Finalists will present their designs for recasting the melted down fragments of Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue
Three finalist were selected among 32 entries in the Swords into Plowshares project.
The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center has announced that three design firms competing to recast the two tons of bronze ingots that remain after Charlottesville’s monument of Robert E. Lee was melted down will present their proposal to the public on Saturday, March 14, at the center.
The three finalists were selected among 32 entries in the “Swords into Plowshares” project, launched after the 2021 removal of Charlottesville’s Confederate statues, which is “devoted to creating new public art in the city of Charlottesville to advance multiracial democracy in relation to global sites of memory.”
In October last year, Charlottesville’s statue of General Stonewall Jackson, which was “chopped apart” by artist Kara Walker and “put back together to form a disjointed monster,” was the centerpiece of an exhibit of deconstructed Confederate statues on display in Los Angeles until May.
“It’s strange. It’s a very strange show,” Bennett Simpson, a senior curator at Moca and one of the show’s co-curators, said, when asked what it was like to spend so much time with Confederate monuments. “There’s a lot of beauty in it, but it’s heavy. It deals with real shit that people don’t often really want to deal with.”
Here in Charlottesville, never-before-seen photographs that document the dismantling and melting of the Lee statue will be displayed at the exhibit opening on March 14, which will stay up until May 30, and the finalists will present their proposals and take questions from the audience. Later, the Swords Into Plowshares jury will select a winner.
“These design groups are each leaders in national and international conversations about race, memorialization, and public space, aligned with our global aspirations for this project,” said Dr. Andrea Douglas, Executive Director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, in a statement. “Swords Into Plowshares is transformative for us here in Charlottesville and will ignite imaginative possibilities for decisive intervening in racial justice narratives in all public spaces.”
Here are the three finalists, who will present their designs to the public at 6:00 p.m. Saturday, March 14, at the the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center:
MASS Design Group: National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, Alabama (the lynching memorial at the Equal Justice Initiative); “The Embrace” Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King memorial, Boston, Massachusetts.
Hood Design Studio: African Ancestors Memorial Garden, International African American Museum, Charleston, South Carolina; Kitty Foster house Shadowcatcher, University of Virginia South Lawn, Charlottesville, Virginia. The firm’s principal designer, Walter J. Hood, is a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” grant awardee.
PUSH Studio: Zeta Phi Beta sorority centennial monument, Howard University, Washington D.C.; Harriet Tubman Plaza, Cambridge, Maryland. The firm’s principal designer, Glenn LaRue Smith, is the founder of BlackLAN, a national organization of African American landscape architects.