Monday’s Monument: Flame of Compassion, Denver, Colorado
The “Flame of Compassion” is a aeolian wind harp which is in constant harmonic communication with the elemental heartbeat of nature. This sculpture stands as a metaphor for the constant vigilance and genuine intent held to create Harmony as the preferred outcome in...
Monday’s Monument: Jan Karski Statue, New York, New York
Jan Karski was a World War II Polish resistance fighter who risked his life to bring firsthand reports of the Holocaust to the Allies. This statue of him is on the southeast corner of Madison Avenue & 37th St., in front of the Polish Consulate. This bronze statue...
Monday’s Monument: La Rogativa, San Juan, Puerto Rico
La Rogativa is a famous bronze statue located in the Plazuela de la Rogativa on Caleta de las Monjas near La Puerta de San Juan. Derived from the verb rogar, meaning to plea or to supplicate, a rogativa is a procession making a plea to God for help. British troops,...
Since May 2015, every Monday morning I have been posting a little essay about a peace or social justice monument. For more than a decade, ever since the peaceCENTER was contracted by a national peace & human rights group to develop a workshop exploring strategies for creating memorials about acts of violence and injustice that did not glorify the bloodshed, we have pondered the relationship between the landscape and civic memory.
“I would rather take care of the stomachs of the living
than the glory of the departed in the form of monuments.”
Alfred Nobel
As we showcase these monuments we hope you will join us in this exploration. For now, we’re concentrating on publicly accessible outdoor works. Some are grassroots and homespun; others, more complicated in their funding and execution. They all have a story to tell and we can learn from all of them.
Monday’s Monument: Vernon Dahmer Statue, Hattiesburg, Mississippi
The bronze sculpture, created by artists Vixon Sullivan and Ben Watts, was commissioned in 2018 by the Forrest County Board of Supervisors to honor the man who was killed for trying to get blacks registered to vote. It was dedicated in a plaza outside the courthouse...
Monday’s Monument: Sülh Göyərçini Bidəsi, Sumgayit, Azerbaijan
The peace dove monument in Nasimi Culture and Leisure Park has become the symbol of the city of Sumgayit. Made of solid concrete, it was designed by the Chief Artist of Sumgayit Vagif Nazirov and architect A. Guliyev. The sculpture was installed in 1978. The...
Monday’s Monument: Messenger of Peace, Manchester, England
The Messenger of Peace sculpture was the winner of a 1986 competition to celebrate the status of Manchester as the world's first nuclear free city. This bronze statue, created by sculptor Barbara Pearson, was the winning entry and it showed a woman with doves around...
Monday’s Monument: Embodied, Los Angeles, California
Unveiled in October, 2014, this statue, created by Los Angeles artist Alison Saar, is intended to exemplify the spirit and values of justice represented in the roles of District Attorney’s Office and the Sheriff’s Department, the tenants of the recently renovated Hall...
Monday’s Monument: Unwavering Courage in the Pursuit of Freedom, Wilmington, Delaware
Dedicated in 2012, this scene embodies the perseverance and sacrifice of Harriet Tubman and those who assisted her in leading enslaved African Americans out of the South, a dangerous, clandestine operation known as the Underground Railroad. This monument includes...
Monday’s Monument: Resolution, Nicosia, Cyprus
Resolution (1995), by Cypriot sculptor Theodoulos Grigoriou, reiterates the faith of the city of Nicosia and its inhabitants to human rights as the only precondition to peace and freedom. On the round cement base, part of the text of the Universal Declaration of Human...
Monday’s Monument: Bukit Kasih, Kanonang Village, Indonesia
Bukit Kasih translates as Peace Hill or Hill of Love. It was built in 2002 as a spiritual center where religious followers from various faiths can gather, meditate and worship side by side "at the lush and misty tropical hill." The people of north Sulawesi Island...
Monday’s Monument: Mustafa Kamâl Atatürk Statue, Washington, D.C.
