Source; The New York Times
ACCORDING TO DATA compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center, some 100 monuments to Confederate generals and politicians have been removed from American public land since June 2015, when Dylann Roof, a then 21-year-old white supremacist, murdered nine Black parishioners in a mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in a state that, at the time, still flew the Confederate flag over its capitol. More than a third of these monuments have been removed since May 25 of this year alone, when a Minnesota police officer named Derek Chauvin, who has been charged with second-degree murder, was caught on video kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, for more than eight minutes while Floyd pleaded for his life. (As a point of comparison, for the nearly 100 years between 1923 and 2015, only nine such monuments were removed.)
There has already been significant work done toward reimagining monuments — both figurative and abstract — in the media and among elected officials. In 2018, the editor Erin E. Evans launched “The Black Monuments Project” on the website Mic, which envisioned an America in which our public monuments celebrated Black greatness rather than white oppression. In July of this year, the U.S. House of Representatives approved legislation to remove Confederate monuments from the Capitol building in D.C. and to replace a bust of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney — the author of the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, which ruled that the Constitution did not grant Black Americans citizenship — with one of Justice Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court’s first Black justice, who died in 1993. (The legislation still needs to be passed by the Senate and signed by the president in order to be enacted.)
Contemporary artists have also found themselves participating in this debate, such as Kehinde Wiley, whose 27-foot bronze statue, “Rumors of War” — depicting a Black man in jeans and a hoodie atop a rearing horse — was installed late last year in front of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, near Monument Avenue, which has long been a kind of public mausoleum for heroes of the Confederacy. It was in that spirit that T asked five artists, including the activist group and artistic collective Decolonize This Place, to imagine their own monument: It could be of anyone, or anything, and be placed anywhere (or replace anything). The works or concepts they created range from the explicit, such as Ibrahim Mahama’s statue of Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, on the campus of Nkrumah’s alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, to the more theoretical, such as Tourmaline’s plans to turn the Rikers Island penitentiary complex into a pleasure garden. Collectively, they are an argument for rethinking the very idea of a monument itself: something that, instead of celebrating history, grapples with it — and then suggests a way to look forward, into a more just future.
