Defunct Monuments
In support of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture's 2018 national day of action #Revolution of Values, I made three 'postcards' of defunct monuments. They refer to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s April 4, 1967 Riverside Speech when he said,
[W]e as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
They are influenced by my memory of kudzu consuming all sorts of man-made structures in Mississippi when I was working there in 2009. Soon after I made these, a group of artists from Charlottsville, VA, contacted me to ask if they could use “Defunct Monument I – Racism” as a model for an activist campaign they’d imagined. This led to the “Kudzu Project,” who’s members have been covering Confederate statues with hand-knitted kudzu as a way of symbolizing those monuments roots in a racist ideology.
The series continued in 2021 with the addition of Defunct Monument IV - Nationalism.