Audit finds public art tends to honor white men, violence

A look at 48,000 conventional monuments in the United States reveals trends in who or what gets memorialized with a statue and who or what does not.

In October 2021, a statue of George Floyd—displayed among figures of John Lewis, the late civil rights activist and US Congressman from Georgia, and Breonna Taylor, a Black woman killed by Louisville police officers following forced entry into her home—was vandalized in New York’s Union Square.

“The audit’s dataset has found that while 22 monuments feature mermaids, only two represent US congresswomen…”

And that wasn’t the first time: In June, the same statue of Floyd had been defaced with a white supremacist logo while on view on Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue. The sculpture’s story—from its creation to the repeated damage it suffered—seems representative of tensions around public art that have arisen following Floyd’s death, amid a renewed effort to remove monuments celebrating figures associated with white supremacy and replace them with new works highlighting marginalized voices.

To gain a better understanding of the national landscape in this reckoning over monuments and narratives, Monument Lab, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit art and history studio, conducted a year-long audit of records documenting historic properties in every US state and territory, in partnership with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Researchers from the Monument Lab searched approximately a half million data records to generate a study set of about 48,000 conventional monuments, noting in their report, The National Monument Audit, that “there is no single agreed upon definition of a monument in American culture,” nor is there a “central system for tracking, maintaining, or understanding them.” For the purposes of this project, the researchers defined a monument as “a statement of power and presence in public.”

Among other key findings, the report reveals that the majority of monuments depict white male figures, and that they tend to highlight themes of war and conquest.

Here, NYU Gallatin assistant professor/faculty fellow Patricia Eunji Kim, associate director of public engagement at Monument Lab and one of the report’s coauthors and coeditors, talks about the stories current US monuments tell, and how public commemorations may change in the future:

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