In Turkish, the phrase "Yurtta sulh, cihanda sulh" -- "Peace at Home, Peace in the World" -- was first said by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on 20 April 1931 to the public during his tours of Anatolia (aka Asia Minor.) This stance was later integrated and implemented as the...
Monday’s Monument: Monumento del Primer Grito de la Independencia de Centro América, San Salvador, El Salvador
A year after the more famous Mexican Grito de Dolores on September 16, 1810, Central America also shouted for freedom and liberty, in El Salvador. This monument marks that occasion, on November 5, 1811. Manuel Jose Arce proclaimed in a speech in what is now Libertad...
Monday’s Monument: The Petrified, Geneva, Switzerland
Just off the United Nations Square, up a small rise, is the Musee International de la Croix-Rouge et du Croissant-Rouge (the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum.) As you walk up the ramp to the museum entrance, you encounter a group of shrouded, life-size...
Monday’s Monument: Tolerance Monument, Hilversum, The Netherlands
This statue is on the station square in Hilversum, a city between Utrecht and Amsterdam. The statue is named "Monument for Tolerance," but it is popularly called "the hands."The monument of concrete and glass was created by Edo van Tetterode. It is of two stone hands...
Monday’s Monument: Irish Famine Memorial, Providence, Rhode Island
The Irish Famine Memorial, along the Riverway, was dedicated on November 17, 2007. A bronze statue of three Irish figures anchors one end of the site, with a walkway incorporating memorial bricks and flagstones leading to the memorial wall. There, a narrative plaque...
Monday’s Monument: Mary Barbour Statue, Glasgow, Scotland
Mary was a key figure in the 1915 Rent Strikes, which exposed and protested against landlords who took advantage of the wartime economy to hike up rents for workers, evicting those who could not pay. The protests forced a change in the law with the introduction of the...
Monday’s Monument: Martin Luther King Memorial Cube, New York, New York
William Tarr’s 1974 weathering Cor-Ten steel black sculpture stands atop the plaza of Martin Luther King Jr. High School down the street from Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side at 66th and Amsterdam. All four sides of this cube include important dates in the life...
Monday’s Monument: Bury the Hatchet, San Antonio, TX
This engraved stone is embedded in the pavement in front of the Bexar County Court House in Main Plaza / Plaza de las Islas. It says: Captain Toribio de Urrutia and Fray Santa Ana now determined to do their best to establish a permanent and lasting peace with the...
Monday’s Monument: Door of Equality (La Puerta de Igualdad), San Antonio, Texas
The Door of Equality (La Puerta de Igualdad) is the latest gateway sculpture by the artist Sebastian and is a gift to the City of San Antonio from Fundación Sebastian and Siempre México to commemorate the city's rich civil and human rights history. The sculpture...
Monday’s Monument: Labyrinth Gateway, UTSA, San Antonio, Texas
Located on the southwest corner of the University of Texas, San Antonio Downtown Campus. “Labyrinth Gateway” is a suspended sculpture hanging from cables mounted to pylons surrounding a small courtyard. The labyrinth represents a metaphor in the writings...
Monday’s Monument: Healing Hands, Ennis, Ireland
The limestone sculpture of two humans hands by Shane Gilmore were placed on the grounds of Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral in May, 2008. The hands were dedicated to several concepts as shown on the plaques below the sculpture: Hands sculptured by Shane Gilmore Hands...
Monday’s Monument: Handspan, Wanganui, New Zealand
Handspan is a large work of art, almost 20 meters in diameter, which rises in a double spiraled pathway to a height of about 3 meters with walls on each side, covered with some 4,000 terracotta hand casts made from hand prints of community members of all ages (from 3...
Monday’s Monument: Hand of Peace, Walnut Creek, California
“Hand of Peace” by Benjamin Bufano, is made of copper, mosaic and stained glass. The 30-foot-tall open-hand figure has stained glass around the fingers and a mural in the middle of the palm featuring a group of children. Above them, an inscription reads, “The children...
