Artist Carrie Mae Weems discusses “Contested Sites of Memory” at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. (Photo by Keshia Eugene, courtesy Shore Art Advisory and the ICA)
Amid the Tyvek-shielded construction bustle and promotional signage of Scott’s Addition along North Arthur Ashe Boulevard, and beside a plumber’s advertisement, is a ghostly black-and-white image of a former statue’s plinth.
In capital letters, the caption poses a rhetorical thought: “What container, what marker, what monument can truly represent our collective voices.”
The big query is one of four billboards installed by internationally recognized multimedia artist Carrie Mae Weems. Two of them are digital and placed along the expressway that hugs Scott’s Addition. The intention is to break up the commercial come-ons.
Weems visited Richmond earlier in October. The event was a collaboration with social justice and equity organizations, the Emerson Collective and E Pluribus Unum. She spoke with EPU’s director, Scott Hutcheson, at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture and presented “Contested Sites of Memory,” a multimedia lecture with performance and music, at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Artist Esther Armah performs a spoken word piece accompanied by imagery titled "Look Up! On Monuments, Manufactured in Reverence & Emotional Justice" at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. (Photo by Keshia Eugene, courtesy Shore Art Advisory and the ICA)
One part of the ICA performance included a spoken word piece accompanied by various images of monuments during “Look Up! On Monuments, Manufactured In Reverence & Emotional Justice,” by Esther Armah.
Her dynamic presentation about the nature of monuments built to the memory of those who once held some form of power, and what kind of power it was, brought up a memory of the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial located on the grounds of the Virginia State Capitol. The monument is for Barbara Johns and those who struggled against racial segregation. At the 2008 dedication, a Black woman in the audience remarked that all of the other big monuments featured men high up on horses. “This one’s down on the ground,” she said, and not as a compliment. Somehow, the lofty goals of the memorialized individuals didn’t equate with the physicality of looking up.
But is the intention less worthy? The memorial was the last public commission of renown New York-based sculptor Stanley Bleifeld whose career in part involved fashioning figures of ordinary people cast in a heroic mode. Decades earlier he also created “Family at Play,” installed at the opening of Regency Square Shopping Center. A viewer indeed needed to look up, and follow with the eyes, since its initial installation displayed the sculpture on a rotating plate.
Weems observed during the recent discussion at the VMHC, “The distance between what you know and what you want is creativity.” She continued, “Where I see the most diversity in my own life is through museums and cultural spaces and listening to music and going to lectures and poetry readings, the most diverse crowds. There’s, I think, a space in our hearts and minds where these elements can bring us all together, in that moment, in that hour, in that place.”
The event earlier this month at the ICA, with its rousing music, directed by Craig Harris, featuring singer-musician Nona Hendryx and frequent collaborator musician-composer Jawwaad Taylor, wove elements of gospel, jazz, funk and contemporary sounds. Director Hassan Washington led the Destiny Community Church Choir. Together, these voices lifted and instruments creating evocations and colorations lifted up the audience and moved them to stand in appreciation.
Richmond isn’t a stranger to outdoor signage-as-art, ranging from Yoko Ono’s “FLY” series in 1996 to the 2010 Billboard Art Project helmed by David Morrison and Claire Accardo that claimed four pictorial representation spaces along the city’s ramps and highways.
Weems, too, has taken up the repurposing of these commercial elements for not only art’s sake, but to confront and provoke thought. But near Weems’ Leigh Street sign, atop a Summit Avenue building currently undergoing a refitting, is a piece that is now an artifact and a mirror by Richmond artist Ed Trask.
The piece that heralds Scott's Addition features a cityscape of powerlines, birds fluttering across a reddening dawn, and the downtown skyline, which accurately is behind the person looking, well, up at the art. Barely noticeable in the lower left corner is the logo of flamboyant developer Justin French, who took an interest in this corner of town when some people didn’t know what or where was a Scott’s Addition. His efforts became part of the first wave of warehouse reclamation and apartment building. French also demonstrated interest in street art and planned for an alley exhibition venue. French’s reach ultimately exceeded his grasp which landed him in legal trouble and, ultimately, prison.
