I want to offer you a note on absence.

Absence defined, not as a state of non-existence or lack, but as an occasion of being away −a departure, an obscuring, an erasure. Absence, especially in the context of history, plays the trick of enabling something to be defined by the void of its withdrawal or worse yet, to be manipulated, appropriated, or commodified by those that caused the flight. Surveying the various American visual landscapes, shaped by the might and will of man, a historical narrative of power is transcribed for us. Who is present and who is absent?

The battle raging over public monuments, both discursive and legal, tends to hinge on that central question, who is present and who is absent? I wish to reframe this question to no longer connote an absence of representation, of women’s bodies and the bodies of people of color, but to instead refer specifically to the absence of power. To put it frankly, the erecting of a Black body in bronze, alabaster, or gold does not give living, breathing Black people their full rights as citizens −a violent conflation that I battle in this discourse every day. Often placed within improper context, or no context at all, these “monuments” appropriate the bodies and likenesses of people of color, enabling the same historical violence to be enacted on their bodies posthumously, while silent in the face of current systemic violence.

Take for example the 2020 unveiling of Meredith Bergmann’s Women's Rights Pioneers Monument on the mall of New York City’s Central Park. Controversy over the initial design involved the lack of diverse representation of the American women’s suffrage movement. The initial design celebrated two figures, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, both white. The figure of Sojourner Truth was added, not because of her significant contributions to the movement, but as a compromise. Her Black body, a supposed signifier of racial unity, of one harmonious ideology.

In 1858, Truth boldly revealed her breasts to an audience to prove her biological womanhood, prove her worthiness of the care and consideration offered to her white peers. Does this monument not call on the exploitation of her body, yet again? Her body, her likeness used to mask the reality that the sculptor, shouldered with the great responsibility of materializing a movement, did not think Truth significant enough to place on her pedestal. Well, what if Truth was not there? What if she was absent? This is a question I ask when faced with any monument, what if this were just empty public space?

While at a conference for historic preservation in 2019, I lamented to an audience of about fifty peers that my extensive research on displaced Black communities in St. Louis, MO proved that commissioned monuments and historic site preservation were not effective enough in the face of cultural erasure and prevailing systemic inequities. These triumphant objects, regardless of how beautiful, large-scale, and well placed, appear hypocritical on the same city streets where Michael Brown was shot. In a rage, a white man stormed up to the panelist table and loudly proclaimed that the monuments depicting Black people weren’t for people “like me,” but to educate people “like him.” He turned his back on me before I could respond, “is that why I exist, as a measure of your humanity?” Is that why Truth was included, to obscure the fact that the battle she began is not yet over? Congresswoman Park Cannon was forcibly removed from the Georgia State capital and arrested while one of the most egregious voter suppression bills was signed into law. Through our present lens it is clear Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were not fighting the same battle as Truth. The incident at the conference inspired the final line of “Toward a Monumental Black Body,” originally published in the Spring 2020 issue of ART PAPERS: “Don’t let them turn me into a monument after they shoot me down in the street.” I do not offer my body to the public landscape; it will have to be taken from me.

Mere representation does not suffice. This is not to say that the representations can’t be beautiful, or that these figurative sculptures cannot spark joy and inspiration. The battle I am fighting isn’t over a statistic telling me how many faces look like mine in the surrounding landscape, how many white historians can be strongarmed into writing my people’s histories, or how many white women artists can be shamed into considering how their very identity is predicated on the lack of power given Black women. The battle I am fighting is over the absence of power. How the bodies of people of color, living and dead, continue to be commodified and worked for the appeasement and protection of the bodies of white people. How the narratives of our histories and cultures continue to be negotiated by white discomfort, even in the face of our continued systemic murders. In “Toward a Monumental Black Body” I speak of how a Black man was shot on my doorstep, how he died. Could it be that it was a fatal shot, or was it the slow response of the ambulance that killed him? Was it the ambulance, or was it the newly constructed median that makes the road so narrow that an ambulance can’t get through? Not a year after this man’s death was a sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr. erected on that very street. I sat at my table and laughed until I cried.

Power and representation are interconnected, but not the same. A monument depicting Sojourner Truth as having a seat at the table does not translate to her having a seat at the table. The suspended body of a Black person in public space is not a new visual phenomenon. Yet another sculpture depicting Martin Luther King Jr. or Harriet Tubman is not a sign of social change. A rising statistic of Black representation in public sculpture does not make my Black male body safer in public spaces.

There are foundational questions in monumental discourse. What are monuments for? Who are they for? What do they have the potential to do? My response to these questions is always, well, what do you need? What do the people need right now? When we do this work, who are we doing it for? The work of emancipation and decolonization is having the power to choose what is done with my body, where it goes. Too quickly art is used to cover the cracks and fissures caused by ingrained systemic issues. Monuments are no different. The first national monument was an act of colonization. Roosevelt claimed the Devil’s Tower Monument in Wyoming for the burgeoning United States, severing it from those nations that claimed it a part of their cultural heritage. I, like many of my peers, believe art in its various forms can be transformative, but we also understand that it has historically been used to suppress.

So, what do I want for the future of monuments? I want them to tell the truth. I want monuments and architecture that work against the oppressive sculptural histories of their genres. Structures that inspire us to challenge our systems and institutions, encourage the gathering of people, and remind everyday people of their collective power. As more voices contribute to the discourse, I want monuments that can shift, change, and move depending on the needs of the people. As a cultural historian, I am most interested in architectural interventions and acts of iconoclasm. In the recently published issue of ART PAPERS, which bore the theme of Monumental Interventions, co-editor Sarah Higgins and I explored how artists are making interventions into the material and sculptural history of monument and memorial-making. In its pages we offer just a brief survey of radical thinkers and makers that are pushing against the very form of public art to either transform or destroy it. We make space for the appropriation of the sculptural genre, problematizing it, speculating what it could be and what it can’t. When facing the Women’s Pioneer Monument in Central Park, I cannot see it without seeing the appropriation of a Black woman’s body. I imagine Truth, given the choice, would get out of her seat and go stand firmly next to those who know her fight, Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and contemporary voices like Stacy Abrams and Park Canon. Her body long gone from Bergmann’s sculpture; viewers left to live with her absence.

Absence, like silence, can be fertile. Living in St. Louis taught me that. The city has a rich and transnational Black history that I could not find transcribed or recognizable in the public city landscape. Where is the Black history? That question inspired my graduate research. Where are we reflected in stone? Stumbling upon the history of red clay brick, learning that it was initially the enslaved labor, the labor of Black people, that dug the coal and clay that shaped the oldest and most celebrated structures in St. Louis. Until technology advanced, it was the labor of those who migrated north that hand-packed the bricks and layered them one by one to build the foundations. A walk down any St. Louis City street will show you, our history is not transcribed in stone, it is imbued in brick, and when the rising sun illuminates those bricks, we sing. When it rains, we cry. Absence led me to my critical study of the United States’ built environment, absence led me to the battle over monuments, and I hypothesize that within absence we will find our solutions. This battle has left many city squares with empty plinths and pedestals. Good. Now when we gather, without obstruction, we can see each other.