This paper was presented at the 2022 SECAC conference in Baltimore, Watershed, as part of the session "Memory and Belonging: Revisiting Monuments, Museums, and Historic Sites," chaired by Zoe Weldon-Yochim, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Public Art, Private Interests: Fred Wilson, Sam Durant, and the Problems of Commemoration
by Jeffry Cudlin
Contemporary artists Fred Wilson and Sam Durant have both earned critical acclaim for projects recontextualizing signifiers of racism, trauma, and resistance in order to challenge dominant historical narratives. Born in the Bronx in 1954, Wilson spent the mid- 1970s working as an educator for the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the American Crafts Museum simultaneously; the differences he observed in how objects and people were treated in these institutions shaped his own exhibitions parodying cultures of museum display.1 Durant, born in 1961 in Seattle, Washington, often describes hearing American Indian Movement (AIM) protesters debunk popular stories of the Thanksgiving holiday as an important formative experience,2 spurring his interest in counter-narratives and the appropriation of protest signs representing cultural upheaval in the 1960s3—and, later, pieces fashioned after didactic history museum displays or public memorials.
Yet despite both artists’ thoughtful investigations of institutional practices and collective memory, both have also experienced high-profile failures in the realm of public art—in one case, having an ambitious already-commenced project cancelled; in the other, having a completed work removed from its site and destroyed. Analysis of these two failures reveals significant differences between contemporary art and public art commissioning processes; common misunderstandings between commissioning agents and the audiences they purport to serve; and disregard among many project administrators for best practices in front-end evaluation, community engagement, and curatorial work in general.
Fred Wilson’s practice is perhaps best exemplified by his breakthrough 1992–3 exhibition, Mining the Museum, organized by curator Lisa Corrin of Baltimore’s nomadic non-collecting museum, the Contemporary, and occupying the entire third floor of the Maryland Historical Society (now the Maryland Center for History and Culture). For that show, Wilson culled unexpected objects from the museum’s collection and juxtaposed them in surprising or disturbing ways, accompanied by poetic or less-than-clarifying wall labels: from an exhibit titled “Portraits of Cigar Store Owners,” featuring cigar store Indians turned away from museum visitors to face photos of contemporary Native Americans; to iron slave shackles, displayed alongside a set of repoussé silver in an exhibit titled “Metalwork, 1793– 1880;” to a Klansman’s hood, incongruously nestled inside an antique baby carriage in an area simply labeled “Modes of Transport.”4
Public Art, Private Interests: Fred Wilson, Sam Durant, and the Problems of Commemoration
by Jeffry Cudlin
Contemporary artists Fred Wilson and Sam Durant have both earned critical acclaim for projects recontextualizing signifiers of racism, trauma, and resistance in order to challenge dominant historical narratives. Born in the Bronx in 1954, Wilson spent the mid- 1970s working as an educator for the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the American Crafts Museum simultaneously; the differences he observed in how objects and people were treated in these institutions shaped his own exhibitions parodying cultures of museum display.1 Durant, born in 1961 in Seattle, Washington, often describes hearing American Indian Movement (AIM) protesters debunk popular stories of the Thanksgiving holiday as an important formative experience,2 spurring his interest in counter-narratives and the appropriation of protest signs representing cultural upheaval in the 1960s3—and, later, pieces fashioned after didactic history museum displays or public memorials.
Yet despite both artists’ thoughtful investigations of institutional practices and collective memory, both have also experienced high-profile failures in the realm of public art—in one case, having an ambitious already-commenced project cancelled; in the other, having a completed work removed from its site and destroyed. Analysis of these two failures reveals significant differences between contemporary art and public art commissioning processes; common misunderstandings between commissioning agents and the audiences they purport to serve; and disregard among many project administrators for best practices in front-end evaluation, community engagement, and curatorial work in general.
Fred Wilson’s practice is perhaps best exemplified by his breakthrough 1992–3 exhibition, Mining the Museum, organized by curator Lisa Corrin of Baltimore’s nomadic non-collecting museum, the Contemporary, and occupying the entire third floor of the Maryland Historical Society (now the Maryland Center for History and Culture). For that show, Wilson culled unexpected objects from the museum’s collection and juxtaposed them in surprising or disturbing ways, accompanied by poetic or less-than-clarifying wall labels: from an exhibit titled “Portraits of Cigar Store Owners,” featuring cigar store Indians turned away from museum visitors to face photos of contemporary Native Americans; to iron slave shackles, displayed alongside a set of repoussé silver in an exhibit titled “Metalwork, 1793– 1880;” to a Klansman’s hood, incongruously nestled inside an antique baby carriage in an area simply labeled “Modes of Transport.”4
With Mining the Museum, Wilson posited a new, expanded audience for an old institution—and was proven correct, delivering the most attended exhibition in the museum’s history, drawing some 55,000 visitors.5 Wilson says he connected with this audience by amplifying unheard voices and creating conversations that did not preexist his arrival on the scene: “I try to get to know the community that the museum is in,” he explains in the show’s catalog, “the institutions, the structure of the museum, the people in the museum from the maintenance crew to the executive director. I ask them about the world, the museum, and their jobs, as well as the objects themselves.”6
