Central Indiana Community Foundation kills Fred Wilson project

December 13, 2011/Modern Art Notes/Art-focused Journalism by Tyler Green

The Central Indiana Community Foundation announced today that it has terminated Fred Wilson’s E Pluribus Unum project. The proposed sculpture, considered by some critics the most significant public art work proposed in America in many years, had long been on life-support.

The backstory: In 2009 a CICF-funded Indianapolis civic organization and project called the Indianapolis Cultural Trail – a pedestrian/cycling path that connects far-flung Indianapolis neighborhoods – commissioned Wilson to create a public artwork. Wilson, who describes himself as being of “African, Native American, European and Amerindian descent,” proposed an artwork that took as its point of departure the city’s Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, a 30-story-tall, neo-classical enormity located at the geographic midpoint of Indianapolis. Designed by German architect Bruno Schmitz, it was erected in 1901-02. One of the figures on the memorial is an African-American man, apparently a former slave (as symbolized by his muscular, bare torso and by the way he is holding a recently broken chain and shackles). Indianapolis has the second-most public monuments of any American city, but according to Wilson this figure is the only African-American depicted in any of them.

Wilson’s proposed sculpture, titled E Pluribus Unum [rendering above via the ICT], would have reproduced that figure isolated and relocated it from its position on the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument. Wilson would also have removed the signifiers of human bondage, resulting in his literally and figuratively freeing the African-American figure from references to slavery. Into the figure’s outstretched arm, the arm that the figure uses to reach up toward the white man on the monument, Wilson would have placed a flag that celebrated the African Diaspora. Wilson’s sculpture would have been visible from the existing memorial, thus pointedly critiquing its paternalism.

This past summer, CICF and Indianapolis mayor Greg Ballard announced that they would no longer support citing the sculpture there and the project entered several months of limbo. In the immediate wake of that decision, Wilson initially told MAN he was unsure of whether he was willing to move forward with the project at another site, but in late September he said he’d try to work with CICF on a new location.

“Indianapolis is crazy not to go ahead with it,” Los Angeles Times art critic and three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Christopher Knight said in July. “Wilson is a first-rate artist. Not only is this one of the most provocative ideas he’s come up with, it’s one of the most compelling ideas for a public art project that I’ve encountered in a very long time.” Read more. And remarks from Fred Wilson.