Soldiers and Ghosts

May 26, 2023

The Valentine's ‘Monumental’ gives context to the nature and variety of Richmond's monuments

by Harry Kollatz Jr.

July 3, 2018

4:12 PM

The scaffolding erected for the installation of the Lee Monument; the statue was completed and unveiled in 1890. (Photo from the Cook Collection courtesy The Valentine)

Prior to barbecue and fireworks, you can visit The Valentine and imbibe of food for thought about our monuments and memorials.

The Valentine demonstrates once again its unerring good timing. While the keeper of Richmond's memory, the museum is a proponent of discussing how the present will be viewed from the future.

Whether hosting community conversations just when controversies are flaring up about neighborhood gentrification or transit, or giving perspective on the likelihood of widespread communicable disease at the beginning of flu season, The Valentine's timing is again apt with "Monumental: Richmond's Monuments (1607-2018)."

The exhibit — six months in the planning in response to the events in Charlottesville — opens on the Glorious Fourth.

And it's not all about those ones on Monument Avenue.

Richmond's first memorial, really, was a marker that Christopher Newport shoved into a now vanished islet probably beneath the Mayo's Bridge. Parahunt, a son — one of many children of the paramount Chief Powhatan — knew something was up. He didn't buy Newport's attempted explanation through translation that the joined wooden slats symbolized the union of their peoples, friendship. This may have constituted the first big lie told in Virginia. Newport and company scurried back to Jamestown, and decades passed before there was a permanent European settlement along the Falls of the James.

In 1907, amid the fever of recognizing the 1607 founding of Jamestown, a symbolic monument to the Newport Cross was installed on Gamble's Hill with a splendid view of the James River rapids and the belching smokestacks of Tredegar Iron Works. Industry formed as much a part of the scenery as trees and water in those days. But the peripatetic nature of the piece is such that perhaps they should’ve put casters underneath the heap of rocks surmounted by the cross. The cross now stands by the Canal Walk and the mural-ed remnants of the 12th Street Hydroelectric Plant. The memorial is now closer to where what it commemorates occurred.

Perhaps there is some cosmic justice at work here, because one of the city's newest monuments — dedicated in April — is a spiral sculpture and water piece, "Mantle," in a Capitol Square tribute to Native Virginians. The organic and contemplative piece is by Alan Michelson, a Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River. That work displaced the statue of Edgar Allan Poe. Thus Poe, in his memorialized posterity, as he often did in life, moved around. (One of several "Monumental" sub-themes is just how many of our statues have either caused or been displaced by shifting values of real estate).

"Monumental" surveys the great, the humble and poignant, and the planned and might-have-been.

Here, through photographs and video, are the recent Antony Tobias Mendez bronze of Maggie Lena Walker, the River Road bicycle memorial to Lanie Kruszewski, and the strong dignity of Paul DiPasquale's "The Headman" that commemorates the boatmen of the James River & Kanawha Canal, many of whom prior to the Civil War were enslaved, hired out or freed African-Americans.

Models for the Emancipation and Freedom Monument, due for Brown's Island, are situated by a monitor showing a drive down Monument Avenue. The female figure's arm is broken; this occurred when the pieces were touring the state.

And, in the "It Could’ve Been Worse" category, there is a jaunty, colorful sketch of a proposed full-on Beaux Arts Jefferson Davis memorial pavilion for Monroe Park. The soaring domed structure, replete with sconces for eternal flames, would’ve been a Confederate Pantheon complete with Davis’ dead body forever looked upon by Confederate state governors (many of whom either disliked or disregarded Davis). The money for that architectural gem instead went to Monument Avenue.

Here, too, are the instruments used by sculptor Edward V. Valentine. His work includes the Jefferson Davis figure on Monument Avenue. Here is a "maquette," or model for the Virginia statue at Gettysburg — or a version thereof. Curator David Voelkel reminds us that monuments are usually designed by committee. Frederick William Sievers, Richmond-based, Georgia-born and European-trained, at first thought about allegorical figures around the martial Robert E. Lee atop a pedestal. Instead, representatives of the soldiers were desired by those with the money.

Sievers created two quite different Monument Avenue statues of Matthew Fontaine Maury and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. The first with its globe resting on tumult and washed ashore people and livestock and the other ramrod-straight martial is an example of how one artist can approach different subjects.

"Monumental" enlivens what could’ve been a static show with kinetic energy provided by a video installation featuring the views of Dana Ollestad. Using both drone capability and an eye for detail, aspects of statuary and memorials that you pass by every day are revealed and made new. Voelkel observes that, in the case of Monument Avenue, actually getting to the statues can be a life-and-limb proposition. Traffic hurtles past, and Lee's grass medallion and Davis’ concrete apron aside, there's no way to approach and reflect on the statues aside from ambling up the median. "You can't see the reliefs of bats and fish on the Maury pedestal from your car," Voelkel says.

And finally, the category of Wouldn't That Have Been Awesome? The proposed memorial to "Southern women" in general and Confederate hospital matron Capt. Sally Tompkins in specific, to have been created in 1966 by surrealist Salvador Dalí. Alas, just think of the millions of potential tourist dollars lost by the short-sighted rejection of a 15-foot aluminum pinky balancing a mushroom cap, on which St. George is slaying the dragon of disease — which also reflected the logo of Reynolds Metals, whose aluminum would’ve been used. Capt. Sally is instead getting her place among others in the under-construction Virginia Women's Monument for Capitol Square.

"Monumental" is up through Jan. 20, 2019, and will have attendant programs. In this time of discussion about the meanings and matters of the city's monuments and memorials, you’ll have ample material for discussion after your visit.

by Harry Kollatz Jr.

July 3, 2018

4:12 PM