Durant’s investigation of the structure and meaning of monuments arguably reached its apotheosis with his 2005 project, Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions, exhibited at Paula Cooper Gallery in 2005 and ultimately acquired by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 2013. This room-filling sculptural installation uses fiberglass reproductions of 30 nineteenth-century memorials to the Indian Wars from across the U.S.—25 honoring white war dead; a mere five honoring Native Americans—to imagine the transformation of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. into a statement on the country’s history of militarism, historical amnesia, and genocide.7 As Mark Watson explains the piece’s components and structure:
Only the smallest monuments memorialize Native Americans, typically the ‘‘faithful Indians’’ as one inscription puts it, while the largest monuments are for individual white men from the military officer class. Relocated to the mall, these monuments convey a militarized, race-biased, and settler-fixated hierarchy of historical memory linked to the nation-state, one in which General Washington is at the pinnacle of the pantheon, while enlisted white soldiers and male and female civilians are near the bottom.8
Durant’s investigation of the structure and meaning of monuments arguably reached its apotheosis with his 2005 project, Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions, exhibited at Paula Cooper Gallery in 2005 and ultimately acquired by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 2013. This room-filling sculptural installation uses fiberglass reproductions of 30 nineteenth-century memorials to the Indian Wars from across the U.S.—25 honoring white war dead; a mere five honoring Native Americans—to imagine the transformation of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. into a statement on the country’s history of militarism, historical amnesia, and genocide.7 As Mark Watson explains the piece’s components and structure:
Only the smallest monuments memorialize Native Americans, typically the ‘‘faithful Indians’’ as one inscription puts it, while the largest monuments are for individual white men from the military officer class. Relocated to the mall, these monuments convey a militarized, race-biased, and settler-fixated hierarchy of historical memory linked to the nation-state, one in which General Washington is at the pinnacle of the pantheon, while enlisted white soldiers and male and female civilians are near the bottom.8
While Durant’s Proposal may seem more like an intellectual exercise than Wilson’s institutional overhaul—it was originally created in response to a call from the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art for new imaginary monuments designed without concern for “contextual, budgetary, or practical constraints”9—his presentation of extensive historical research and inclusion of plans for administering reparations challenges a traditional, ostensibly white art audience. As Durant explained in a 2006 interview:
Denouncing racism is one thing but talking seriously about reparations for Indians and slavery is quite another...That’s why I was so happy to be able to include the [Ward Churchill] essay inside my book. He makes such a thorough and well- reasoned proposal for how reparations could work and of how they would serve the greater good of all Americans, not just those that they would ostensibly benefit.10
These successes cemented the reputations of both artists and led to invitations to work on ever-larger projects. In March of 2007, Mindy Taylor Ross, public art project manager for the Indianapolis Cultural Trail, contacted Fred Wilson regarding a possible commission for a new artwork in downtown Indianapolis. The eight-mile cultural trail—a $63 million pedestrian and cycling path designed to connect downtown cultural and entertainment districts—would eventually garner $4 million in private funding for newly commissioned artworks.11
Wilson visited the city a month after speaking with Ross and the Central Indiana Community Foundation (CICF), and became interested in the Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Monument, a roughly 280-foot neoclassical structure designed to honor Indiana’s veterans from multiple wars. Dedicated in 1902, the obelisk-like monument includes sculptural groupings by Austrian-born artist Rudolph Schwarz.12 One of Schwarz’s figures in particular fascinated Wilson: a former slave, shirtless and barefoot, his knotty limbs tensed and crossed; in his right hand, he clutches broken shackles and holds them aloft. His eyes search upward toward a colossal female figure representing freedom and holding a giant shield emblazoned with an eagle and the slogan “E Pluribus Unum.”
Denouncing racism is one thing but talking seriously about reparations for Indians and slavery is quite another...That’s why I was so happy to be able to include the [Ward Churchill] essay inside my book. He makes such a thorough and well- reasoned proposal for how reparations could work and of how they would serve the greater good of all Americans, not just those that they would ostensibly benefit.10
These successes cemented the reputations of both artists and led to invitations to work on ever-larger projects. In March of 2007, Mindy Taylor Ross, public art project manager for the Indianapolis Cultural Trail, contacted Fred Wilson regarding a possible commission for a new artwork in downtown Indianapolis. The eight-mile cultural trail—a $63 million pedestrian and cycling path designed to connect downtown cultural and entertainment districts—would eventually garner $4 million in private funding for newly commissioned artworks.11
Wilson visited the city a month after speaking with Ross and the Central Indiana Community Foundation (CICF), and became interested in the Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Monument, a roughly 280-foot neoclassical structure designed to honor Indiana’s veterans from multiple wars. Dedicated in 1902, the obelisk-like monument includes sculptural groupings by Austrian-born artist Rudolph Schwarz.12 One of Schwarz’s figures in particular fascinated Wilson: a former slave, shirtless and barefoot, his knotty limbs tensed and crossed; in his right hand, he clutches broken shackles and holds them aloft. His eyes search upward toward a colossal female figure representing freedom and holding a giant shield emblazoned with an eagle and the slogan “E Pluribus Unum.”
Much as he did in Mining the Museum, Wilson decided to cast light on problematic representation within a cultural site. His proposed counter-monument would consist of a faithful reproduction of the emancipated Black figure, carved from Indiana limestone, albeit without his shackles, and presented at an angle so that he would no longer appear supine— not gazing and reaching upwards, but, instead, forwards.13 With his now-reoriented right hand, the copied figure would extend a large flag representing the African diaspora.
