privatization. What is a city without a public space? And in a

country that guarantees the right of the people to assemble, where shall they do that without

plazas, squares, and great malls like Washington’s?

I imagine that many readers of this essay will agree with this minimalist thesis: the

remaining Confederate “monuments” should not continue to stand in public places in their

current form. New Orleans and Mayor Landrieu have provided an exemplary model for

removing these markers of slavery, secession, and white supremacy. Memphis and Baltimore

have conducted healthy purges of their public spaces. A growing number of people in the US

recognize the possibility of something like a collective catharsis of the shameful symbols and,

beyond that, of renewed attempts to come to terms with the history and consequences of that

great fracture and trauma, the Civil War and its aftermath. The statues have become rallying

points for violent white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups. Can’t we just take them down? Here we

encounter an apparent tension, an aporia if you will. Should the emphasis be on purging or on

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memory? Would the elimination of public markers of the pro-slavery cause yield only a

deceptive assurance of innocence at the cost of obliterating history and memory? Defenders of

the monuments say that removing them would destroy their history. Some add that even

supplementing them with informational material would infringe on their “heritage.” We will

have to explore these slippery concepts of history and heritage.

So is there a conflict between catharsis and fidelity to history? I’ve already suggested, in

effect, that a public catharsis does not actually obliterate history, but can mark a new relation to a

troublesome past. Would that circumstances allowed such purgations to be carried out in the full

light of day with a sizable audience – something like an inversion of the inaugural ceremonies

and speeches that typically accompanied their installation (unfortunately our barbaric gun laws

and the Supreme Court’s perverse interpretation of the Second Amendment render such festivals

dangerous). Still, if the “monuments” –note the scare quotes – are simply removed, and there is

no remaining text, no regular re-enactment of the removal as there is in tragedy, it does seem as

if history is in danger of being forgotten or erased.2

2 We -- those who can’t stomach leaving the statues as they are -- feel and say that catharsis is necessary. I use the term katharsis advisedly; let’s recall the several distinct but related senses that it has in Greek thought, senses at play in Aristotle’s account of tragedy. Catharsis is in order, is prescribed, when a person, a family, a community, is stained or infected by a pollution, what the Greeks called a miasma. In the classic case, Oedipus Tyrranus, we begin with a city suffering from a plague whose origin and cause is in question. The plague literally infects and sickens the body politic, the polis. Catharsis will have several dimensions, which we can initially designate as medical, religious, and legal. Medically, there would seem to be some agent, a foreign body, who must be expelled to cleanse the political organism. Oedipus, who apparently came out of nowhere as the heroic victor over the sphinx, is both the chief physician and the cause of the city’s pollution. The city’s crisis is not only medical but religious – the city must have offended the gods in some way. And catharsis has a legal sense, as explained in Plato’s Laws, a sense also at work in Aristotle’s Poetics, albeit insufficiently noted. Here the one who has brought a miasma upon themselves – and likely others – by (say) murdering a close relative, can effect a purgation by establishing that the act was not performed deliberately, but under compulsion or in a fog of ignorance. This is distinct from a modern legal finding of innocence, because for the Greeks the miasma was a real thing qualifying the agent and purgation does not mean that they were never guilty. Catharsis then is not obliteration. It is a defined medical, religious, or legal procedure. In tragedy, it is enacted communally and publically. Analogies can go only so far. If racism in the US corresponds in some way to the Theban plague, and the dubiously electored 45th president to the tyrant who surprisingly ascended to power, we know that our plague will not be cured simply by the elimination of statues. While the New Orleans structures were removed in the dead of night with protective security, the Mayor’s letter and the circumstances of removal made this an official act of the city rather than a stealth operation.

