Author: Kirk Savage
At the end of August, I had the good fortune to see a remarkable exhibition of six temporary outdoor installations on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The exhibition, Beyond Granite: Pulling Together, was funded by the Mellon foundation and curated and implemented by Philadelphia-based Monument Lab, in collaboration with a crazy quilt of agencies and nonprofits in Washington. Inspired by opera singer Marian Anderson’s 1939 recital on the steps of the Lincoln – a catalytic event in the Civil Rights movement – the exhibition brought to life one set of answers to the curators’ question “What stories remain untold on the National Mall?”
I’ve been serving for several years on the board of Monument Lab, whose mission is to repair and transform the monumental landscape we have inherited. One of our core beliefs is that “the unreconciled past continues to haunt the present.” In 2021 the Mellon Foundation commissioned to us to do a national monument audit, which confirmed that belief with hard data showing the prevalence of monuments to white men, enslavers, colonizers, and warriors – perpetrators in one way or another of violence, injustice, and hierarchy. The audit points to a problem with the common notion of “repair,” which implies returning to a status quo that existed before a breakdown or injury. The problem is that there has never been a time in this nation, or in most others, when monuments have been democratic and inclusive. Conventional monumental landscapes have always been unjust and elitist, if not downright oppressive and authoritarian. Reparation efforts, therefore, must aim at a more fundamental transformation if they are to succeed in alleviating harm and empowering those who have been unrecognized or actively disdained in existing monuments. The mantra of Monument Lab is “Monuments Must Change” (and yes, you can get a T-shirt or button with that slogan).
It is one thing to diagnose the problem, but quite another to try to do something about it, especially in a commemorative landscape as hotly contested and politicized as the National Mall. The Mall is also the most tightly regulated memorial landscape in the U.S. and perhaps the world. The space is governed by federal legislation, the Commemorative Works Act, and overseen by the U.S. Congress and at least four different agencies and commissions. The regulations from just one of those agencies (the National Parks Service) pertaining to just one issue (maintenance of the grass) run to sixty-nine pages.
In this environment, it is a wonder that Monument Lab’s team, led by curators Paul Farber and Salamishah Tillet, were able to pull off Pulling Together. Longtime Washington Post critic Philip Kennicott voiced his own amazement in his rave review of the exhibition, “Art on the Mall! They Put Art on the Mall!”
Even more stunning, though, all six of the artists featured are people of color – this at a time when one of our two major political parties is engaging openly in a backlash against diversity and inclusion, disguised as a “war against woke.” Credit must be given to the Trust for the National Mall, the National Capital Planning Commission, and especially the National Park Service for working quietly and diplomatically behind the scenes to explain the initiative and reassure anxious officials of its nonpartisan intent. Credit is also due to Monument Lab’s superb communications team, which reached out across political lines. Sure enough, when the exhibition opened on August 18, Fox News’ D.C. affiliate station carried three separate segments on the exhibition, all positive.
There are lessons to be learned from this experience about the broader possibilities of “symbolic reparations,” a term that has emerged in international legal efforts to help societies break cycles of violence and mend their social contracts. Unlike monetary compensation or land restitution, symbolic reparations take place in the domains of art and ritual, which have their own unique ways of giving collective recognition, amplifying the stories of the marginalized, and creating new lines of communication across seemingly intractable political divides.
On the efficacy of symbolic reparations, Doris Sommer has argued that “A work of visual art, a new ritual, a performance, need not be overtly political. In fact, if they are works of art, political positions are probably unclear at the surface, a measure of relief from partisanship that allows people of various positions to consider the piece together.” The experience of Pulling Together gives us an opportunity to flesh out this insight and test it in the real-world conditions of an already existing, highly charged commemorative landscape.
Some of my questions:
• Can works of art whose politics are “unclear at the surface” help effect political change?
• How do they offer “relief from partisanship” without becoming anodyne, insignificant, or worse, appropriated by the state for reactionary aims?
• Is there room for playfulness, joy, and wonder in works that tell difficult stories or tackle issues that spark partisan divides?
All the works in the exhibition actively work against the somber, funereal, inhuman feel of the Mall. They have bright, unexpected color and approachable scale; some have sound and musical components. The installations are identified by orange wayfinding signs, and welcome stations offer information and invite social interaction. In this sense, the exhibition as a whole critiques the existing landscape and offers a counter-practice of care. You the visitor are made to feel that this exhibition is for you and that you matter in that space.