Wilson’s proposal was enthusiastically accepted by a twelve-member trail committee; work to scan and reproduce the original emancipated figure commenced. Between 2010 and 2011, a series of meetings to introduce Wilson’s project to the public were held at the Madame Walker Theatre, Crispus Attucks High School, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. These meetings, however, quickly devolved after the Indianapolis Recorder, the city’s largest African American newspaper, ran a letter by high school history teacher Leroy Robinson in September 2010—stating, in part:
Whose culture is this image along the Indianapolis Cultural Trail attempting to represent, the oppressor or the oppressed? Monuments in general are created and designed to leave a lasting positive image of a great historical figure...while the newly-commissioned E Pluribus Unum passes on another negative image from one generation to the next...14
An ad hoc protest organization, Citizens Against the Slave Image (CASI), was formed to fight Wilson’s proposed sculpture. The group protested in front of the state capitol and brought Kirk Savage, noted historian and author of the acclaimed 1997 book Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, to address the meaning of the original monument.
Whose culture is this image along the Indianapolis Cultural Trail attempting to represent, the oppressor or the oppressed? Monuments in general are created and designed to leave a lasting positive image of a great historical figure...while the newly-commissioned E Pluribus Unum passes on another negative image from one generation to the next...14
An ad hoc protest organization, Citizens Against the Slave Image (CASI), was formed to fight Wilson’s proposed sculpture. The group protested in front of the state capitol and brought Kirk Savage, noted historian and author of the acclaimed 1997 book Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, to address the meaning of the original monument.
While careful not to take a position on Wilson’s proposal, Savage noted Rudolph Schwartz’s deliberate erasure of Black soldiers in his groupings, and his use of an archetypal image of the freed slave that “created a dynamic in which whites could congratulate themselves for ending slavery while presenting abolition as a gift from a morally advanced civilization to a benighted black race.”15 As CASI saw it: Wilson wasn’t providing a new affirming image of Indianapolis Black citizens; he was merely doubling an archaic one and amplifying its racist message.
In the end, after multiple meetings in which over 90% of attendees voiced strongly negative opinions, Bryan Payne, president and CEO of the CICF, announced the cancellation of the project.16 Reflecting on its demise a year later, Wilson framed CASI’s objections as stemming from the dynamics of a city he had misjudged:
I didn’t realize that the power of the history of that monument—where it is and what it is—trumped for some its possibility for regeneration, reanimation...when I touched on these subjects in the context of the CICF grant, I think many people saw it as something being put on them once again. I think people shut down, because they felt like they had not been involved with the conversation--which, it sounds like to me, from a lot of the people I have spoken to, fell in line with how things are done in Indianapolis, beyond art.17
Wilson, the CICF, and the citizens of Indianapolis no doubt learned valuable lessons from the years-long process of soul-searching—but was this failure a foregone conclusion? And did the trail’s production schedule reflect established best practices for curating public art?
In her contribution to Suzanne Lacy’s landmark 1995 book, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, curator Lucy Lippard redefines “public art”—typically thought of as large sculptures situated outdoors—as encompassing a number of organizing practices, with particular emphasis on how an audience is brought into conversation with an artist and their process:
I would define public art as accessible work of any kind that cares about, challenges, involves, and consults the audiences for or with whom it is made, respecting community and environment. The other stuff is private art, no matter how big or exposed or intrusive or hyped it may be. 18
As Louisa Buck and Daniel McLean note in their 2012 book, Commissioning Contemporary Art, this focus on audience consultation is not for the faint of heart: “It is a given that conditions for commissioning in the public realm are considerably more difficult than those that take place in the comparatively protected worlds of art institutions, private foundations, private collections, and art events,”19 they explain. While an artist participating in a public art process may have a very specific vision, they need to be prepared for their proposal’s details to change significantly in response to feedback and realities on the ground. In fact, Buck and McLean explain that contact with the public through front-end evaluation and proposal reviews can—and should—be a generative process:
Negotiation with the public and wider constituencies can also be an opportunity for the artist and/or the commissioning curator to communicate ideas and elicit responses to initial design concepts. The public may contribute ideas to the creative process, document the commission, and provide a resource for the artist.20
In the case of E Pluribus Unum, this consultation with an audience resulting in concept development and negotiation simply did not happen. By the time the community was asked to weigh in, the artist had already been selected, his specific proposal approved, and roughly $5000 had already been spent to commence production.
Add to this New York-based artist Wilson’s status as an out-of-towner: Although his oeuvre reflects his entirely relevant personal experiences as a Black man navigating white cultural spaces, Wilson had no connection to—or direct knowledge of—the specific struggles of the Indianapolis Black arts community. In her 2002 book, One Place After Another, author Miwon Kwon reflects on the difficulties of an artist like Wilson parachuting into a neighborhood to produce public art. Using the example of curator Mary Jane Jacob’s seminal 1993 show in Chicago, Culture in Action, Kwon examines how the roles of the curator and sponsoring organization can appear radically different depending simply on an artist’s home address:
When the artist is from out of town, the sponsoring institution serves as a matchmaker and mediator, becoming the primary source of information and guidance for the artist...in the case of the local artist, the artist usually functions as the primary point of mediation between the sponsoring institution and the community partner. Whereas outside artists are most often associated with the institution (both are seen as outsiders in the community), local artists are usually identified with the community.21
In this case, Wilson became associated with—and entirely reliant on—the Central Indiana Community Foundation, which, name notwithstanding, had not built trust with relevant community partners. Wilson and the Foundation were thus linked as bad-faith actors.
