Monument Avenue Research Articles

The Obsolescence of Sculpture

Previous articleNext article No AccessCommentariesThe Obsolescence of SculptureKirk SavageKirk Savage Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Art Volume 24, Number 1Spring 2010 Sponsored by the Smithsonian American Art Museum Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/652736 Views: 148Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Laura Giraudo In the shadow of Cuauhtémoc: commemorative sculptures, indigenous heroes, and indigenismo in Mexico and Brazil, 1944-1958, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 1 (Apr 2022): 1–24.https://doi.org/10.1080/17442222.2022.2041349Elizabeth P. Baltes Challenging Narratives: Arthur Ashe and the Practice of Counter-Monumentality on Richmond’s Monument Avenue, de arte 53, no.2-32-3 (Dec 2018): 31–50.https://doi.org/10.1080/00043389.2018.1481911Sedat Cereci The Contemporary Role of Art as an Instrument of Communication: Peace Works, SSRN Electronic Journal (Jan 2016).https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2723954

Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory

This richly illustrated collection of fourteen essays examines the ways in which Confederate memorials from Monument Avenue to Stone Mountain and the public rituals surrounding them testify to the tenets of the Lost Cause, a romanticized narrative of the war. Several essays highlight the creative leading role played by women s groups in memorialization, while others explore the alternative ways in which people outside white southern culture wrote their very different histories on the southern landscape. The authors who include Richard Guy Wilson, Catherine W. Bishir, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, and William M.S. Ramussen trace the origins, objectives, and changing consequences of Confederate monuments over time and the dynamics of individuals and organizations that sponsored them. Thus these essays extend the growing literature on the rhetoric of the Lost Cause by shifting the focus to the realm of the visual. They are especially relevant in the present day when Confederate symbols and monuments continue to play a central role in a public and often emotionally charged debate about how the South s past should be remembered. The editors: Art Historian Cynthia Mills, a specialist in nineteenth-century public sculpture, is executive editor of American Art, the scholarly journal of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Pamela H. Simpson is the Ernest Williams II Professor of Art History at Washington and Lee University. She is the coauthor of The Architecture of Historic Lexington.

Driggs, Sarah Shields; Richard Guy Wilson; Robert P. Winthrop. Richmond's Monument Avenue

Driggs, Sarah Shields; Richard Guy Wilson; Robert P. Winthrop. <i>Richmond's Monument Avenue</i>

Separate times, shared spaces: Arthur Ashe, Monument Avenue and the politics of Richmond, Virginia’s symbolic landscape

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, monuments honouring white heroes of the Confederate States of America were erected along Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. In 1995, a vociferous debate occurred in Richmond over a proposal to ‘integrate’ the Avenue, still considered to be the South’s grandest Confederate memorial site, with a statue of the late African American Richmond native, tennis star and human rights activist Arthur Ashe. While on the surface, the main issue in the debate was where to locate the Ashe statue, the underlying debate over Richmond’s symbolic landscape centred on issues of race relations, identity and power in Richmond at the end of the twentieth century.

Review: Richmond's Monument Avenue by Sarah Shields Driggs, Richard Guy Wilson, Robert P. Winthrop, John O. Peters, Richmond

Review: Richmond's Monument Avenue by Sarah Shields Driggs, Richard Guy Wilson, Robert P. Winthrop, John O. Peters, Richmond

Living with Confederate Symbols

Bragg Bowlin and I are talking as we sit in the living room of his home, a 1920s-era row house two blocks from the famous Monument Avenue historic district in Richmond, Virginia. The room is furnished in dark mahogany and cherry, with impressive overstuffed chairs and sofa. Antique lamps and rugs join with the heavy wood furniture to give the room a turn-of-the-century feel. In these formal surroundings, Bragg's bare feet, blue jeans, and white T-shirt look out of place. The room's most prominent features, however, are its numerous images of the Confederacy and antebellum South. On a bookshelf is a bust of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Above the fireplace are framed prints of figures on horseback, generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. A Confederate battle flag hangs limp in one corner of the room. But the icon of the Old South that keeps drawing my attention is a striking collection of figurines, men in minstrel-style black face. Their pitch-black faces, stark white lips, and bulging eyes are contorted and twisted into expressions meant to convey lightheartedness and contentment. Whether these are antiques, the objects of a collector's curious fancy, or the wistful longings for the good-old days purchased by a middle-aged white southerner at a tourist shop, I do not know. I did not ask.

