Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

Just one day before a group calling itself Citizens Against Slave Image holds a rally to protest a proposed Fred Wilson sculpture in downtown Indianapolis, the project’s lead funder, the Central Indiana Community Foundation, has told MAN that it will no longer support the  project at its intended site. The move, which will be formally announced later today in a press release, puts the future of the project in doubt.

Wilson conceived the sculpture, titled E Pluribus Unum (renderings at right and below), as a site-specific artwork in response to a commission from the Indianapolis Cultural Trail. (For details on the artwork, the project, the site and Saturday’s rally, click here.) The site Wilson chose is on the plaza in front of Indianapolis’ City-County Building, near the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial, from which the Wilson appropriates the sculpture’s figure.

Payne said that CICF would still be willing to fund the project anywhere along the Indianapolis Cultural Trail.

“Fred mining a non-for-profit museum [for subject matter] is not the same as Fred mining works in public to put on public land,” Payne said. ” That this is public art makes it more complex than if he’s mining a museum, where a person can elect to go or not go.”

Payne said that he and Wilson spoke about other sites more than six months ago, but that he does not know what Wilson would think of moving the piece now. Payne added that he has not yet spoken with Wilson about CICF’s announcement, but that he hoped to talk with Wilson soon.

Wilson told MAN that he was deeply disappointed but indicated that he was not immediately prepared to walk away from the project.

“I have spent a long time trying to figure out a place  for the work that would have some fellowship to the [Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument] and also be within downtown,” Wilson said. “There really were no other great locations that I saw for this kind of thing, for this work along the trail. The siting I thought spoke well on many different levels. However, I am ultimately a very generous person and would like to still keep lines of communication open about the piece and not close the door on it by saying that [the City-County Building] was the only site possible. I’m open to conversations about it.”

While it’s possible that another funder could step forward to fund the work at its intended site, it’s not clear whether the city would be willing to continue with the City-County Building as the site. UPDATE, 3:22pm ET, 7/29: A spokesperson for Indianapolis mayor Greg Ballard said that the mayor was opposed to siting E Pluribus Unum at the City-County Building. “The mayor did encourage the CICF to move the sculpture from City-County Building property,” Ballard spokeseperson Marc Lotter said. “If [they] want to find a location on another part of the ICT for the artwork that would be their decision. They mayor felt that due to the controversy and some of the concerns that were brought up, using the City-County Building itself would be not be the best location.”

Wilson also sounded potentially willing to site the piece off of the Indianapolis Cultural Trail should he be unable to find a suitable ICT site.

“I assumed that if this piece was nowhere near the monument that it would fade into the background as [the figure on the monument] had for 100 years,” Wilson said. “That is a reason for having something else permanent, to think about the relationship between the past and now. So I’ll keep everything open until it’s clear that the work is compromised.”

Reaction from the arts community was swift.

“I’m disappointed in the immediate outcome but very much hope that the project will find a prominent place on the cultural trail,” Indianapolis Museum of Art director Max Anderson told MAN.

“Indianapolis is crazy not to go ahead with it,” said Los Angeles Times art critic and three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Christopher Knight. “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.”

ICT project manager and curator Mindy Taylor Ross also expressed frustration. “I have  been working with the Cultural Trail, the community and Fred Wilson for almost five years on this project and I am very disappointed to learn of this decision while on vacation with my family,” she said.

The extent of CICF’s commitment to the project has been in question for months. As I reported on MAN yesterday, nine months ago CICF president Brian Payne said that his organization planned to hold a series of public meetings in an effort to foster dialogue about the project and build consensus. Despite a$50,000 display of public support for the project (and the public forums) from the Joyce Foundation, CICF has held no public meetings.

Still, Payne emphasized that CICF reached its decision based on input from the community.

“I’m in conversation with lots of people, all the time,” he said. “It hasn’t been as all-conclusive about the work, but I’m in conversations with lots of people, including mayor Ballard, and it seems as if the location is defining the conversation in a negative way. It seemed like it was better to go ahead and eliminate the location as a part of the conversation because it was clear to me as a result of this community process that it was not going to end up at that location. I’m very confident about that. It’s not like we’re going to hear a big rallying cry of, ‘Why didn’t you put it at the City-County Building?’ So we said, ‘Why don’t we take that off the table and talk about the piece somewhere else?’

Payne said that CICF would move forward with its plans to instigate community conversations about the piece, but did not specify a timeline for when they would happen.

When I last reported on America’s most interesting public art proposal, Fred Wilson’s E Pluribus Unum in Indianapolis, the project was stuck in neutral.

It still is — and as a result of the apparent inability of the project’s supporters and funders to move forward with their own plans, opponents of the Wilson project are attempting to seize  the initiative with a potentially inflammatory new campaign that refers to E Pluribus Unum a “slave statue” and to E Pluribus Unum’s alleged racial divisiveness. The group, which calls itself Citizens Against Slave Image  is planning an “anti-slave rally” against the project this Saturday.