And then there’s the name.
Scott’s Addition is named for the family of Dinwiddie County native and protean 19th century military leader Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott. These Richmond lands came down through inheritance and annexation.
None of the Scotts ever lived here.
During the 1940s-1950s, Scott's Addition was a neighborhood of working class families, churches, corner stores, a skating rink and baseball stadium and later speedway, Mooer's Field. The Addition could be a rough and tumble place, as recalled in a memoir, the aptly titled "Scott's Addition" by Kenneth Woodcock detailing what it was like growing up there. He recalled the neighborhood men who patrolled the streets toward dusk to threaten or beat up any non-white they found.
Weems is interested in memory and history and how the two interweave, and, importantly, who tells these stories and in what manner. “I’m raising questions about power,” she said, “I’m interested in power. The impact of power, on me, my family, my community.”
Around the time of the 2006 election cycle she assumed the guise of a sinister clown, part Charlie Chaplin’s “Great Dictator,” part The Joker, from the comics and films. She went around on trains selling hopes and dreams, Weems recalled, making a fool of herself while also, she explained, demonstrating the foolishness of the Electoral College turning "one man, one vote into a joke." Her “If I Ruled The World,” depicts this character’s contempt for the planet and all which rides on it.
Power can build and power can break. Which returns to her Leigh Street billboard question about the interpretive pliability of a physical object. In a city until lately filled with statues and remembrances of a war, the after effects of which divide the nation still, perhaps the pertinence of this question is about if or what can come next in terms of public memorial. Is permanency — or the perception of it — possible anymore?
In August 2017, Steve Coll, reflected in the New Yorker essay, “Things to Think About When Taking Down Statues,” “A democratic country’s arguments about public space, history, and art are necessarily continuous. One difference between democracies and dictatorships is that the constructing and revising of public spaces is not a propaganda opportunity for the ruler but a realm of democratic discourse, influenced by popular opinion and competitive electoral politics.”
Artist Carrie Mae Weems' temporary billboard installation in Jackson Ward (Photo by Harry Kollatz Jr.)
Such discourse is demonstrated by the Weems’ billboard in historic Jackson Ward, at the joining of the Chamberlayne Parkway and Jackson Street. The image is of a monumental portico under which stand two ranks of what appear to be Boy Scouts and between them an apparition of a woman in a long dress. They are all gazing into a misty distance. The capitalized question here is, “In a land of competing beliefs, ideas & voices, how do we honor what we most value?”
The sign stands next to the historic William Washington Browne House. Browne in 1881 founded the United Order of True Reformers, a financial and social organization dedicated to Black community uplift during a period of enforced racial division. The restored house and private residence is part of the Maggie Walker Historic Site.
In Weems’ ICA event, her “Leave! Leave Now!” video presentation and performance related the story of her grandfather Frank Weems, an Arkansas tenant farmer. His efforts in labor organization led to his violent beating. He was left for dead on a roadside but instead, lived. He fled to Chicago and the disappearance drew national attention. He never returned home. Weems later took up a lawsuit on her grandfather’s behalf charging Arkansas with crimes against humanity.
Weems’ billboards are arranged amid the blare and noise of our busy-ness, amid our public thoroughfares, and old neighborhoods. They mark the tendrils of memory and history through which, whether you are from here or come here or are passing through, we are all inextricably bound. It remains to be seen whether these big questions amid the world's larger noise promote in passersby any curiosity or investigative desire to interrogate our past to better understand our present.
But Weems' personal artistic quest continues, and questioning, always questioning. And like her, these days, we all have much to think about during our personal journeys between what we know and what we want.
The billboards will remain up through October's end.
