The very public debate over Fred Wilson’s Indy sculpture

originally posted 10/27/10 in Modern Art Notes

Art-focused Journalism by Tyler Green

The work Fred Wilson proposed for the Indianapolis Cultural Trail, E Pluribus Unum, takes a cue from Indianapolis’ huge downtown Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument ( image at right via Flickr user OZinOH), a neo-classical enormity designed by German architect Bruno Schmitz and completed in 1901. One of the figures on Schmitz’s memorial is an ex-slave, as symbolized by the African-American man’s bare torso and the apparently recently broken chain and shackles. (The Col. Eli Lilly Civil War Museum is in the base of the memorial. It chronicles Indiana’s Civil War history.)

Wilson proposed to create a sculpture out of Indiana limestone that would isolate that figure, mostly remove the signifier of bondage and to slightly him. Into his figure’s outstretched arm Wilson would place a flag that represents the African Diaspora. Wilson’s sculpture would be visible from the existing memorial. (This excellent short video features Wilson presenting and explaining the project. The proposed flag is below.)

As I noted this morning, initial public reaction to Wilson’s artwork was muted. The Indianapolis Recorder, Indy’s black newspaper, published what was by all accounts a thorough, considered story on Wilson and his sculpture in early September. (The story is no longer online.) The story was apparently mild, but the reaction to it was not.

On Sept. 16, the Recorder published an inflammatory letter from former Indiana Public Schools teacher and board member Leroy Robinson. In his letter, Robinson excoriated the project. “[T]his is not the 19th century and the African-American community in Indianapolis does not need another ‘image’ in downtown Indianapolis to remind us of how downtrodden, beat down, hapless, and submissive we once may have been,” Robinson wrote. “We don’t need any more images of lawn jockeys, caricatures… no more buffoonery, no more shuckin’ and jiven’, and no more ape-ish looking monuments.” Along with the letter the Recorder ran a picture of a lawn jockey, which likely confused readers because the image was unrelated to anything Wilson has proposed.

“We’ve been working for four weeks to correct misinformation, to re-publish renderings,” Indianapolis Cultural Trail curator and public art project coordinator Mindy Taylor Ross told me on the phone last week.

Wilson understands Robinson’s position — he just disagrees with it. “Images are obviously at the heart of racism because we look different,” he told me, also in a phone conversation. “So the manipulation of images has been a part of the bone of contention for a long, long time in the African-American community because it’s been kind of controlled by others.” Read more