Richmonds Monument Avenue by Sarah Shields Driggs, Richard Guy Wilson, Robert P. Winthrop

BOOK REVIEW Book Review Winner of the SESAH zoor Book Award Sarah Shields Driggs, Richard Guy Wilson, and Robert P. Winthrop with original photography byJohn 0. Peters, Richmonds MonumentAvenue, Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001, xi+ 28opp., illus., $45, ISBN o-80J8-260J-J· T here is no better mirror of American culture -its aspirations, progress, and disappointments -than the fabric of its cities. And, as stage-sets for the extraordinary and everyday experiences of their inhabitants, the image and identity of city streets are everybody's business. Through their close study of one of the South's most remarkable streets, the authors of Richmond's Monument Avenue underscore these urban truths. Conceived in the r88os as a splendid thoroughfare distinguished with fine houses, careful landscaping, and unique commemorative statues, Monument Avenue fits firmly in the tradition of the City Beautiful. So too, its conception and realization involved matters ofreal estate speculation, transportation, and societal values that resonate with the histories of other familiar "streets of power," particularly New York's Fifth Avenue and Chicago's Prairie Avenue. This street, however, 1s Richmond's Monument Avenue, and its story necessarily engages a rich if often discordant local heritage, for nineteenthcentury Richmond was caught at once in the progressive fervor of the New South and the nostalgic pull of the cult of the lost cause. As a result, the book is a study ofhow power and identity intersect to define urban form and is dedicated to exploring fully whether Monument Avenue is a "shrine to Richmond's obsession with its past" or a model of modern urban planning designed to endure adaptation and change. The authors acknowledge that Monument Avenue's story is a complex tale to tell, engaging the history of the city and its politics; the statues and buildings that line the street; and, most significantly , the people who built and lived on the street together with those figures-from Robert E. Lee to Arthur Ashe-who are represented in its statuary. Collaborators Sarah Shields Driggs, Richard Guy Wilson, and Robert P. Winthrop craft a lucid story through meticulously researched chapters, thick with descriptions of the street's material culture, that explore how and why Monument Avenue was created. The book begins with a glimpse at Monument Avenue's "Origins," a chapter that offers a deeply structured context of Richmond's socio-political and economic history. Not only does this section situate Monument Avenue in the city's chronicle of pre-Civil War and post-Civil War prosperity and its urban consequences; moreover, the formative discussion reveals a key subtext that is woven through the book: the racial tension that is an uncomfortable yet recurrent theme in Richmond's history. Chapter 2, devoted to "The Statues," follows . Five commemorative monuments linked to the Civil War and conceived to evoke a poignant southern history (depictions of Robert E. Lee ARRIS 73 BOOK REVIEW [189o}, J.E.B. Stuart [1907}, Jefferson Davis [r9o7}, T. J. "Stonewall: Jackson [1915}, and Matthew Fontaine Maury [1929}) together with the recently added Arthur Ashe statue (1996) render Monument Avenue a "great gallery of outdoor sculpture." This chapter, however, reveals that its masterworks, which both venerate the old South and optimistically anticipate the modern South, are not mere objects of public art; they are political and cultural symbols, ripe for the potentially conflicting interpretation by dominant and decentered members of the community. A discussion of "Building A Neighborhood," chapter 3, presents an overview of Monument Avenue's tout ensemble, a quickly evolving melange of great houses, town houses, new apartments, and houses ofworship, and the personalities that forged their development-real estate speculators, builders, land owners, and new residents. In parallel to the treatment of the memorials in chapter 2, chapter 4, "Houses, Styles, and Architects," examines the architectural fabric of Monument Avenue, covering informative background concerning the regional figures and national players, including John Russell Pope and William Lawrence Bottomley, who designed its buildings. Another central theme ofthe book commands this chapter: the notion of "unity with diversity," which, the authors assert, distinguishes the spaces and places of Monument Avenue. This idea extends to both the accommodations of stylistic breadth...

Richmond's Monument Avenue

Long hailed as a supreme example of American city planning, Monument Avenue is home to some of Richmond, Virginia's, most prestigious houses and distinguished architecture - and to the unique procession of statues from which the street takes its name. Initially planned in 1890 around a memorial to Robert E. Lee, over the next four decades the avenue evolved into a parade of statues honoring heroes of the Confederacy. In the mid-1990s, however, the dedication of a controversial memorial to African American tennis player Arthur Ashe signaled that Monument Avenue's meaning had broadened beyond commemorating the Lost Cause..This book traces the history of Monument Avenue, of its buildings and statuary, and of the people who helped create one of America's great streets. Enriched by more than three hundred photographs, plans, and drawings, it chronicles the avenue's development, captures architectural details and city preservation efforts, and places the avenue's story in local, regional, and national context. Built to reflect the hopes and attitudes of Richmonders at the turn of the last century, Monument Avenue exists nearly intact today as the centerpiece of a flourishing neighborhood, even as its meaning continues to be redefined.