Some of the installations are explicitly playful. vanessa german’s piece on Marian Anderson, Of Thee We Sing, on the plaza in front of the Lincoln Memorial, is a fun counterpoint to the conventional hero monument. Made of steel and resin, german’s work gathers blue bottles, red and yellow lilies, outstretched cut-out hands, and photos of Anderson’s face from different angles into a joyful assemblage that could hardly be more different from the brooding white marble Lincoln behind her. Paul Ramirez Jonas’s elegant belltower installation, entitled Let Freedom Ring, plays the song “My Country Tis of Thee” (which Anderson chose to open her recital) but invites visitors to ring the final note on an actual bell situated at ground level. Derrick Adams’ America’s Playground: DC is exactly what it says it is: a playground, complete with real play equipment, including a xylophone on which my adult autistic daughter, for the first time in her life, played a tune for nearly two minutes while I stood there transfixed, recording on my phone. Yet it has political depths. It is divided into two halves that mirror each other, one monochrome and one in color, with a hugely enlarged photograph in between that dates to 1954, showing a previously all-white playground in D.C. overrun joyfully by black and white children. The local park had been desegregated by a court decision literally days before. Adams’ installation brings the local history of Washington into the national space of the Mall and challenges us – playfully – to confront the dissonance between ideal and reality and to draw strength from the joys of community, however fleeting. Ashon Crawley’s piece Homegoing strikes a much more solemn note, with its maze-like structure and audio score evoking a religious procession that mourns the loss to AIDS of Black queer musicians who worked – often closeted – in church settings. Crawley’s music is the beating heart of this installation, which invokes the Black church while also resonating across other cultural contexts.
The remaining two installations set themselves apart by directly challenging existing monuments in their midst. Tiffany Chung’s For the Living in Constitution Gardens responds to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial nearby. Set on a grassy slope a few hundred yards from the memorial, her installation draws a map of the world in black rope, with southeast Asia at the center. Brightly colored points and lines trace the global routes of war refugees and other immigrants leaving their homeland in the wake of the American war in Vietnam. Challenging the VVM’s focus on the U.S. war dead, Chung’s piece recenters the war on the region where it was fought and asks us to consider its global consequences for millions of noncombatants. In the process the piece draws attention to human issues and stories that are currently taboo in the culture of American war memorials. Wendy Red Star’s The Soil You See is a stunning take on the monumental practice of naming, located in Constitution Gardens just a few yards from the Signers Memorial, a little-know monument that reproduces in gold lettering on polished stone the distinctive signatures of the fifty-six white men who put their names to the Declaration of Independence. By contrast, Red Star’s memorial is a large oval sheet of glass rising vertically from a boulder and set against the knife-like tower of the Washington Monument in the distance. On the glass, the artist’s enlarged thumbprint creates a swirling pattern of red and white ridges, in which you can make out the names of fifty Crow chiefs who signed treaties with the U.S. in the nineteenth century, many of whom made the long trek to Washington to register their names. At the top is the meandering text of one of their speeches, beginning with “The soil you see is not ordinary soil – it is the dust of the blood, the flesh and bones of our ancestors.” The piece invites us to reflect on whose land and whose independence matter on the Mall – and in the standard histories of the U.S.
While only on display for one month, all the installations are what Monument Lab calls “prototype monuments,” examples of how the commemorative landscape could be transformed in the future. Already some of them will have an afterlife: Red Star’s piece has been acquired for a museum in Crow country in Montana, while german’s piece will come to Pittsburgh to be exhibited at the Frick Museum.
How have they fared in more political terms? Thankfully they have eluded partisan attack, but not because they are empty politically. As a group they challenge us to rethink the space of the Mall and the conventions of permanent monuments. Some make more pointed challenges to common assumptions about what issues, stories, and people are worthy of attention in the country’s premier commemorative precinct. In both ways these prototypes invite us to imagine a transformed memorial landscape that acknowledges the humanity of its visitors and integrates the lived and inherited perspectives of those who have been dispossessed and ignored. It is an open-ended project, without a specific political platform, that rejects outrage and celebrates creativity. Pulling Together dreams of a more hospitable memorial landscape, one in which criticality is infused with generosity, and partisanship gives way to curiosity and even joy.
Image Caption: Wendy Red Star’s The Soil You See