5. Relocation and Recontextualization

5. Relocation and Recontextualization

Decommissioned statues and their future in Richmond.

Following the removal of the monument of Robert E. Lee in 2021, the city of Richmond wrestled with the question of what to do with the now decommissioned statues of Confederate figureheads. Disassembly and storage of these monuments in late 2020 fell upon Richmond local Devon Henry. Under continuous threat from the Ku Klux Klan, Henry routinely wore a bullet-proof vest to work while decommissioning these statues. In total, Henry removed and relocated twenty-four Confederate monuments throughout Virginia. Iker Seisdedos of The Guardian reported on February 28, 2023 that all of the decommissioned statues from Monument Avenue along with others from around Virginia had been relocated to an open-air industrial area in Richmond. Although the exact location has been withheld from the public, photographer Lenin Nolly visited the statue graveyard and provided several pictures of the decommissioned statues to The Guardian. Each Confederate statue has been preserved exactly as it was following the protests over the murder of George Flyod and despite their disassembly, each piece has been coded for rapid reassembly, should the need arise. Many of the statues are covered in political graffiti or have been vandalized in severe fashion. The bronze statues have been shrouded in white cloth to prevent discovery from onlookers on the nearby highway. The Guardian suggested that the Davis statue would eventually travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles.

Emma North reporting for ABC 8 News in Richmond reported on January 24, 2022 that the Richmond City Council in a unanimous vote on Resolution 2022-R002 affirmed the plan to donate decommissioned Confederate statues to the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia. The list of statues included Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Jefferson Davis, J.E.B. Stuart, Matthew Fontaine Maury, all from Monument Avenue, as well as Joseph Bryan, Fitzhuh Lee, Confederate Soldier and Sailor, and the Ceremonial Cannons from various locations in Virginia. The Director of the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia, Mary C. Lauderdale provided a statement to The Guardian in which she affirmed that the decision regarding presentation and contextualization of the decommissioned statues would be made in agreement with the Richmond community. According to Lauderdale, a decision of this magnitude will most likely take five to ten years and require significant input from the stakeholders.

The one exception to this decision making process is the statue of Jefferson Davis which is in a prone and lying position at the Valentine Museum in Richmond. On full display and covered in political graffiti, the monument is now accompanied by panels of contextualization which explain how the monument fell and its relationship to the Lost Cause narrative propagated throughout the South. Surveys have been provided to each attendee of the museum with six options for potential solutions to the monument debate. These options include storing the statues, relocating the statues with context, relocating the statues without context, exhibiting the statues in museums, reusing the material for public art, or simply destroying the statues. Recent developments have necessarily shown that the public is in favor of displaying the statues in museums with proper contextualization, though opposition to this route persists.

Artnet News reported that Los Angeles art director Hamza Walker of LAXART intended to temporarily relocate Confederate statues from Richmond, as well as, other cities in Virginia and exhibit them for the public in 2023 in Los Angeles. According to the article, “Walker conceived a fiendish idea: Why not stage an exhibition in which, removed from their places of pride, these statues could be evaluated not only as propaganda for genocide but also as art objects? And why not invite contemporary artists to create works in response to them?” In a close partnership with MOCA, LAXART has increased its roster of potential loans and has spent most of 2023 slogging through litigation and criticism for its decision to exhibit decommissioned Confederate statues. The LAXART website recently provided an update on the potential exhibit and modified the opening to 2025. Additionally, the exhibit will be accompanied by a well researched scholarly publication and rigorous educational programming. With financial support from the Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, LAXART and MOCA may potentially display these decommissioned Confederate monuments in the next two years.

Seisdedos, Iker. 2023. “A US City Took Down Its Racist Statues. Where Do They Go Next?” The Guardian, February 28, 2023, sec. US news. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/27/the-statue-graveyard-where-torn-down-confederate-monuments-lie.
“MONUMENTS.” n.d. LAXART. Accessed October 26, 2023. https://laxart.org/monuments.

Boucher, Brian. 2021. “A Curator Wants to Put Confederate Monuments in a Contemporary Art Museum. First, He Has to Figure out Who They Belong To.” Artnet News. December 20, 2021. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/confederate-m
onuments-contemporary-art-la-moca-2023-2051395.

“Unanimous Vote: Richmond Confederate Monuments Going to Black History Museum.” 2022. WRIC ABC 8News. January 25, 2022. https://www.wric.com/news/local-news/richmond/unanimous-vote-richmond-confederate-monuments-going-to-black-history-museum/#:~:text=The%20Black%20History%20Museum%20and.

15 November 2023

Kareem Khaled

English

Hist. 402 A Fall 2023

Richmond, Virginia