New Sculpture is Taking Shape Where Statue of Confederate President Once Stood
NEW ORLEANS — Watch this space. As Canal Street commuters have probably noticed, something’s going on at the site of the former monument to Jefferson Davis on the Norman C. Francis Parkway neutral ground. An avalanche of startlingly scarlet, plastic foam blocks are piled on the steps of the stone platform where a statue of the president of the Confederacy once stood.
The eye-catching, unfinished conceptual sculpture, which is surrounded by a translucent fence, is part of a future multi-part public artwork titled “Abolitionist Playground” by kai lumumba barrow. The artist does not capitalize their name.
The statue of Davis was declared a public nuisance, craned away, and placed in storage indefinitely in 2017. The parkway where the statue stood was formerly named for the Confederate president, but was renamed in 2021 in honor of Dr. Norman C. Francis, former president of Xavier University.
The plinth that once supported the Confederate monument has been used repeatedly by artists as a historically resonant context for alternative public art. Notably, in 2021 Demond Melancon, Big Chief of the Young Seminole Hunter Black Masking Indian tribe, displayed a beaded and feathered suit at the site. Later that year, Rontherin Ratliff and the Level Artists Collective produced a towering sculpture of an African drum being held aloft by human figures, which was installed where Davis once stood.
According to information found via QR code on signs near the sculpture, barrow’s artwork is meant to call attention “to sites of carceral control while engaging counter-narratives of play and creative imagination.” The finished project “will consist of a series of sculptural installations that give physical form to the institutional ramifications of racism and modes of survival and resistance.”
The jarringly colored installation at Canal Street is related to the clusters of salvaged doorways, fences and shutters a few blocks farther downtown on the parkway that appeared earlier in the summer, also by kai lumumba barrow. Barrow’s work is one of three public installations being sponsored by Prospect NOLA, New Orleans’ international art festival. Prospect will provide each of the projects with between $40,000 and $50,000.
A Prospect exhibit in 2021-22 included the installation of a water goddess sculpture by a Black female artist at the site of the former monument to Confederate General Robert E. Lee, which became a public sensation.
Based on the materials used to produce the “Abolitionist Playground” artworks so far, the installation will probably not be permanant.
The Prospect management has declined to be interviewed or to comment in detail on the ongoing installations.
For more information visit the Prospect website.
–nola.com
