6 ideas for new monuments — in honor of migration, a massacre and a tree
"Monuments come down. Monuments go up. And monuments are reconsidered.
In Los Angeles, a statue of Franciscan friar Junipero Serra is felled, launching vigorous social media debates about who or what might replace him — and whether the park that bears his name should be re-baptized in honor of someone else.
In Richmond, Va., a statue of Robert E. Lee and busts of various Confederate historical figures were removed from the Virginia State Capitol this week. An advisory group will propose new memorials for the Thomas Jefferson-designed building.
And in Alabama, calls are growing to rename the Edmund Pettus Bridge for U.S. Rep. John Lewis, who died last week, a pioneer of the Black civil rights movement who had his skull fractured by a state trooper’s baton as he led marchers across that bridge in 1965. The image of peaceful marchers getting brutally beaten by police helped ensure passage of the Voting Rights Act that same year.
A renaming of the bridge would represent a seismic shift in the histories honored by the steel arch structure over the Alabama River, erected in 1940. Pettus was a former Confederate general who was later a Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan.
As of Friday afternoon, an online petition to rename the bridge has received more than half a million signatures (and counting). Among the signatories: “Selma” director Ava DuVernay, who Tweeted a statement in support of the change. “Edmund Pettus Bridge should be the John Lewis Bridge,” she wrote. “Named for a hero. Not a murderer.”
In reporting a feature story on monuments — “Goodbye guy on a horse. A new wave of monument design is changing how we honor history” — I spoke with artists, designers and scholars around the country about how monument design is evolving, including the historic narratives that monuments pay tribute to.
Among the projects being designed or discussed are a monument to honor Indigenous people in the space where a Christopher Columbus statue once stood in downtown Los Angeles’ Grand Park and a memorial at the Los Angeles River site once known as Sleepy Lagoon where police roundups of Latinos led to the largest mass conviction in California history and set the stage for the Zoot Suit Riots.
In addition to exploring what is already underway, I asked these culture specialists what ideas, people or historical events they might like to see memorialized by a monument. Their ideas not only spanned the continent but also fill some important historical gaps.
Here are five of them — along with a sixth by yours truly (featuring a famous Los Angeles tree):
Spotlight on migration
Rebeca Méndez, design firm founder and UCLA design media professor, is part of the team (along with L.A. landscape architecture firm Chee Salette) working on a memorial to the 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Ariz., that left six dead and 12 wounded, including former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
A monument to migration — what it means to be in movement and what it means to have the freedom to move from the Arctic to the Antarctic like the Arctic tern. It’s a bird that has the longest known migration of any creature in the world — it goes 60,000 miles from the Arctic to the Antarctic every single year. It’s really beautiful.
Driving very close to the border I see the wall, and it drives me crazy because it’s killing people. So, migration as a new attitude of survival. What’s interesting about a monument to migration is that it could be not one, but thousands of them."— Caroline Miranda, Jul. 24, 2020
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article, including the five additional recommendations on the Los Angeles Times website.
Read more about Rebeca Méndez.
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