Artist Titus Kaphar’s work often confronts the history of slavery and racism in the United States. “If we are not honest about our past, then we cannot have a clear direction towards our future”. On confederate monuments:
“…we are continuing that binary conversation where we’re saying “either keep it up or take it down,”… The binary conversation doesn’t bring all of the issues into consideration. So there’s a third option. The third option is: We engage our contemporary artists of this time. In the same way that the WPA did, we bring in contemporary artists, we have them make sculptures that exist in the communities that they live in, we present those sculptures in the same community squares where these Robert E. Lee sculptures exist, we pull these Robert E. Lee sculptures down from the pedestal, bring them at the same level as these new contemporary works, and we force these works to engage one another. I think one of our challenges is that we sort of consistently try to make public sculpture in a way that it’s a sentence with a period at the end. And inevitably it’s not — it’s a comma, and there should be a clause after that.”
Fischer is stuck with his binary thinking. We need to acknowledge our shared history by putting the monuments in context, not by imposing them on other black communities (Brandenburg and the confederate soldier – to read previous blogs, key ‘monument’ in the search tile at https://www.jackiegreenformayor.org )
Source:
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/04/654476095/meet-the-macarthur-fellow-disrupting-racism-in-art
