Why Public Art?
Public art provides a narrative and creates a sense of place. To this end, public art often serves as a catalyst for challenging discussions over communities’ essential cultural and political understandings. This summer since the massacre at the historical Episcopal AME church which claimed the lives of nine black parishioners, Americans once again delve into heated debates over the contentious meaning imbued in the South’s myriad remembrances of the Confederacy. This tragic event almost immediately prompted big box organizations to remove the Confederate iconography from their shelves and South Carolina to remove the Confederate flag from its State House. Through the countless tangible reminders, the South grapples with its public identity encouraging us to question how we best represent the South in the 21st century.5
As the former capital of the Confederacy and now a majority minority city, Richmond continues to grapple with its identity. In a state which only stopped celebrating Lee-Jackson-King Day in the last fifteen years—in 2000, Governor Jim Gilmore pushed for the state to only observe the MLK holiday in January6—there is a clear continuous struggle over finding the best way to remember and celebrate our past. In her book entitled Tangled Memories, author Marita Sturken asserts, “Public commemoration, is a form of history-making, yet it can also be a contested form of remembrance in which cultural memories slide through and into each other, creating a narrative tangle.”7 During this unit, students will navigate the narrative tangles of public art. They will discover that public art is not stagnant and frozen in time, but instead imbued with different meaning that often changes depending on the audience and the historical context.
In one chapter from Tangled Memories, Sturken discusses various controversies and interpretations of the Vietnam Memorial created by Yale student Maya Lin, and she outlines the difference between monument and memorial. Contrary to the ubiquitous Confederate statue, Sturken writes, “Whereas a monument most often signifies victory, a memorial refers to the life or lives sacrificed for a particular set of values.” There was great debate over and even ire towards the Vietnam Memorial. Controversy over public art narratives serves as one driving force which forces communities to evaluate the politics of the version of history portrayed in their public landscapes. These landscapes shift with societal changes causing communities to revisit the stories of its past, despite how layered and nuanced they may be.
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