Teachable Monuments: Using Public Art to Spark Dialogue and Confront Controversy

The events in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017 set off a contentious and long-overdue reckoning for the fate of public monuments and have revealed them to be potent sites for symbolic and physical conflict. Monuments around the United States have become the focus of intense and sustained discussions, activism, vandalism, and removal. Public commemorative sculptures, from their very inception, are frequently the subject of debate. However, disagreements and passions often fade, and monuments tend to become invisible with time, subject to neglect and disinterest. Since the convulsive events of 2015 and 2017 in Charleston, South Carolina, and Charlottesville, Virginia, during which white supremacists committed violence in the shadow of Confederate symbols, long-simmering tensions have surfaced about the history of public symbols and about history, race, and representation, prompting many cities across the country to remove their Confederate monuments. Protestors also have called for the removal of monuments to historical figures like Christopher Columbus, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dr. J. Marion Sims, whose status as heroes and exemplars of moral virtue and progress have been questioned by the forward march of historical revisionism.

This anthology offers guidelines and case studies tailored for students and teachers, community groups, civil servants, and politicians to demonstrate how monuments can be used to deepen civic and historical engagement. The essays analyse specific controversies throughout North America with various outcomes as well as examples of monuments that convey outdated or unwelcome value systems without prompting debate. Key strategies addressed in theoretical and pragmatic ways include: inaction, relocation, removal, and (re)interpretation.