I was a silent Zoom attendee of a meeting with Mayor Walsh and the North End community last week. In it, the Mayor touched on what will happen to the Columbus statute recently "beheaded" in Christopher Columbus Park. Mayor Walsh let the community members in attendance know that the Columbus head had been recovered and was in 7-8 pieces; the entire statue had been removed and was in city storage. While he didn't condone the defacing, he said that "real dialogue and conversations" needed to take place to reckon with it and what it means. No one on that call spoke up to keep the statue.
A neighbor/onlooker photographs the beheaded Christopher Columbus statue in the North End before it was removed by the city. Photo via NBC 10 Boston
As I type, healthy debates on what to do with Boston's Emancipation Memorial/Freedmen Statue by Thomas Ball have become national news. Placed in Park Square in 1879, the figurative work shows an anonymous emancipated slave kneeling before Abraham Lincoln. This representative work is typical of its era, but what does it mean for our present? Steve Locke, a former Boston artist whom I deeply admire, argues that the monument should be contextualized and remain. Boston was robbed of a beautiful, permanent public artwork, Locke's “Auction Block Memorial,” meant for Fanuiel Hall, last summer, and I consider him to be an authority on the city's memorials. Another artist whom I deeply respect, Tory Bullock, started a petition to remove it (which as of this posting has over 12,000 signatures and has resulted in the Boston Art Commission calling a special meeting scheduled for June 30).
Boston-based artist and activist Tory Bullock stands with the Emancipation Memorial by Thomas Ball currently installed at Park Plaza Boston.
As these debates grow here in Boston, people are protesting (again) for the removal of the confederate monuments across the south, too. And with the renewed urgency of the #TakeDown movement, I can’t help but watch with bated breath and, I admit, conflicted feelings as confederate monuments come down. I grew up outside of Richmond, Virginia, another center of this conversation (also the site of the destruction of another Christopher Columbus monument last week) and the seat of what was the confederacy. Confederate monuments and memorials (in the form of streets and parks) littered the landscape and shaped my idea of home. Though I've lived far away for most of my adult life, I do feel a twinge of embarrassment every time I hear the words "Virginia" and "confederacy" together.
Let me be clear: I don't want confederate or colonizer statues in our twenty-first-century. And I don't think confederate monuments should have been erected in the first place. They are treasonous homages to an insurrectionist cabal that fought to maintain their way of life built on hate. As is well documented, most were erected in the decades after Reconstruction; they manifest the desire of white, powerful people to maintain that power. They are symbolic of the terror and unspeakable violence of the Transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery. Simply speaking, confederate monuments embody white supremacy and anti-blackness. Few are genuinely "artistic;" there is no reason why these monuments should now dominate major thoroughfares in places like Richmond.
But with this renewed call to remove monuments that celebrate the confederacy as well as brutal colonizers and historical figures symbolizing white power and supremacy, I realized I had never engaged with any of my Black friends or neighbors in Richmond about what they thought of the monuments or what should happen to them. Take them down? Contextualize? Bring Arthur Ashe closer to downtown? Place Kehinde Wiley's Rumors of War on the plinth where Robert E. Lee once was? There are many ideas that have been thrown around during the years as the Take Down movement accelerated, but I had never thought to talk about it with a black person from home. And that's on me as a white woman.
The Robert E. Lee memorial on Monument Avenue in Richmond, VA overlayed with a light projection intervention promoting the Black Lives Matter movement during a recent demonstration in response to the killing of George Floyd.
Now, for the first time in my life, I'm part of a race consciousness-raising group. Once a week we gather (online, of course) to talk about our white womanhood and do the hard work of trying to understand how whiteness and white supremacy have structured every aspect of our waking lives. White, middle-class southern women took the lead in erecting confederate monuments, and as one myself, I feel culpable.* But that reality gives me pause; if white women put these monuments up, should I really be part of the discourse of what happens to them now?
Yes, taking them down feels good and right. But it shouldn't consume the dismantling that also must take place emotionally and intellectually for white people.
And that brings me back to the debate ongoing here in Boston. Should the Emancipation Memorial/Freedmen Statue stay and be contextualized, or be destroyed? Or languish in City storage, or be sold to bolster the City's coffers? And what about Columbus and his namesake park? I can't say. I honestly don't know; moreover, I’m not sure this is a debate that needs my voice. Though I have now started to talk with Black friends and colleagues about it.
As a white woman, as a white curator, I will keep listening, reflecting, reading, and talking to my family and friends in the south and beyond. I will speak up in my white women's race conscious-raising group. I will try not to center myself. I will make mistakes. I will feel uncomfortable, and yes, embarrassed. I will keep trying to amplify voices that aren't my own. BIPOC should guide the debate on what happens to the problematic monuments in their communities, and be at the forefront of making new, more equitable ones. And as a white curator, I will try to make way for that.
*The very, very intertwined history of white womanhood and racial violence is real and too complex for me to dig into here. But other white women, if you want to talk, get in touch. Or read this or this.
This personal reflection and curatorial exploration builds on N+T's 2016 Beyond the Bust panel, which was hosted at the very start of the Take Down movement. We will continue to hold space for this conversation with our community, artists, partners, and the public and we are planning on a follow-up piece to this post that will spotlight Black perspectives on some of the specific monuments discussed in this post, as well as the cultural importance of monuments overall. We also welcome your responses to this blog post either in writing or through video or audio recording. Responses can be submitted to info@nowandthere.org.