Like Wilson in Indianapolis, Sam Durant was an outsider to the Dakota community in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Yet he may not have considered this a problem to be addressed when he installed his sculpture Scaffold in the Walker Art Center’s revamped Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in 2017—since, to him, this was arguably not a public art project at all, but rather the placement of a pre-existing outdoor contemporary artwork that had been successfully exhibited multiple times elsewhere on an art museum’s grounds.
When it had first opened in 1988, the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden had been enclosed by pine trees and bermed walls—a space, like the museum, set apart from the noise of the world, despite its status as a public/private partnership, maintained by the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board and the Walker. But on its 75th anniversary, the Walker raised $78 million dollars ($10 million of it public money) to support an expansion that removed those enclosing walls, added five acres of land, and created multiple new points of entry for visitors.22
In the end, after multiple meetings in which over 90% of attendees voiced strongly negative opinions, Bryan Payne, president and CEO of the CICF, announced the cancellation of the project.16 Reflecting on its demise a year later, Wilson framed CASI’s objections as stemming from the dynamics of a city he had misjudged:
I didn’t realize that the power of the history of that monument—where it is and what it is—trumped for some its possibility for regeneration, reanimation...when I touched on these subjects in the context of the CICF grant, I think many people saw it as something being put on them once again. I think people shut down, because they felt like they had not been involved with the conversation--which, it sounds like to me, from a lot of the people I have spoken to, fell in line with how things are done in Indianapolis, beyond art.17
Wilson, the CICF, and the citizens of Indianapolis no doubt learned valuable lessons from the years-long process of soul-searching—but was this failure a foregone conclusion? And did the trail’s production schedule reflect established best practices for curating public art?
In her contribution to Suzanne Lacy’s landmark 1995 book, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, curator Lucy Lippard redefines “public art”—typically thought of as large sculptures situated outdoors—as encompassing a number of organizing practices, with particular emphasis on how an audience is brought into conversation with an artist and their process:
I would define public art as accessible work of any kind that cares about, challenges, involves, and consults the audiences for or with whom it is made, respecting community and environment. The other stuff is private art, no matter how big or exposed or intrusive or hyped it may be. 18
As Louisa Buck and Daniel McLean note in their 2012 book, Commissioning Contemporary Art, this focus on audience consultation is not for the faint of heart: “It is a given that conditions for commissioning in the public realm are considerably more difficult than those that take place in the comparatively protected worlds of art institutions, private foundations, private collections, and art events,”19 they explain. While an artist participating in a public art process may have a very specific vision, they need to be prepared for their proposal’s details to change significantly in response to feedback and realities on the ground. In fact, Buck and McLean explain that contact with the public through front-end evaluation and proposal reviews can—and should—be a generative process:
Negotiation with the public and wider constituencies can also be an opportunity for the artist and/or the commissioning curator to communicate ideas and elicit responses to initial design concepts. The public may contribute ideas to the creative process, document the commission, and provide a resource for the artist.20
In the case of E Pluribus Unum, this consultation with an audience resulting in concept development and negotiation simply did not happen. By the time the community was asked to weigh in, the artist had already been selected, his specific proposal approved, and roughly $5000 had already been spent to commence production.
Add to this New York-based artist Wilson’s status as an out-of-towner: Although his oeuvre reflects his entirely relevant personal experiences as a Black man navigating white cultural spaces, Wilson had no connection to—or direct knowledge of—the specific struggles of the Indianapolis Black arts community. In her 2002 book, One Place After Another, author Miwon Kwon reflects on the difficulties of an artist like Wilson parachuting into a neighborhood to produce public art. Using the example of curator Mary Jane Jacob’s seminal 1993 show in Chicago, Culture in Action, Kwon examines how the roles of the curator and sponsoring organization can appear radically different depending simply on an artist’s home address:
When the artist is from out of town, the sponsoring institution serves as a matchmaker and mediator, becoming the primary source of information and guidance for the artist...in the case of the local artist, the artist usually functions as the primary point of mediation between the sponsoring institution and the community partner. Whereas outside artists are most often associated with the institution (both are seen as outsiders in the community), local artists are usually identified with the community.21
In this case, Wilson became associated with—and entirely reliant on—the Central Indiana Community Foundation, which, name notwithstanding, had not built trust with relevant community partners. Wilson and the Foundation were thus linked as bad-faith actors.
Like Wilson in Indianapolis, Sam Durant was an outsider to the Dakota community in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Yet he may not have considered this a problem to be addressed when he installed his sculpture Scaffold in the Walker Art Center’s revamped Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in 2017—since, to him, this was arguably not a public art project at all, but rather the placement of a pre-existing outdoor contemporary artwork that had been successfully exhibited multiple times elsewhere on an art museum’s grounds.