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So I propose to take a step back and inquire into the nature of the “monuments”

themselves. While I believe that what I have to say is more generally applicable, I focus in what

follows on the situation in the former Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. Should

Richmond erase its disgrace or does it have a rare opportunity to come to terms with the

emblematic fracture of US history? The city’s showcase Monument Avenue is punctuated by

equestrian statues of three military figures -- Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jeb Stuart; a

shrine with colonnades and a soaring column honoring Confederate president Jefferson Davis;

and a seated statue of the engineer Matthew Maury who designed Confederate submarines and

other war machines. On first coming to Richmond in 1991 I thought these were rather quaint and

irrelevant. When I moved to the “monuments” neighborhood that year and saw the statues

regularly celebrated by men with the Confederate battle flag, I became uneasy; even more so

when a few years later the installation of a commemorative statue of the African-American

tennis star and Richmond native Arthur Ashe on the same avenue led to heated controversy and

marchers with those flags. I had come from Lawrence, Kansas which had been a free state

sanctuary, a stop on the underground railway and the site of one of the deadliest attacks on a

civilian population in the US. During Quantrill’s Raid, in August 1863, a band of Southern

irregulars massacred over 150 men and boys in the street. Memorials to these victims are quite

modest, simple granite slabs with the names of a few of the fallen. One was virtually on the

grounds of my house.

I’ve written “monuments” in scare quotes or spoken of “so-called monuments.” Do even

their fiercest defenders actually regard them as monuments, even if that is the Richmond

avenue’s name? Arthur Danto makes an acute distinction between monuments and memorials.

Danto wrote a sensitive analysis of Washington’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM), a work at

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first controversial but one that’s gained increasing acceptance and respect in the thirty-plus years

it’s been up (or down, to be more precise). The VVM is situated within Washington’s extensive

and growing complex of monuments and memorials by which the US expresses the meaning of

its history. Danto asks why we call some of these structures monuments (like the Washington

Monument) and others memorials (like VVM). His answer is a model of clarity: “We erect

monuments so that we shall always remember, and build memorials so that we shall never

forget...Monuments commemorate the memorable and embody the myths of beginnings.

Memorials ritualize remembrance and mark the reality of ends.”3 Monuments, then, are material,

public celebrations of origins that demonstrate a community’s idea of those events and people it

honors for qualities it finds indispensable to its identity. George Washington, whatever his limits

or failings, is honored as the father of his country. He led the Revolutionary War; as first

president of the US he is the primary exemplar of its constitutional government. Memorials, like

VVM, are meant to insure that certain events and people will never be forgotten, although in

many cases, like the Vietnam War, we are collectively ambivalent about major aspects of what

they mark. While honoring the sacrifice of the soldiers named, we are much less clear about

whether that war (in contrast to the American Revolution) should have been fought at all. Many

believe it was escalated under false pretenses, and conducted in bungled and deceptive fashion.

By its very form, descending into the ground, the VVM is memorial and not monumental. We

honor the achievements of Washington, the dead hero. We collectively mark the memory of

those who died in a misguided war.

So what about those 1890-1920 works on Monument Avenue? There are records of what

local political and cultural leaders said in connection with their erection and unveiling. All of

those – if not all citizens, many of whom were disenfranchised -- clearly thought they were

3 Arthur Danto, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial” in The State of the Art (Prentice Hall, 1987), 112.

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honoring heroes who should be emulated. The white celebrants were symbolically congratulating

themselves on resisting Reconstruction’s drive for equality, firmly establishing segregated

schools and neighborhoods, and denying votes and other civil rights to African-Americans (and

many poor whites). They erected monuments to the Jim Crow regime, in addition to honoring

past warriors. A memorial park for the Confederate dead would have had a different atmosphere

and meaning than equestrian statues and the soaring Davis column with its pretentious shrine. It

could not have anchored a turn of the century real estate development, like Monument Avenue

and its stately homes. Ironically, as the leading analyst of Confederate “monuments” Kirk

Savage points out, by 1890 when the first Richmond statue (Lee) went up, the military equestrian

paradigm was already stale and outmoded. It was being replaced either by single soldiers

representative of ordinary recruits or, in a few cases, by groups of fighting men depicted in the

midst of battle. However, it suggested a pattern of natural mastery which consciously or not

suited the white supremacists of the time. As Savage writes “[t]he equestrian Lee is at once a

retrospective image of the benevolent master good to his inferiors, and a prospective image of a

postwar white government claiming to know what is best for its own black population.”4

Fast forward to recent years. Defenders of the statues and shrine resist their removal or

supplementation by on-site information or additional structures explaining the Civil War and

post-Reconstruction context. They are horrified by suggestions that Lee might have to face off

against an anti-slavery fighter like Nat Turner or John Brown. Their defense is couched not in

the language of monumental achievement but as preservation of “heritage.” Similarly, exhibiting

a Confederate flag is supposed to have nothing to do with slavery or treason, but with the fact

that one’s ancestors lived through a certain era.

