“Monuments Must Change.” Mellon Examines Symbols of Power in the American Landscape

Dedicated in 2011, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial is the first monument to an individual person of color on the National Mall. Photo: TJ Brown/shutterstock

Dedicated in 2011, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial is the first monument to an individual person of color on the National Mall. Photo: TJ Brown/shutterstock

It’s the largest initiative the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has ever taken on—$250 million for a wide-ranging effort to “transform the nation’s commemorative landscape.” Announced at the end of 2020, Mellon’s Monuments Project is a key part of the foundation’s pivot to a more overt social justice strategy under its president, poet and Ford alum Elizabeth Alexander. It also comes at the time of heightened attention to—and controversy around—the commemorative installations that dot America’s public spaces.

When we first wrote about the Monuments Project last year, its only grant at the time was $4 million to the Philadelphia-based Monument Lab to conduct a thorough audit of the nation’s monumental landscape. Other grants have gone out in the interim, mostly to support local art and monument-making endeavors. But the Monument Lab audit has been a centerpiece of Mellon’s initiative all year.

And now the audit is complete. Mellon announced the findings this week, along with what it characterizes as a “first-of-its-kind” report based on a study set of nearly 50,000 monuments across the United States. Monument Lab has made that database publicly accessible, along with essays and supplementary materials produced along the way. 

Central to the project’s findings and mindset is the idea that the commemorative landscape is not static and never has been. “I ask you to grasp the idea that monuments must change,” said Monument Lab co-founder Paul Farber during a launch event alongside Mellon’s Alexander. From what I could tell, Farber meant that in a dual sense: both that monuments inevitably will change as time and conditions take their toll, and that as a collective, America’s monuments should change to better reflect this nation’s history, inhabitants and values. 

It’s eye-opening to see just how skewed the monumental landscape is in a number of ways. It’s also interesting to consider how the Monument Lab’s working definition of a monument—“a statement of power and presence in public”—applies to philanthropy in general, and what questions that brings to the fore.

Representation and misrepresentation

Monument Lab’s audit makes no claims to be comprehensive, but it’s still an impressive piece of data combing. Over the course of nearly a year, a team of researchers dug through about 500,000 monument records from a wide array of sources—federal, state, local, tribal, institutional and more. Then they narrowed that down to a study set of 48,178 “conventional” monuments covering all 50 U.S. states as well as U.S. territories. 

Farber noted that this study set mostly contains monuments designed to be long-lasting or “generational” (not necessarily “permanent”) rather than short-term or temporary installations. He also pointed out that despite what people sometimes think, there is no central tracking apparatus for monuments, only assorted local records maintained by an overlapping hodgepodge of agencies. The last effort remotely comparable to Monument Lab’s audit was a nationwide survey of outdoor sculpture undertaken by the Smithsonian in the early 1990s. 

So what did this audit actually find? The report begins by stressing that “monuments are not timeless, permanent or untouchable.” Wear and tear, maintenance, and changes in the social and physical environment around them all alter monuments over time. So do intentional modifications by the community, which only in a small minority of cases involve wholesale removal. “Though the removal of monuments remains an area of great attention, we estimate that 99.4 percent of conventional monuments remain in place,” the report notes. 

The audit’s second key finding is hardly surprising: The American monument landscape is predominantly white, male and wealthy. Of the monuments in the study set depicting individuals, Monument Lab put together a list of the top 50 figures represented most often. A full 44 of those 50 are white men, the exceptions being Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, Tecumseh, Sacagawea, Frederick Douglass and Joan of Arc. Only three are women. About 75% of the top 50 depicted landowners, and a startling 50% of them enslaved other people.

The report also points out that “feminized bodies often appear in the sanctioned monument landscape as fictional, mythological, and allegorical figures.” For instance, the study set contained more representations of mermaids—22—than of U.S. congresswomen—just two. 