When it had first opened in 1988, the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden had been enclosed by pine trees and bermed walls—a space, like the museum, set apart from the noise of the world, despite its status as a public/private partnership, maintained by the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board and the Walker. But on its 75th anniversary, the Walker raised $78 million dollars ($10 million of it public money) to support an expansion that removed those enclosing walls, added five acres of land, and created multiple new points of entry for visitors.22
New works were also added—including a piece the Walker’s then-Executive Director Olga Viso saw in Europe in 2014. Sam Durant’s Scaffold had appeared in Documenta 13, installed in Karlsaue Park in Kassel, Germany; from there, it traveled to Edinburgh, and then to an exhibit at an art center in The Hague. Durant’s wood and steel piece was an odd architectural mashup of historical instruments of death, including the basic shapes of seven gallows, dating from 1859 (John Brown) to 2006 (Saddam Hussein). Steel stairs allowed viewers—children and adults alike—to climb and explore the piece, slowly discovering its secrets. As Durant explained in a statement accompanying the piece:
While some might see a resemblance to constructions in an adventure playground from the 1970s, the sculpture is actually made up of a combination of reconstructed gallows...that were used in executions of significance throughout U.S. history. Through this formal uncertainty there is an attempt to signify both the free play of childhood and the ultimate form of control, capital punishment.23
Viso proposed that the Walker acquire the piece later that year, and the Walker approved the $450,000 purchase.24
While Durant intended the piece as a reflection of, as he would later put it, “the difficult histories of the racial dimension of the criminal justice system of the United States,”25 the Dakota community of Minneapolis immediately saw something else: a glaring reminder of a key traumatic event in their history. At the end of the U.S. Dakota War—also known as the Dakota Uprising—38 Dakota men accused of participating in the conflict were sentenced to death and marched to the scaffold in Mankato the day after Christmas, 1862. It was the largest mass execution in U.S. history, resulting from irregular trials conducted in great haste, with many defendants maintaining their innocence throughout—and two prisoners, as it turned out, executed entirely by mistake.26
Durant’s Scaffold contained the unmistakable outlines of that massive square gallows from 1862, and Dakota residents immediately recognized it being erected in the park as a play structure, much to their surprise and dismay.
While some might see a resemblance to constructions in an adventure playground from the 1970s, the sculpture is actually made up of a combination of reconstructed gallows...that were used in executions of significance throughout U.S. history. Through this formal uncertainty there is an attempt to signify both the free play of childhood and the ultimate form of control, capital punishment.23
Viso proposed that the Walker acquire the piece later that year, and the Walker approved the $450,000 purchase.24
While Durant intended the piece as a reflection of, as he would later put it, “the difficult histories of the racial dimension of the criminal justice system of the United States,”25 the Dakota community of Minneapolis immediately saw something else: a glaring reminder of a key traumatic event in their history. At the end of the U.S. Dakota War—also known as the Dakota Uprising—38 Dakota men accused of participating in the conflict were sentenced to death and marched to the scaffold in Mankato the day after Christmas, 1862. It was the largest mass execution in U.S. history, resulting from irregular trials conducted in great haste, with many defendants maintaining their innocence throughout—and two prisoners, as it turned out, executed entirely by mistake.26
Durant’s Scaffold contained the unmistakable outlines of that massive square gallows from 1862, and Dakota residents immediately recognized it being erected in the park as a play structure, much to their surprise and dismay.
Protests began on May 26, 2017, in advance of the planned June 3 opening; signs condemning the installation covered the chain link fences surrounding the still-under- construction park.27 Two days later, bowing to intense pressure from online media and hundreds of in-person protestors, the museum announced that Sam Durant had agreed to have his Scaffold dismantled. With the artist’s permission, the resulting 51,000 pounds of lumber would be removed from the site and eventually buried in a secret location.28
Some were shocked at the callousness the Walker had shown in its outreach process—or lack thereof. Rory Wakemup, director of a gallery of contemporary native art in Minneapolis, assumed initial stories about the piece were a joke: “Anything this heavy needs to have approval from a wide range of the community,” he explained. “There's no singular voice that can just do this.”29 Durant later acknowledged the problems of both having the piece so accessible, and not having actually consulted anyone in the Dakota Community:
The sculpture was erected in a very prominent part of the garden, so it was highly visible. The garden itself had not been reopened, the whole thing was fenced off, but you could see [the piece] clearly from the road and the paths. [Members of] the Dakota community recognized the Mankato gallows in the sculpture. It was very visible in the sculpture. The museum—and I’m sharing the blame—didn’t reach out to the community. We didn’t think of it, to start a dialogue before we started building it. There was no information.30
The sculpture was erected in a very prominent part of the garden, so it was highly visible. The garden itself had not been reopened, the whole thing was fenced off, but you could see [the piece] clearly from the road and the paths. [Members of] the Dakota community recognized the Mankato gallows in the sculpture. It was very visible in the sculpture. The museum—and I’m sharing the blame—didn’t reach out to the community. We didn’t think of it, to start a dialogue before we started building it. There was no information.30
In Olga Viso’s own explanatory note, published prior to the museum agreeing to remove Durant’s piece, she acknowledged her responsibility for the lack of outreach—but then perhaps inadvertently indicated the museum’s main audience and key stakeholders:
I should have engaged leaders in the Dakota and broader Native communities in advance of the work’s siting, and I apologize for any pain and disappointment that the sculpture might elicit. When I first encountered Scaffold in a sculpture park in Europe five years ago, I saw a potent artistic statement about the ethics of capital punishment. Most importantly, I recognized its capacity to address the buried histories of violence in this country, in particular raising needed awareness among white audiences. I knew this could be a difficult artwork on many levels.31
I should have engaged leaders in the Dakota and broader Native communities in advance of the work’s siting, and I apologize for any pain and disappointment that the sculpture might elicit. When I first encountered Scaffold in a sculpture park in Europe five years ago, I saw a potent artistic statement about the ethics of capital punishment. Most importantly, I recognized its capacity to address the buried histories of violence in this country, in particular raising needed awareness among white audiences. I knew this could be a difficult artwork on many levels.31
Viso’s stated interest in using Durant’s piece to create dialogue with white audiences points to a common misunderstanding in museum work: the difference between community engagement and audience engagement. As the Arts Engaged consulting group’s website defines the terms, audience engagement consists of “activities undertaken by an arts organization as part of a marketing strategy designed to deepen relationships with current stakeholders;” community engagement, by contrast, describes “activities undertaken by an arts organization...to build deep relationships between the organization and the communities in which it operates for the purpose of achieving mutual benefit.”32 Audience engagement, then, means reaching out to people who already support your institution; community engagement requires building new relationships, and is a slower process demanding that the institution share authorship over content or power over decision-making in some meaningful way.