Monday’s Monument: Memorial to the Murdered Members of the Reichstag, Berlin, Germany
This memorial is located in front of the Reichstag building and commemorates the 96 members of the Germany's last democratically elected pre-war parliament who were murdered by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945, in concentration camps. In German, Denkmal zur Erinnerung...
Monday’s Monument: Memorial To Beacon Fires, Mt Maunganui, New Zealand
To celebrate peace at the end of World War I, the Boy Scouts proposed lighting beacon fires across the British Empire. The idea was inspired by the words of Sir Edward Grey on August 3, 1914, who looked out of his window in London at dusk and remarked: “The lamps are...
Monday’s Monument: Hand of Peace, Barnard’s Green, England
Rose Garrard was commissioned in 1998 to create this sculpture to draw attention to an existing commemorative stone on a war memorial site in Barnard’s Green, which was neglected and regularly vandalized. She researched and developed the designs in consultation with...
Monday’s Monument: A Grande Mão, São Paulo, Brazil
"The Big Hand" was designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer in 1989 as the focal point of the the Latin America Memorial (in Portuguese, Memorial da América Latina), a cultural, political and leisure complex. This large hand is perhaps a nod to his mentor Corbusier’s open...
MONUMENT (n.)
late 13c., “a sepulchre,” from Old French monument “grave, tomb, monument,” and directly from Latin monumentum “a monument, memorial structure, statue; votive offering; tomb; memorial record,” literally “something that reminds,” from monere “to admonish, warn, advice,” from PIE *moneyo-, suffixed (causative) form of root *men- (1) “to think.” Sense of “structure or edifice to commemorate a notable person, action, or event” first attested c. 1600.
Ten Questions to Ask at a Historic Site
In his book Lies Across America, Professor James Loewen posed these ten questions to ask at a historic site.
1. When did this location become a historic site? (When was the marker or monument put up? Or the house interpreted?) How did that time differ from ours? From the time of the event or person interpreted?
2. Who sponsored it? representing which participant groups’s point of view? What was their position in the social structure when the event occurred? When the site went “up”?
3. What were the sponsor’s motives? What were their ideological needs and social purposes? What were their values?
4. What is the intended audience for the site? What values were they trying to leave for us, today? What does the site ask us to go and do or think about?
5. Did the sponsors have government support? At what level? Who was ruling the government at the time? What ideological arguments were used to get the government acquiescence?
6. Who is left out? What points of view go largely unheard? How would the story differ if a different group told it? Another political party? Race? Sex? Class? Religious group?
7. Are there problematic (insulting, degrading) words or symbols that would not be used today, or by other groups?
8. How is the site used today? Do traditional rituals continue to connect today’s public to it? Or is it ignored? Why?
9. Is the presentation accurate? What actually happened? What historical sources tell of the event, people, or period commemorated at this site?
10. How does the site fit in with others that treat the same era? Or subject? What other people lived ad events happened then but are not commemorated? Why?
Want to learn more about monuments? Check out my bookshelf.
Ready to Kill
by Carl Sandburg (Chicago Poems, 1916)
TEN minutes now I have been looking at this.
I have gone by here before and wondered about it.
This is a bronze memorial of a famous general
Riding horseback with a flag and a sword and a revolver on him.
I want to smash the whole thing into a pile of junk to be hauled away to the scrap yard.
I put it straight to you,
After the farmer, the miner, the shop man, the factory hand, the fireman and the teamster,
Have all been remembered with bronze memorials,
Shaping them on the job of getting all of us
Something to eat and something to wear,
When they stack a few silhouettes
Against the sky
Here in the park,
And show the real huskies that are doing the work of the world, and feeding people instead of butchering them,
Then maybe I will stand here
And look easy at this general of the army holding a flag in the air,
And riding like hell on horseback
Ready to kill anybody that gets in his way,
Ready to run the red blood and slush the bowels of men all over the sweet new grass of the prairie.
Want more poems? Check out my monumental poetry section.