As much as we’d like to think that we’re doing everything right, right now, we’re not. Not totally.
Created by Mayor Lori Lightfoot in response to the protests last summer that also prompted her to cause Christopher Columbus statues to vanish from public parks, the Monuments Project is led by a 30-member advisory committee that includes artists, architects, scholars, and civic leaders.
The monuments range from images of Leif Erikson, Abraham Lincoln, and Columbus, to the golden replica of the “The Republic” that stands in Jackson Park.
Some of what follows, in nearly two hours of comments by committee members, are suggestions that future monuments don’t have to be statues, but can be, for example, gathering places, and that they should be less about prominent individuals and more about women, people of color, and the collective experience. DCASE staffers report that 125 artists submitted ideas for new monuments, and that, after Chicago, no place is more interested in the project website than Croatia, homeland of sculptor Ivan Meštrović, whose Bowman and Spearman sculptures (at Michigan and Ida B. Wells Drive) are on the list.
Did you know that Mother (Mary) Jones immigrated to America from Ireland as a child, lost her husband and four children to an epidemic of yellow fever, and moved to Chicago (for a second time) in 1867, setting up a dressmaking business that was wiped out in the Great Fire before embarking on her legendary career as a labor organizer?
