Will Building New Monuments Challenge Racism?

The Brooklyn Museum [Peter Morgan/Reuters]

A new project aimed at reshaping our understanding of U.S. history through monuments has some critics wondering if we’ve become too focused on representations of equality rather than equality itself.

Last month, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced The Monuments Project, a $250 million pledge to fund arts and humanities projects that will “recalibrate the assumed center of our national narratives to include those who have often been denied historical recognition.”

Elizabeth Alexander, president of the foundation, sees funding monuments as an opportunity for public education. “So much teaching happens without us going into a classroom, and without us realizing we’re being taught,” Alexander, a poet and memoirist who has held teaching posts at Yale and Columbia University, told The New York Times.

News of the Monuments Project followed this summer’s widespread Black Lives Matter protests in response to the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The demonstrations reignited the issue of monuments’ role in shaping public consciousness of the legacies of slavery and Native American genocide. There are over 1,500 monuments devoted to the Confederacy in the United States; there are relatively few to the enslaved. In 2018, a memorial to the victims of lynching was erected in Montgomery, Alabama, the first of its kind.

The Monuments Project is an attempt to chart a new way forward. But some question whether funneling money to arts organizations, rather than directly to people affected by racial inequality, is the right response.

This concern stems, in part, from long-standing racism in the art world, which has also been rocked in recent years by controversies at major institutions like the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum and the British Museum concerning undercompensation for Black artists, failures to hire Black curators and artifacts stolen during colonialism. However, Monument Lab, a Philadelphia-based organization that was announced as the first recipient of funds from the Mellon foundation, has a number of people of color on their team working as curators and in other senior roles. Monument Lab will be using their $4 million grant to conduct “a definitive audit” of the country’s monuments, complete with data on the funding bodies behind them.

When the Monuments Project was announced, reactions on social media were mixed. Some people felt the fund could bring past injustices into U.S. collective memory. Others felt the large sum could serve minority communities best through investment in social welfare programs. As one Twitter user wrote: “Someone please design a ‘monument’ that is a $250 million public housing project.” Sam Haselby, senior editor at Aeon Magazine, tweeted, “People can't pay their rent or medical bills and Mellon is spending $250 million on new monument proposals…Representations of things vs. actual things.”

Indeed, in spending hundreds of millions of dollars on projects that will likely go to arts organizations, which have a poor track record of employing Black curators and other creative professionals, there is justified concern that the beneficiaries of this project will not likely be the millions of Black Americans who marched for justice this summer.