The third main finding is also less than surprising. War and conquest comprise by far the most common subject matter depicted in U.S. monuments, far outstripping categories like religion, arts and letters, plants and animals, and allegory and mythology. In war monuments, glorification is typical. “Despite their preponderance, our monuments generally minimize the social and environmental costs of warfare,” the report notes. There are exceptions to that rule, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C., but they’re in the minority.

Finally, the audit found that taken as a whole, the current monument landscape misrepresents U.S. history. Farber highlighted the usefulness of pairing sets of keywords in the dataset to highlight how biased or one-sided much of the commemorative landscape can be. For instance, only 1% of the dataset’s 5,917 monuments mentioning “Civil War” also mention “slavery.” Only 3% of those mentioning “Confederate” also mention “defeat.” And of the 916 monuments mentioning “pioneer,” only 15% also mention “Native American,” “Indian” or “Indigenous.”

Shifting ground

What are we to make of all this? Beyond the obviously skewed nature of the current monument landscape—which Monument Lab says can and will evolve—there are some big civil society questions at play here. Public agencies usually oversee the placement and upkeep of monuments, but it’s often private groups and individuals who pay for and push for specific installations. 

Mellon is one. As part of the Monuments Project, it’s been supporting several new installations and monument-related programming, notably a $5 million expansion of Judy Baca’s mural “The Great Wall of Los Angeles.” Reaching back further, it’s often been noted that another civil society organization, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, pushed to install hundreds of Confederate monuments in the early 20th century. 

Not unlike our city parks, which are increasingly created and supported with private donations, monuments are one way that philanthropy directly shapes our physical landscape. That landscape ideally reflects community values, but is all too often skewed by problematic power imbalances, as the audit suggests. Mellon’s undertaking is a continuation of philanthropy’s role in shaping public space, but a rare case of the sector doing so with great intention and introspection.

While Monument Lab’s audit was conducted as a kick-off to Mellon’s own quarter-billion-dollar initiative, these findings can certainly inform the decision-making of other funders interested in public art and public spaces, particularly funders seeking to center equity. Monuments in the public square may fade into the background of everyday life, but their undeniable presence over the course of generations affects how “history lives with us every day,” as the report puts it. 

There’s also the question of how monuments must change at a time when many of the most pivotal developments are happening in the digital world, not the physical one. This audit didn’t focus on them, but Farber spoke favorably about “virtual monuments,” including interesting work being done around augmented reality and linking the physical with the virtual. 

While augmented reality and the like might seem gimmicky or overly ephemeral next to monuments of marble and bronze, funders with an eye on preservation and commemoration should be thinking about how to handle history in the digital age—a time when vast troves of data exist alongside stunning online amnesia. Monument Lab’s broad definition of a monument, a “statement of power and presence in public,” covers a lot of ground. These days, much of that ground is virtual.

Philanthropy as monument

While considering the audit’s findings, it also struck me that quite a few philanthropic gifts map onto Mellon’s definition of a monument.

A big donor slapping their name on an art gallery or hospital is certainly a public statement of power and presence, and constitutes a monument to the donor themselves. Inasmuch as naming rights are one of philanthropy’s well-established domains, there are a lot of parallels between challenges to traditional monuments and criticism of big-donor philanthropy. We’re even having debates about removing what are basically monuments to offensive donors, or prohibiting new ones.

In a way, Mellon’s mission to interrogate what our monuments say about us parallels our current interrogation of the role private wealth plays in our society. Like the critics of monuments to America’s traditional hierarchies, critics of philanthropy often speak about big gifts as a form of propaganda meant to buy good will and obscure wrongdoing. Their opponents then turn around and accuse those critics of doing their own propagandizing—Mellon’s Monument Project itself will be seen as such by some.

With civil society entering a more volatile and combative era, that tension between public interest and “propaganda” will be at the core of many funding debates, especially as the history of the present era comes together. Civil society voices will need to ensure that complete stories are told, and whether, given what’s out there, they can justify staying silent.