4 Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 135; and see the general discussion of the equestrian paradigm throughout Chapter Four “Slavery’s Memorial.”

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In other words, the contested works, originally built in a monumental spirit are now

defended as memorials. The figures honored cannot be publicly acknowledged as symbols of

Jim Crow, but as reminders of an old conflict, a fallen capital, and some hazily articulated ideas

about “states’ rights.” (It was actually the northern states who defended their states’ rights not to

return fugitive slaves, but were overruled in the Dred Scott decision.) Using Danto’s distinction

between monuments and memorials, it seems that the “traditionalists” want to have their cake

and eat it too. They want the monumental’s heroic aura but can justify it only with the

memorial’s principles. If you think these are heroic monuments, you identify yourself with the

Lost Cause of slavery, secession, and white supremacy. If you see them as, at best, memorials to

misguided Virginians, then you should have some difficulty in explaining why they should be

icons on the signature avenue of a contemporary state capital, rather than resituated in museums

or battle parks.5

The statues’ defenders speak about “heritage,” but just what does this mean? It’s certainly

not history, in the sense of a full accounting of events and an interpretation of their meaning, that

takes into account all the sources available to us. “Heritage” seems to be a concept of something

sacred, something that would be sullied or insulted by questions about what actually happened

and who did what. In the “monument” controversy “heritage” apparently refers to a kind of

inviolable essence that must be intuited and is immune to analysis and discussion. “Heritage” in

this context seems closely allied to the “blood and soil” slogan chanted by German Nazis and 5 Writing in 1908, during the heyday of Confederate statue installation, Josiah Royce defended the general idea of loyalty to a “lost cause” in his Philosophy of Loyalty (see McDermott edition vol. 2 pp. 900, 927-931, 961-970). He left no doubt that he meant this to include the lionization of Lee and a romanticized version of the Southern cause. There is a blatant problem with his argument that Lee’s cause was admirable in so far as it exhibited “loyalty to loyalty.” For that higher loyalty involves a commitment to encourage and respect the voluntary choices of all individuals in their assumption of determinate loyalties. Clearly, no cause that centrally involved the preservation and expansion of slavery could meet this criterion of “loyalty to loyalty.” The obvious contrast is with William James’s 1897 dedicatory speech at the Robert Gould Shaw memorial in Boston, which spoke of the “civic courage” (above and beyond military courage) exhibited by Shaw and his ill-fated regiment of black soldiers . One wonders what the two friends and Harvard colleagues Royce and James said to each other about these themes. In an essay in progress I explore this contrast further.

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more recently in Charlottesville. With the advent of DNA testing we know that “pure blood” is a

myth, and a little history is enough to show that soil (or territory) has typically been disputed (the

Charlottesville marchers showed no interest in returning Virginia to Native Americans).

We should not imagine that the monuments of the past are necessarily sacred and

inviolable. One century’s monuments can become an embarrassment to future generations.

Statues of fascist and totalitarian dictators are smashed or removed to museums or sculpture

parks. As Kirk Savage points out in Monument Wars, public monuments to political and military

heroes were slow to catch on in the United States and were not without vocal critics and

detractors. Horatio Greenough’s classicizing statue of a toga-clad George Washington was

removed from the Capitol. It took over fifty years of interrupted work to erect the Washington

Monument. There were many calls during that time to abandon the project. Prominent writers

like William Dean Howells thought the US was wasting time and treasure on unnecessary

celebrations of war and conflict. He said that Ward’s Freedman model “was the full expression

of one idea that should be commemorated, and would better celebrate the great deeds of our

soldiers than bas-reliefs of battles, and statues of captains, and groups of privates.”6

The iconoclasts who simply want to tear the things down or place them elsewhere (as

Russia did with some former Stalinist emblems) have an admirably consistent position: slavery

and secession were evil and traitorous, Jim Crow was their nasty continuation, and the so-called

monuments are a disgrace in a contemporary multi-ethnic American city.7 While I find the

6 Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, 164-66; cf. Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 97-99. One surprising index of changing attitudes toward monuments: the US’s leading landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, envisioning the development of Washington in the 1880’s thought he could ignore the Washington Monument and concentrate on cultivating what is now the National Mall with trees and other greenery as if it needed no unimpeded vista

7 As the old joke goes, in the North they call it the “Civil War,” in the South the “war of Northern Aggression,” while Virginians discreetly referred to “the recent unpleasantness”; perhaps their head-in-the-sand evasions were more honest than today’s self-contradictory traditionalists.