Redefining a Southern City’S Heritage: Historic Preservation Planning, Public Art, and Race in Richmond, Virginia

Historic preservation is a planning technique employed in many American metropolitan areas. A local ordinance specifies those districts that deserve careful attention, then an Architectural Review Board determines whether or not the proposed redevelopment schemes are appropriate for the historic design character of those precincts. Today, there are over 1,800 such boards in place, making critical decisions on rehabilitations, infill development, urban amenities, and public art projects. This narrative examines the siting of a public art project within an historic district in Richmond, Virginia: The district is the Monument Avenue Historic District, and the public art project is the sculpture of Arthur Ashe, which is sited within that historic area. In the process that culminated in the Arthur Ashe statue taking its place on Monument Avenue, the activities of public planning institutions were central. But the ultimate decision was the product, as well, of local politics, racial attitudes, public art standards, and passionate concern for the integrity of an historic landscape. This article seeks to illuminate the intricacies of that local decision-making process.

Monument Avenue Park Association vs. The Virginia Racing Commission

Monument Avenue Park Association vs. The Virginia Racing Commission

Monument Avenue: The Architecture of Consensus in the New South, 1890-1930

Monument Avenue: The Architecture of Consensus in the New South, 1890-1930

R. E. Lee — 1807-1870

R. E. LEE _ 1807-1870 To Allen Tate Iced elms, cased in ice, The dead limbs of a dead harrowing, And The Captain on Traveller Faces southward. Greened in age The bronzed form interrupts the leafs Swift glide toward extinction. When all Are dispersed, a tardy snowfall Tassels the firm beard. Floodlights Are delusion, lighting without warmth, Beading that chilled shell. Marvel At that one, frozen in cold metal, Staring southward in wintry Virginia, One hundred years past his occasion! In our own seasonal agitation Gilded cars weave along the avenue Drumming the world to work. From fogged Panes faces gape, riding the bus. One lone gun, crammed with mortar, foretells The metallic processional. Maury, Jackson, Davis himself until, swerving, You pass the Captain. Do not look Upward. Past concrete, past stone, Below the dignity of their gaze, unseen, Proceed. Not elms but time has hidden them. Striking for work, you do not see Stuart himself, screening the Captain's flank. Who faced the Captain in that direction? Those who remembered him looking north Against the bayonets massed for war By a Providence of Machines. Their watch was his. In deadly pledge they raised their bloody hands. They were his sword; he did not let them fall Until their strength reddened a hundred thickets 374 Of blackjack oak, Virginia creeper. Pale rebels Among the dogwood stood to his calling. Those who by wretched campfire huddled For common grieving, turned him that way. They are all gone. The Captain on the horse Stands for them now, their blessedness and fears, Their lust and faith composed for scrutiny In that one stainless horseman, facing south. Dread hours in the Wilderness, canister, The quick brush aflame, April at Appomattox: Defeat. And Jackson storming on the left In love they wheeled that horseman round about And stood him there; "Demons out of the earth—" Who set him for a symbol of their kind. Wind in the elms, wind from the frigid north On a scattered and confused terrain of Now. Rememberless the land invites the steel, The asphalt lanes. Ice in Capitol Park Is filmed with smoke and grit of factories. Twelve miles west of Malvern Hill, the sound Of parking lot attendants, stripping gears. In a city of endless Reconstruction, Statutes alone throw shadows. What portents come, Remain unseen. Where death is air, Light in the sky, who is the foe? Assail the wind? Above the breath of exhaust Cold horsemen along Monument Avenue Rally to the air's assault on bronze. Jackson and Stuart facing north, and Lee: Seeing the long lines faint, the caissons burst, Richmond burning, the young Confederates dead, He rode off westward. They held an infant boy For blessing. Teach him he must deny himself, He said. Now, later than smoke, Later than civil war, the Captain stands High above the roofs and hardened elms, Hearing across the street the children's cries. —Louis D. Rubin 375 ...