Wilson is one of America’s most-honored artists. Typically his work uses installations of pre-existing objects to raise new questions about race-driven historical narratives — or to make points about how those narratives are formed. In 1999 he was awarded a MacArthur ‘genius’ fellowship. In 2003 he represented the U.S. at the Venice Biennale. He is a trustee at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

In 2009 an 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 [renderings above and left, via the ICT], would reproduce that figure isolated and relocated it from its position on the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument. Wilson would also remove 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 place a flag that celebrates the African Diaspora. Wilson’s sculpture would be visible from the existing memorial, thus pointedly critiquing its paternalism. The project’s funder would be the Central Indiana Community Foundation, a major local philanthropic organization with $600 million in assets. According to CICF’s website, only one of its 19 trustees is African-American.

What appears to be a small group of Indianapolis residents opposes the artwork so vociferously that the CICF has been paralyzed to the point of inaction, unwilling to proceed with the project. Nine months ago, CICF president Brian Payne told MAN that his organization planned to hold a series of public meetings in an effort to foster dialogue about the project and build consensus. Despite a $50,000 display of public support for the project from the Joyce Foundation, CICF has held no meetings since Payne discussed CICF’s public meetings plan with MAN. Mindy Taylor Ross, the public art coordinator for the Indianapolis Cultural Trail told me that she hopes that the group launches meetings early this fall, a full year after Payne first announced plans for them.

Into that void has stepped the apparently ad-hoc Citizens Against Slave Image, which has created a website called “1 Slave is Enough.” CASI has used the extended period of CICF/ICT inaction to organize opposition to Wilson’s artwork and will hold an “anti-slave rally” at the state capital building on Saturday morning. [The group's flyer for the event is at right.] According to CASI’s web page, State Rep. William Crawford, the ranking minority member on the Indiana House’s Ways and Means Committee, will be among the attendees. (Crawford represents a district several miles away from where the Wilson would be installed.) The group’s website describes its website and mission as:

“dedicated, first and foremost to stopping the erecting of another slave monument in Indianapolis’ public space. We are dedicated to preserving the dignity of every citizen in our society. This is not a black versus white issue. It is a HUMAN DIGNITY issue.

The Soldiers and Sailors Monument [sic], located on Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis already displays a ‘freed’ slave in a humiliated position. The creators of this website declare that one slave image in Indianapolis’ public space is enough. We are oppossed to the plans to recreate another slave monument as our city’s only testimony to African American life and achievement in our great city of Indianapolis.

No where in Indianapolis is any other racial, ethnic or culture being depicted in a negative fashion. Additionally, we strongly believe that there is no “cultural” value to slavery.”

Elsewhere on the website, the group refers to Wilson as a “proposed slave image,” even though the figure is Wilson proposes to use is a representation of a freedman. Emails and Facebook posts promoting the rally have been distributed by Donna Stokes-Lucas, the former owner of an Indianapolis bookstore and gallery. The emails list Michael “Mikal” Saahir, imam at the Nur-Allah Islamic Center of Indianapolis as a contact. (Neither Stokes-Lucas nor Saahir had replied to emails from MAN as of publication time.)

Saahir also published an op-ed in the Indianapolis Recorder, the city’s African-American newspaper in June, in which he described E Pluribus Unum as a “slave statue” that “continues to divide Indianapolis along racial lines, not unite us.” However, a recent discussion of the artwork on Indianapolis’ most popular African-American talk radio program, hosted by Amos Brown, featured at least as many African-Americans calling in to support the artwork as to oppose it. That program aired in January. UPDATE: Amos Brown & Co. also discussed the work on Wednesday. [Image: Wilson at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument, via the ICT.]

A webpage with details of Saturday’s rally says that CASI feels that “the city of Indianapolis should not be in the business of promoting and erecting any negative images of its citizens, even for the sake of ‘artistic expression,’ particularly those citizens who have been historically and intentionally disenfranchised and oppressed. [Ed.: Indianapolis is not a funder of the proposed artwork. However, the plaza in front of the City-County Building is the proposed site.] We believe there is nothing positive about the institution of slavery!”

Neither does Wilson.  In an interview with MAN in October, 2010, Wilson expressed surprise that his artwork was being described as depicting African-American culture in a negative fashion or that it could be construed as saying anything positive about slavery.

“It’s out there in public and people can interpret it in the way they will and often without any mediation, which is really great,” Wilson told me. “But on the other hand, people are bringing different understandings of art and its forms to it, so one has to be very responsible with that idea. But given that, for me it’s quite amazing that some people couldn’t get past the image of this freed slave as a slave. I thought that by taking him out of context, he became a man and became something else other than just what was placed on him by the tropes of being in the monument.”