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iconoclasts’ logic refreshingly clear, I am drawn more to a contextualist position (as I’ll call it).

Let’s not talk of the city’s or region’s “heritage” but of its history. “Heritage” invokes

questionable metaphors of family and genealogy. Not all current Richmonders are or feel

affiliated to what the traditionalists see as their heritage. On the other hand, the statues (and

much else, like the White House of the Confederacy, the Civil War Museum, and the

undeveloped graveyards of the enslaved) are undeniable signs of Richmond’s history – of what

has been done and suffered here, who lived and how they died. Mere erasure would be a form of

historical denial. A modern ritual of katharsis seems unlikely. Are there other possibilities?

What is history for? Shortly after a European war another philosopher, Friedrich

Nietzsche, asked the question in On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.

Nietzsche wrote in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), which saw Germany’s

victory over France, and the consolidation of its Reich by Otto von Bismarck. Nietzsche’s idea

was that history studied purely for its own sake would be a pointless escape from life’s adventure

and responsibility. He distinguished three modes of pursuing history in the service of life. Two

are close to Danto’s monumental and memorial pair. All three modes have advantages and

disadvantages, so individuals and policy-makers must use them in wisely balanced ways.

Monumental history, Nietzsche said, recognizes great works, deeds, inspirations, and creations.

Its strength is “the knowledge that the great which once existed was at least possible once and

may well again be possible sometime.” Antiquarian history memorializes; it appeals to “the

preserving and revering soul – to those looking back with love and loyalty on their origins.”

Antiquarians draw sustenance from experiencing a living heritage. Yet both monumental and

antiquarian modes have potential disadvantages. Some may say that the monumental heroes,

artists, or thinkers of the past are so great that it is useless to aim now at anything equally

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significant. The antiquarian attitude can breed a blind lust for the past simply as past;

antiquarians can end up worshipping trivia imprisoned within a narrow horizon. Given these

pitfalls, it’s sometimes necessary to question one or both types. When they stifle ongoing life,

old illusions and habits dissolved or shattered. Critical history brings obstructive monuments and

musty antiquarian memorials to the bar of judgment, demonstrating how they foreclose the way

forward.

Nietzsche was not thinking in the first instance of substantial physical, public monuments

and memorials, but more generally of collective memory and historical perspective. Yet his view

speaks to Monument Avenue. The Confederate icons, I’ve argued, are a confused mixture of the

monumental and the memorial (or antiquarian), originally intended as monuments, but now

confusedly defended as memorials in an attempt to appropriate the monumental’s heroic

atmosphere.

So, remove them altogether? Destroying or removing them elsewhere minimizes options

for productively using the past. Critical contextualization is the better alternative. This would be

a complex and no doubt long-term process, drawing on the skills and judgment of historians,

artists, urban planners, and a good cross-section of local residents. It is obviously premature to

anticipate just what form contextualizing installations will take. Among the alternatives are

inscriptions on plaques explaining the war itself, disputes over slavery, the role of Richmond and

Virginia in the Confederacy, Reconstruction (and its abrupt termination following the election

deal of 1876), African-American disenfranchisement, the blatant racism evident in the original

planning and dedication of the “monuments,” and their role in promoting the avenue as

Richmond’s urban signature landmark.

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I’ll throw out one idea for redesigning Monument Avenue, knowing that it’s only my

idiosyncratic take on a possible complex and lengthy process. What if Richmond were to reshape

its signature street as a series of public sculptures with educational and informational displays

that acknowledged the city and state’s history from the centuries of slavery, through the Civil

War, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and the civil rights movement? Might the city come to

terms with its past while fulfilling a responsibility it acquired 150 years ago as the capital of the

Confederate slavocracy? We could begin by removing the three equestrian statues from their

pedestals and placing them on nearby low plinths. Lowering these figures to ground level would

indicate that they no longer have the exalted status they held in the white supremacist culture that

elevated them. The massive pedestals could become informational and educational sites. They

would host conventional plaques and inscriptions both about the rebellion and the culture that

attempted to glorify the Lost Cause thirty to sixty years after the fact. How and why were these

statues erected? What interests did they serve? When the Lee statue was being planned, there

was a good bit of discussion about where it would go. In 1890 the area that became Monument