In this case: Viso saw white patrons as her existing audience, and was only prepared to market to them. Similarly, in the case of E Pluribus Unum, the CICF evidently saw Mindy Taylor Ross, the twelve members of its trail advisory panel, and the Indianapolis cultural establishment as its primary audience. Once their approval was granted, no further consultation with a broader public was deemed necessary to proceed.
Beyond ethics and best practices, larger questions remain about what can be done to commemorate historical events in public in a time when unitary representations of the past seem untenable. As Erika Doss noted in her 2008 book, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, contemporary memorials increasingly reject traditional history and single defining images, favoring the more malleable category of memory. Many new memorials indicate multiple points of view and the sheer scale of human loss via affective agglomerations of countless emotional and material fragments. As Doss puts it:
Memory seems to evade timeless categories, which helps to account for its broad appeal in a cultural climate where category challenging, and shifting, is the norm...[it is] valorized...for being elusive and unstable, open-ended and unresolved. It is further embraced as an active agent that is performative, personal, and presentist.33
But what of creative freedom for the artist and curator, whether in a commercial gallery or a public square, to transgress with strong images and engage in free creative expression? Neither Wilson nor Durant saw their assignment as creating a memorial; from their perspectives, they were merely following the dictates of their individual creative practices—albeit in a public space, with public money. Yet as Maggie Nelson notes in her 2021 book, On Freedom:
No one on earth has absolute freedom to do much of anything; as anyone who has ever tried to install a piece of art with mold on it in a museum or spill blood in a piece of live performance art discovers, such endeavors require planning, permission, negotiation. Art is not a sacrosanct realm, a “state of exception” [in which] all ethical, political, or legal quandaries fly out the window.34
As the examples of E Pluribus Unum and Scaffold indicate, whether one makes art for public or private interests, the notion of complete artistic autonomy is a fantasy. If an artwork is meant to be seen somewhere out in the world—if a piece will enter the day-to-day lives of multiple audiences—consultation, consideration, and willingness to pivot are always required. Institutions may not always consider best practices when commissioning new public-facing art, but those practices exist, and the choice to ignore them brings real consequences. If administrators choose not to invite local stakeholders to contribute to planning processes, they will nonetheless hear from the community eventually—and they may not like what they hear.
1 Judith Barry, Renée Green, Fred Wilson, Christian Philipp Müller, and Andrea Fraser, “Serving Institutions,” in Fred Wilson: A Critical Reader, ed. Doro Globus (London: Ridinghouse, 2011), 91.
2 Laura Raicovich, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest (London: Verso, 2021), 86.
3 Mary Leclère, “Speaking of Others,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 10 (Autumn/Winter 2004): 83–5, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20711557.
4 Lisa Corrin, “Mining the Museum: Artists Look at Museums, Museums Look at Themselves,” in Fred Wilson: A Critical Reader, ed. Doro Globus (London: Ridinghouse, 2011), 61–64.
5 “Return of the Whipping Post: Mining the Museum,” Underbelly (blog), Maryland Historical Society, October 10, 2013, https://www.mdhistory.org/return-of-the-whipping-post- mining-the-museum/.
6 Lisa Corrin, “Mining the Museum: Artists Look at Museums, Museums Look at Themselves,” in Fred Wilson: A Critical Reader, ed. Doro Globus (London: Ridinghouse, 2011), 61.
7 Joshua Mack, “Sam Durant: Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions, Washington, D.C.: Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.”
Modern Painters (December 2005/January 2006): 118–19, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asu&AN=505170698&site=ehos t-live
8 Mark Watson, “Unsettled borders and memories: a ‘local’ indigenous
perspective on contemporary globalization,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 7:1 (May 2015), https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v7.26583.
9 “Monuments for the USA,” CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, https://archive.wattis.org/exhibitions/monuments-usa (accessed October 10, 2022).
10 John LeKay, “Interview: Sam Durant,” Heyoka Magazine 3 (Winter 2006), https://web.archive.org/web/20070824150717/http://www.heyokamagazine.com/HEYO KA.3.SCULPT.SAM%20DURANT.htm (accessed October 12, 2022).
11 “Indianapolis Cultural Trail Art Collection,” Indianapolis Cultural Trail, https://indyculturaltrail.org/art/ (accessed October 12, 2022).
12 “Soldiers & Sailors Monument/Monument Circle,” Indy, https://visitindy.com/indianapolis-soldiers-sailors-monument-monument-circle (accessed October 12, 2022).
13 Bridget Cooks, “Activism and Preservation: Fred Wilson’s E Pluribus Unum,” Indiana Magazine of History 110 (March 2014), 27.
14 Leroy Robinson, “Sculpture Is Appalling,” Indianapolis Recorder, September 16, 2010 http://www.indianapolisrecorder.com/d304c6ff-47ee-5bb6-afce-b5531a03e18c/ (accessed October 10, 2022).
