Monuments to Women. Seen Any Lately?

I lecture on Chicago’s public art (and on public art in general). Monuments are necessarily part of the conversation, though generally speaking, the making of representational monuments became passé in the 1950s. However, prior to that all of the commemorative monuments in Chicago were to dead white men, several of them on horses (they were wartime heroes, of course). Even when representational monuments appeared after the 1950s, they were still of white men, though after a time men of color were commemorated. In fact, one such commemoration of African Americans occurred much earlier, in 1927, when Leonard Crunelle’s The Victory Monument, known generally as “The Doughboy,” was dedicated. It honors the Illinois National Guard Eighth Regiment, an African-American unit that served in France during World War I. It’s located on King Drive at 35th Street.

Just north of “The Doughboy” on King Drive is Alison Saar’s 1996 tribute to the mass movement of African-Americans from the south to northern cities, Monument to the Great Northern Migration.

In representational sculpture, African-Americans and women, though, were still not individually recognized until very recently. Women had, of course, been the subjects of sculpture for centuries and in Chicago since very early on. From such creations as Lorado Taft’s 1913 The Fountain of the Great Lakes (Art Institute of Chicago south garden) to John Storrs’ 1928 Ceres (1) atop the Board of Trade Building to Dessa Kirk’s 2005 Magdalene (Congress Parkway at Michigan Avenue), women were anonymous figures in sculpture in Chicago.

Two things conspired to spur my writing about this.

First, at one of my recent public art lectures an audience member chided me about my not mentioning sculptures of women or, for that matter, by women. I agreed that I need to include public art works by women in Chicago (there are quite a few). I also averred, gnostically, that there are no statues or monuments OF women in the city – this while standing next me was friend and sculptor Margot McMahon, whose 2018 bust of poet Gwendolyn Brooks was unveiled in Chicago at Gwendolyn Brooks Park in North Kenwood (4542 S Greenwood Ave.).

There are, by the way, now TWO monuments to women in the city. The other is a bust of Georgiana Rose Simpson, a philologist and the first African-American woman to receive a PhD from the University of Chicago and one of the first in the United States. The latter is not, as we define it, “public” art, since it resides in a private space at University of Chicago. As for sculptures (or art in other media) by women, there are many. But that’s not the subject of this blog entry.

My second spur was an op-ed article by Gail Collins in the March 29, 2019 New York Times, “Where the Girls Aren’t: Let’s have a statute of limitations on statues.” (2) In it Collins notes that the dearth of monuments to women is a country-wide phenomenon, but that New York City is planning to rectify its monumental gender gap: “New York is trying to do something about its wildly man-centric population of public monuments, and City Hall has commissioned five female statues, one for each borough.” She goes on to note that one of them commemorates Elizabeth Jennings, “a Manhattan [African American] schoolteacher in the years before the Civil War,” who integrated New York City trolleys – in 1854! The women also to be recognized include Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm and singer Billie Holiday.

It’s unfortunate that our rather sudden general consciousness about the lack of statues to women comes so late. For one thing, sculptors aren’t creating “statues” much any more; they’re creating abstract sculpture that is not representational. For another, monuments in our time tend to try to get to the essence of persons or places or events symbolically or ironically (yes, I realize that’s a generalization, but it’s a useful one). While, for example, we certainly do have representational memorials in, say, Washington, DC, perhaps the most memorable of the sculptures is a wall – the Vietnam Memorial. True, sculptors like Margot McMahon do lovingly get to the essence of their subjects with figural works that are, in very interesting ways, not of the “heroic” ilk of past memorials (see the pensiveness of Ms. Brooks). It’s highly unlikely that future monuments to women will see them staring meaningfully into the distance, mounted on horses, with swords held high.

Will we see an outpouring of sculptural tributes to women? Possibly, even likely. But I’m willing to bet that, given the change in artistic sensibilities since the early 1900s, we’re likely to have works that express the memory of notable women in different, deeper ways: art that probes the work they did, the events they centered, their cultural importance. Just a guess. But I’ll live with it.

NOTES

(1) For more information on John Storrs’ Ceres, see my blog entry at https://www.edmcdevitt.org/john-storrs-ceres-and-the-model-who-wasnt/
(2) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/opinion/women-statues.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

© Edmund J. McDevitt
March, 2019