Avenue was undeveloped suburban land. The governor of the Commonwealth intervened to

locate the statue there in order to promote a real estate development to the west. As he said at the

time, locating the statue where it is now was “a plain business deal.”8

Myths about these figures could be challenged here. Robert E. Lee was not the reluctant,

kindly slaveowner of legend. When his chattel slaves were returned after unsuccessful escape

attempts they were not only severely whipped, but brine was rubbed into their wounds to

intensify pain and make the marks stand out as warnings to others.9 More information could be

made available to visitors that could be accessed on electronic devices, as in some contemporary

8 Savage, Standing Soldiers, 148. 9 Wesley Norris, formerly enslaved by Lee, as quoted in Benjamin Wallace-Wells “Battle Scars: how Virginia’s past spurred a racial reckoning,” The New Yorker, December 4, 2017, 33.

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cultural institutions. The Jefferson Davis shrine should be cleansed of the traitor’s statue and

pretentious column. The colonnade structure could remain. Its original inscriptions, which make

misleading claims about “states’ rights” as the issue provoking the Civil War would stay, but

would be countered by information recounting and explaining such things as Confederate Vice-

President Alexander Stephens’ infamous founding speech, in which he forcefully stated that

maintaining and expanding African slavery was the bedrock of the secessionist government (yes,

expanding – the Confederates dreamed of a slave empire extending into the North American

West, the Caribbean, and South America).10 The semi-circle could be transformed into an open

air site for historical education about the coming of the Civil War, the conflict, and its long

aftermath.

Why not set aside the entire long stretch of the avenue between the current statues of Jeb

Stuart and Arthur Ashe as a public memorial and educational space? The equestrian figures now

resting on low plinths could be joined by others representative of those who opposed slavery,

aided the Union, served the Commonwealth during Reconstruction, fought against Jim Crow,

and made major contributions to the civil rights movement. They might be drawn from this

group: Gabriel, organizer of an early Virginia slave rebellion; Frederick Douglas and other 10 Alexander Stephens, “cornerstone speech,” March 1861: Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.But not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes for the better, allow me to allude to one other though last, not least. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us; the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of  the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the 'rock upon which the old Union would split'. He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech

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abolitionists; John Brown, executed for his anti-slavery raid on Harper’s Ferry; Elizabeth Van

Lew, a white woman who served as a Union spy in Civil War Richmond; William Mahone, a

former Confederate general who worked after the war to establish bi-racial government in the

state; one or several militant opponents of the Jim Crow regime; and heroes of the civil rights

movement like Martin Luther King. This is only one suggestion. Richmond’s mayor Levar

Stoney has established a commission to make recommendations about the future of Monument

Avenue. A local group connected to the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth

University is announcing a competition for proposals to redesign the area.11

Perhaps this is a wildly ambitious thought experiment for dealing with the so-called

monuments. Perhaps my design horizon is unnecessarily restricted by assuming that individual

statues will play a major role in a new configuration. Possibly Maya Lin, another artist, or a team

will arrive at a design as surprising and powerful as the VVM. Let me leave no doubt about my

position, however. It is not sufficient simply to add informational plaques to the existing statues.

If Richmond cannot summon the will and resources to engage in a radical and critical

11 Reimagine Monument AvenueStorefront for Community Design and Middle of Broad Studio received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to hold a design competition titled Monument Avenue: General Demotion/General Devotion. This will be an exercise to re-imagine Monument Avenue. The competition will promote constructive dialogue, racial healing, and community education as it re-examines Richmond's confederate monuments, and to generate a community-wide discussion about the role of design in creating a socially just environment. A concurrent local competition will provide youth with an opportunity to design speculative monuments.Competition registration will run from April 1 to September 15, 2018 with submissions due on December 1, 2018. Website coming soon. The Valentine will host an exhibition of entries opening on February 14, 2019.For more information: http://arts.vcu.edu/vcuarts-le ads-initiative-reimagine-richmonds-historic-monument-avenue/ Those interested may email Prof. Camden Whitehead at Virginia Commonwealth University: wcwhiteh@vcu.edu

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contextualization of the statues, then they must come down, with their absence marked by simple

ground level inscriptions.