15 Kirk Savage, “E Pluribus Unum,” Kirk Savage, April 25, 2011, https://kirksavage.pitt.edu/?p=180 (accessed October 12, 2022)
16 Jessica Williams-Gibson, “Controversial Public Art Project Is Discontinued,” Indianapolis Recorder, December 15, 2011, https://indianapolisrecorder.com/5d8c194a-273a-11e1- a7bd-001871e3ce6c/ (accessed October 10, 2022)
17 Modupe Labode, “Unsafe Ideas, Public Art, and E Pluribus Unum: An Interview with Fred Wilson,” Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 108, No. 4 (December 2012), 394–5, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5378/indimagahist.108.4.038
18 Lucy R. Lippard, “Looking Around: Where We Are, Where We Could Be,” in Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, ed. Suzanne Lacy (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 121.
19 Louisa Buck and Daniel McClean, Commissioning Contemporary Art: A Handbook for Curators, Collectors, and Artists (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2012), 105.
20 Louisa Buck and Daniel McClean, 248.
21 Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 136.
22 The Walker Art Center, “The Walker Art Center Raises $78 Million to Complete Campus Plan,” Walker, October 12, 2017, https://walkerart.org/press-releases/2017/walker-art- center-raises-78-million-to-complete-campus-plan (accessed October 14, 2022)
23 Sam Durant’s original artist’s statement from Documenta 13 was previously available on his website, samdurant.net; it can still be read (along with an apology letter) here: https://web.archive.org/web/20180306134235/https://samdurant.net/index.php/project /scaffold/
28 Shelia M. Eldred, “Dakota Plan to Bury, Not Burn, ‘Scaffold’ Sculpture,” The New York Times, September 1, 2017 https://nytimes.com/2017/09/01/arts/design/dakota-plan-to- bury-not-burn-scaffold-sculpture.html (accessed October 14, 2022)
29 Liz Sawyer, “After outcry and protests, Walker Art Center will remove 'Scaffold' sculpture,” Star Tribune, May 28, 2017 https://m.startribune.com/walker-will-take-down- controversial-sculpture-after-protests/424820003/?section=local
30 Carolina A. Miranda, “Q&A: Artist Sam Durant was pressured into taking down his ‘Scaffold.’ Why doesn’t he feel censored?” Los Angeles Times, June 17, 2017 https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cam-sam-durant-scaffold-interview- 20170617-htmlstory.html (accessed October 15, 2022).
31 Olga Viso, “Learning in Public: An Open Letter on Sam Durant’s Scaffold,” Walkerart.org, May 26, 2017 https://walkerart.org/magazine/learning-in-public-an-open-letter-on-sam- durants-scaffold (accessed October 14, 2022).
32 “Engagement Essentials: Community Engagement Is Not Giving Them What We Think They Want,” Arts Engaged https://www.artsengaged.com/engagement-essentials (accessed October 14, 2022).
33 Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 49.
34 Maggie Nelson, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2021), 34–5.
In this case: Viso saw white patrons as her existing audience, and was only prepared to market to them. Similarly, in the case of E Pluribus Unum, the CICF evidently saw Mindy Taylor Ross, the twelve members of its trail advisory panel, and the Indianapolis cultural establishment as its primary audience. Once their approval was granted, no further consultation with a broader public was deemed necessary to proceed.
Beyond ethics and best practices, larger questions remain about what can be done to commemorate historical events in public in a time when unitary representations of the past seem untenable. As Erika Doss noted in her 2008 book, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, contemporary memorials increasingly reject traditional history and single defining images, favoring the more malleable category of memory. Many new memorials indicate multiple points of view and the sheer scale of human loss via affective agglomerations of countless emotional and material fragments. As Doss puts it:
Memory seems to evade timeless categories, which helps to account for its broad appeal in a cultural climate where category challenging, and shifting, is the norm...[it is] valorized...for being elusive and unstable, open-ended and unresolved. It is further embraced as an active agent that is performative, personal, and presentist.33
But what of creative freedom for the artist and curator, whether in a commercial gallery or a public square, to transgress with strong images and engage in free creative expression? Neither Wilson nor Durant saw their assignment as creating a memorial; from their perspectives, they were merely following the dictates of their individual creative practices—albeit in a public space, with public money. Yet as Maggie Nelson notes in her 2021 book, On Freedom:
No one on earth has absolute freedom to do much of anything; as anyone who has ever tried to install a piece of art with mold on it in a museum or spill blood in a piece of live performance art discovers, such endeavors require planning, permission, negotiation. Art is not a sacrosanct realm, a “state of exception” [in which] all ethical, political, or legal quandaries fly out the window.34
As the examples of E Pluribus Unum and Scaffold indicate, whether one makes art for public or private interests, the notion of complete artistic autonomy is a fantasy. If an artwork is meant to be seen somewhere out in the world—if a piece will enter the day-to-day lives of multiple audiences—consultation, consideration, and willingness to pivot are always required. Institutions may not always consider best practices when commissioning new public-facing art, but those practices exist, and the choice to ignore them brings real consequences. If administrators choose not to invite local stakeholders to contribute to planning processes, they will nonetheless hear from the community eventually—and they may not like what they hear.
1 Judith Barry, Renée Green, Fred Wilson, Christian Philipp Müller, and Andrea Fraser, “Serving Institutions,” in Fred Wilson: A Critical Reader, ed. Doro Globus (London: Ridinghouse, 2011), 91.
