Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Public Art Putting History on a Pedestal

2020; Volume: 100; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nyh.2020.0020

2328-8132

Dominique Jean-Louis,

Photography and Visual Culture

Public Art Putting History on a Pedestal Dominique Jean-Louis (bio) Rumors of War (2019). Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977), artist. Cast bronze on a limestone pedestal. Times Square, New York City, Temporary Display. September-December 2019. Kehinde Wiley Studios with support from Times Square Arts. [Editor's Note: The following essay about collective memory, public art, and commemoration was written in January 2020 shortly after Rumors of War was removed from Times Square in New York City and transported to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. In the intervening months, the United States has witnessed a renewed and reinvigorated debate over the role of statues and their value to historical memory following the killings of African Americans by law enforcement. The challenges and questions posed by Kehinde Wiley's sculpture remain central to this debate.] In 1904, the New York Times moved its headquarters to 42nd street. Publisher Adolph S. Ochs successfully persuaded New York City mayor George McClellan to rename the square after his newspaper, and stationed the paper above the brand-new 42nd Street subway station, in the second-tallest building in the city. Trying to drum up public interest in the new area as a place of gathering, he began throwing massive New Year's Eve parties. When a fireworks display was banned after a couple of years, McClellan riffed off of an old maritime "time ball" tradition, and staged a midnight ball drop from the top of the Times skyscraper to ring in the year 1908. The event was a hit: Times Square was the place to be. Ochs had cemented his power over Times Square and time itself.1 Powerful men had used their access and influence to reshape a city, to rewrite history. In the spring of that same year, another celebration of the passage of time, in another city square, was taking place amid a cheering crowd of thousands. The city of Richmond, former capital of the Confederacy, was unveiling two new monuments to the public. One featured president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis (who had been born 99 years earlier to the day), and the other J.E.B. Stuart, who took up arms against the United States of [End Page 165] America in order to keep slavery in America. The end of the Civil War was nearly 50 years prior; the motivation was as much to augment the power of the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow order, as it was to mourn the Confederate loss. A procession of almost 10,000 men began at Capitol Square and paraded nearly two miles along Monument Avenue, lined with the statues of Confederates; a crowd of nearly 80,000 more lined the route, waving Confederate flags and celebrating the history of the men who had used their access and influence to reshape a city, to rewrite history.2 Click for larger view View full resolution "The 1907 Monuments in the Press," (courtesy of virginia memory, library of virginia) [End Page 166] American artist Kehinde Wiley, who lives and works in New York City, got to see this still-standing vision of Richmond, when he opened an exhibition at the Richmond Museum of Fine Arts (RMFA) in 2016. After seeing Richmond's Monument Avenue, Wiley was inspired to revisit the themes in his painted work in a sculptural format. "Art and violence have for an eternity held a strong narrative grip with each other," he said, explaining he wanted to "expose the beautiful and terrible potentiality of art to sculpt the language of domination."3 Click for larger view View full resolution photo: dominique jean-louis The resulting sculpture, Rumors of War, made its debut in Times Square in the fall of 2019, before being permanently installed on Richmond's Monument Avenue outside the RMFA. Despite the skyscrapers and multistory, LED-lit ads that surround the sculpture on all sides, as one walks toward the sculpture, the monumental scale jangles the nerves. Times Square was recently reconfigured to cut off traffic and become a pedestrian plaza, and the superhuman dimensions of a young black male on horseback, standing 27 feet high, feels especially unnatural in a pedestrian setting of spindly folding chairs and tables...