On Friday, MAN reported that the Central Indiana Community Foundation had pulled its support for the site of Fred Wilson’s site-specific E Pluribus Unum sculpture. CICF is the lead project funder. After Payne’s announcement on Friday, it remains to be determined whether or not Wilson will choose to move forward with the project.
In an interview with me, Payne couldn’t identify exactly what specific process led him to pull CICF’s support, but he referred to the mayor’s newfound lack of support for the project-site and to nebulous community feedback. Considering that there was an anti-E Pluribus Unum rally scheduled for Saturday — its organizers called it an “anti-slave rally” — it’s not difficult to connect-the-dots between Payne and ‘community feedback.’
So how did that rally go? I wasn’t there. But this picture of the rally turned up yesterday on Tumblr. Apparently in Indianapolis, which has a metropolitan population of 1,830,000, it took only about 50 people to scare off CICF and the mayor’s office from the Wilson project, thus putting America’s most exciting public art project on the endangered list. [Image via Tumblr user Richard McCoy.]
It seems to be an american thing, out of a population of 1,830,000, it took only 50 probably on the most part un-informed people to scare the B-jesus out of the CICF and the mayor’s office. This unfortunately is the case on the national level, just look at the media attention the unfortunate undereducated members of the “Tea Party” get for going against their own best interests. Go figure, only in america.
The location of that rally seems to be a good place to relocate the sculpture to. There seems to be an empty pedestal to the rear of the rally. Is it inscribed, or simply a plinth that was placed for a future work of art? I would have the flag face towards the building. Maybe it should be a figure with chains wrapped around its mind…
[...] delay in holding the promised meetings about the artwork allowed a small but vocal band of opponents to emerge in the summer of 2011, The ad hoc group that called itself [...]