2 Laura Raicovich, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest (London: Verso, 2021), 86.
3 Mary Leclère, “Speaking of Others,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 10 (Autumn/Winter 2004): 83–5, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20711557.
4 Lisa Corrin, “Mining the Museum: Artists Look at Museums, Museums Look at Themselves,” in Fred Wilson: A Critical Reader, ed. Doro Globus (London: Ridinghouse, 2011), 61–64.
5 “Return of the Whipping Post: Mining the Museum,” Underbelly (blog), Maryland Historical Society, October 10, 2013, https://www.mdhistory.org/return-of-the-whipping-post- mining-the-museum/.
6 Lisa Corrin, “Mining the Museum: Artists Look at Museums, Museums Look at Themselves,” in Fred Wilson: A Critical Reader, ed. Doro Globus (London: Ridinghouse, 2011), 61.
7 Joshua Mack, “Sam Durant: Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions, Washington, D.C.: Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.”
Modern Painters (December 2005/January 2006): 118–19, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asu&AN=505170698&site=ehos t-live
8 Mark Watson, “Unsettled borders and memories: a ‘local’ indigenous
perspective on contemporary globalization,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 7:1 (May 2015), https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v7.26583.
9 “Monuments for the USA,” CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, https://archive.wattis.org/exhibitions/monuments-usa (accessed October 10, 2022).
10 John LeKay, “Interview: Sam Durant,” Heyoka Magazine 3 (Winter 2006), https://web.archive.org/web/20070824150717/http://www.heyokamagazine.com/HEYO KA.3.SCULPT.SAM%20DURANT.htm (accessed October 12, 2022).
11 “Indianapolis Cultural Trail Art Collection,” Indianapolis Cultural Trail, https://indyculturaltrail.org/art/ (accessed October 12, 2022).
12 “Soldiers & Sailors Monument/Monument Circle,” Indy, https://visitindy.com/indianapolis-soldiers-sailors-monument-monument-circle (accessed October 12, 2022).
13 Bridget Cooks, “Activism and Preservation: Fred Wilson’s E Pluribus Unum,” Indiana Magazine of History 110 (March 2014), 27.
14 Leroy Robinson, “Sculpture Is Appalling,” Indianapolis Recorder, September 16, 2010 http://www.indianapolisrecorder.com/d304c6ff-47ee-5bb6-afce-b5531a03e18c/ (accessed October 10, 2022).
15 Kirk Savage, “E Pluribus Unum,” Kirk Savage, April 25, 2011, https://kirksavage.pitt.edu/?p=180 (accessed October 12, 2022)
16 Jessica Williams-Gibson, “Controversial Public Art Project Is Discontinued,” Indianapolis Recorder, December 15, 2011, https://indianapolisrecorder.com/5d8c194a-273a-11e1- a7bd-001871e3ce6c/ (accessed October 10, 2022)
17 Modupe Labode, “Unsafe Ideas, Public Art, and E Pluribus Unum: An Interview with Fred Wilson,” Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 108, No. 4 (December 2012), 394–5, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5378/indimagahist.108.4.038
18 Lucy R. Lippard, “Looking Around: Where We Are, Where We Could Be,” in Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, ed. Suzanne Lacy (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 121.
19 Louisa Buck and Daniel McClean, Commissioning Contemporary Art: A Handbook for Curators, Collectors, and Artists (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2012), 105.
20 Louisa Buck and Daniel McClean, 248.
21 Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 136.
22 The Walker Art Center, “The Walker Art Center Raises $78 Million to Complete Campus Plan,” Walker, October 12, 2017, https://walkerart.org/press-releases/2017/walker-art- center-raises-78-million-to-complete-campus-plan (accessed October 14, 2022)
23 Sam Durant’s original artist’s statement from Documenta 13 was previously available on his website, samdurant.net; it can still be read (along with an apology letter) here: https://web.archive.org/web/20180306134235/https://samdurant.net/index.php/project /scaffold/
28 Shelia M. Eldred, “Dakota Plan to Bury, Not Burn, ‘Scaffold’ Sculpture,” The New York Times, September 1, 2017 https://nytimes.com/2017/09/01/arts/design/dakota-plan-to- bury-not-burn-scaffold-sculpture.html (accessed October 14, 2022)
29 Liz Sawyer, “After outcry and protests, Walker Art Center will remove 'Scaffold' sculpture,” Star Tribune, May 28, 2017 https://m.startribune.com/walker-will-take-down- controversial-sculpture-after-protests/424820003/?section=local
30 Carolina A. Miranda, “Q&A: Artist Sam Durant was pressured into taking down his ‘Scaffold.’ Why doesn’t he feel censored?” Los Angeles Times, June 17, 2017 https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cam-sam-durant-scaffold-interview- 20170617-htmlstory.html (accessed October 15, 2022).
31 Olga Viso, “Learning in Public: An Open Letter on Sam Durant’s Scaffold,” Walkerart.org, May 26, 2017 https://walkerart.org/magazine/learning-in-public-an-open-letter-on-sam- durants-scaffold (accessed October 14, 2022).
32 “Engagement Essentials: Community Engagement Is Not Giving Them What We Think They Want,” Arts Engaged https://www.artsengaged.com/engagement-essentials (accessed October 14, 2022).
33 Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 49.
34 Maggie Nelson, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2021), 34–5.