Was God’s pencil because my friend Jennifer said so. Monuments remain a critical part of Alexander’s polymathic life.Ī finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 2006 for her collection “American Sublime,” monuments have materialized in her verses: (Linda Davidson / The Washington Post via Getty Images) It was the first monument to honor an African American and a woman on public land in D.C. In 1974, the National Council of Negro Women installed a sculpture in honor of educator and civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune across the plaza from Lincoln (which was rotated to face her). Which is why she also clearly remembers the moment when that monument received a counter. “It’s the kneeling supplicant with the great white savior.” Alexander, who grew up near Lincoln Park, where she’d often walk with her mother, says she felt the figure looked abject. The sculpture has long been criticized for the ways it whitewashes the role played by Black activists in bringing an end to slavery. Shouldn’t public monuments have public input? In the George Floyd moment, artists and designers are changing the nature of monuments and the histories they honor. A new wave of monument design is changing how we honor history Most prominent was the Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park, unveiled in 1876, which shows a slave laborer kneeling at the foot of Abraham Lincoln, who wields the Emancipation Proclamation in one hand.Įntertainment & Arts Commentary: Goodbye, guy on a horse. In the capital, where the breadth of the nation’s history is presumably honored, in a city that in the early 1970s was largely populated by Black people, any depiction of them was exceedingly rare. She also came to realize everything monuments could distort and elide. Of these structures, she says she grew to understand “something about their scale and awe.” When she was a girl, someone told her that the obelisk-shaped Washington Monument was actually “God’s pencil.” As a student, she took field trips to the various memorials whose designs were inspired by Classical architecture. When she was a toddler, her parents took her to the March on Washington in 1963, where hundreds of thousands of protesters brought ebullient life to the steps of the temple-like Lincoln Memorial. Growing up in Washington, D.C., she was surrounded by them. You could say Elizabeth Alexander was raised among monuments.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |