Statues Also Die at Real Art Ways

This story needs to be told because not only has social distancing and disconnecting from the world affected my life but others as well. Feeling like you’re boxed in because of the virus is something a lot of people can relate to but is not brought up enough in the media. We can feel as though we are always stuck behind a screen as we watch everyone experience going outside.

I made a small maquette of an Earth Goddess during the Me,Too events. She was ransacked and exploited, mined, on one side and natural on the other. I showed her at the CT Women Artists Members’ show at the New Britain Art League

My monument is meant to memorialize all the artists whose lives are dedicated to making art that no one will ever recognize or know about because fame eluded them; artists whose work is forgotten and discarded after they die. There’s obviously lots of them, probably myself included!

The political environment today I think can be compared to barnyard animals. Sheep tend to follow the crowd, not caring for consequences and pigs gobble up as much slop as they can without concern for others (greed). There needs to be a breath of fresh air in Washington because we keep getting these old animals who are either left or right.

This monument represents how at the darkest times of life, there’s a way out if you make one. It represents will power against all the odds.

Trees are all around us and connected to us but most people pay little attention to them. Along with the other life on the tree and the idea that this young tree will grow and be tall, this sculpture signifies healing and growth and how the integration and going back to nature will help us as humans heal and grow as well. Along with the sculpture, it would include planting several long lasting trees around that area to put the ideas into action.

Recently the federal government ended the 600 extra dollars in unemployment assistance. Since millions of Americans have lost their jobs due to COVID, there is going to be a huge increase in evictions over the next few months. This door represents the front door of the average American family, and what will happen if the government does not take more action.

The monument speaks to colorism specifically within the Black community that uniquely affects women such as job opportunities, dating, and representation. This story needs to be told because we are a collective who are purposely being downplayed and overlooked.

It’s the story of apparent differences bound by gravity on a mound of sand. People come and go leaving foot prints in the sand.

As a child, I was a big introvert, which meant I was my own company. I felt like a ghost or a fly on the wall, something barely acknowledged, yet tolerated. Nothing to pay any attention to or engage with in anyway; apologetic for my own presence.

The sculpture communicates what people go through in their minds, in their daily lives. This story matters because I believe that there isn’t enough awareness about mental health. The effects of dealing with mental health can put a toll on your mind. It can eat you or your loved ones alive, leaving you and your loved ones in a dark place.

To show the struggle the world had when COVID-19 became a pandemic and emphasize that we need to do everything we can to prevent the spread. Though not everyone is Catholic/Christian Jesus Christ is the most recognizable figure on earth and I feel using him helps get the point across to as many people as possible.

I propose a land monument to be created in 2040 A.D. to commemorate the end of our reliance on the petroleum industry. This land monument covers the entire oil terminal complex where New Haven Harbor’s oil storage tanks once stood full of home heating fuel: their circular footprints replaced with crop circle gardens sprouting massive flowering fields, native grasses, traditional vegetable gardens, or small forested plots. Plowshares Land Monument marks our transcendence over the violent, dark age of fossil fuel, turning swords and oil into plowshares and gardens.

A monument representing Dr. Babatunde Olatunji will further memorialize the legacy of an African American who was born and raised in Nigeria. His influences on the paths of musical giants including John Coltrane, Carlos Santana, and Mickey Hart are legendary. A tireless and vocal proponent of social justice and economic equality, Olatunji was a contemporary of Dr. Martin Luther King at Morehouse College, and he participated in the Freedom Marches.

This monument “architecture of sadness” is a huge curtain of recycled blue jeans, plaid flannel shirts, hoodies, jackets, and rope hanging from the ceiling to the floor in the middle of a enormous, open indoor space grounded by a pool of sleeping bags and quilts, all in various shades of blue. The materials for this installation were collected in 2019. This is a monument commemorating the terrible loss and sadness around the world due to the coronavirus. The physicality of the vast amount of discarded clothing symbolizing loss and its enormous weight represent the emotional toll of Covid 19. The pieces of clothing are suspended from metal hooks, crudely sewn together, stapled together, and pinned with quilting safety pins creating a heavy web and waterfall-like structure in which physical and emotional gravity are embodied due to the vast scale.

The story behind this monument targets mental health. It emphasizes the importance of resting your body and mind during stressful times. It helps to normalize the treatment of stress, anxiety, etc. in a easier way that more people might engage in.

What would it look like to construct a monument that touched upon our shared struggles and pain? What good would that serve? A lot, I would say as social scientists have long known that this act of awareness helps to build fundamental compassion and understanding. Finding a common place that lives in all of us as a way to build empathy for others and ourselves. Simply put, the sculptures pay tribute to this powerful universal and monumental theme of how we push through life and the burdens of our past.

The lightbulb would not have been viable had it not been for the inventions of Lewis Latimer, a black man who worked for Thomas Edison and lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He lived in a forgotten and once thriving community called Little Liberia- -that was established by freed slaves. The monument would be an industrial light balloon (see picture) tied to the ground by many ropes that represent all the families that lived in Little Liberia.

History is edited and recorded by the winners.

Against the concept of monumentality is the reality of the littoral zone—tidal spaces force us to recognize that nothing lasts forever, but at the same time, they encourage us to take solace in the fact that with constant change comes the grand opportunity to see ever anew. With its three sea-stone eyes and its base of three antique bottles (collected from Sandy Point Beach in West Haven), this monument is intended to catch the viewer’s gaze, only to cast it outward along a multiplicity of potential sightlines along the shifting landscape. As an infrastructure that floats in the tidal zone, it will both erode and accumulate, becoming a monument of transience as it is acted upon by the sea.

This monument represents our need to abolish the police, and completely rethink and redefine safety. After learning that the cops who killed Breonna Taylor will not be charged with murder, I’m trying to lean into imagining a world, or a space, where she wouldn’t have been killed. I think this monument would be important oasis because public spaces are over-policed in predominantly Black and Brown cities like Hartford. I hope its open walls allow it to spread and grow.

The Mohegan tribe continuously added stones to cairns in in the Northeast as a cultural practice for memorializing deaths, especially fatalities of battle. Colonialism, American genocide, took far too may indigenous lives, and called the land their own. The following monuments actively participate in an occupation of land which is not their own, perpetrating a false cultural understanding. Crude attempts have been made to recognize these atrocities, but the only monuments which achieve justice are the monuments that actively restore the culture we have long denied and reinscribe native history on the landscape.

This is a memorial to all those affected by gun violence. Viewers can walk through and around the structure and the intention is to create a contemplative, peaceful spot to remember lives lost.

This sculpture is a delicate representation of the blooming of equality. It incarnates Mother Nature that is constantly put to the test, shaking under the human touch. Made out of recycled metal mesh.

This monument features a large scale arm reaching out from the ground as if raising from the dead. With fingers stretching upwards and flowers blooming under its bandage, these elements serve as symbols of perseverance and growth in the most unlikely places. This story needs to be told because recognizing the beauty in our most difficult moments encourages the healing we need to keep moving forward.

In considering monuments, I am most taken with the phrase “who and what we remember”. When my father died my first thought was, “The world just lost a great man and didn’t even know it.” When I was eleven years old, on an ordinary afternoon, in a very modest midwestern suburb, I thought, “This day is so ordinary. There is nothing unusual about it. It is so ordinary that I will never remember it.” Because I had that thought, I have remembered that day forever. If I were to create a monument it would be to the small moments in life and the modest people who inhabit them. It resides in the heart and in the mind. The form and image are changeable. They change from person to person.

New Haven is unique in that we bring so many disciplines together— dance, music, art, social justice, environment, food security.

I have AIDS. 38 years. Faith kept me. “Dont Give Up” Image credit: “holding hands” by waithamai is licensed with CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

It’s time we care more about our human being brothers and sisters and their lives, over metal statues. Let’s plant trees, flowers, gardens, food where once were statues.

It’s a butterfly bush.

The U.S. is built on stolen, looted, colonized land by white oppressors. Thusly, all monuments to these oppressors should be taken down and replaced by the decisions of the indigenous, formerly and currently enslaved people, as well as other oppressed communities. The decisions should be entirely in the hands of Indigenous people, not colonizers or their decendants.

A beautifu sunset at the beach.

We need more play gore

we need graundan and froest for help the plant

Representing the passion of black arts (drawing, painting, dancing, acting) Image credit: “Hands” by Skeeze is licensed with CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

People of all colors, ages, religions. Don’t just assume you know where or what a person is going through based on appearance or character. Rich, poor, homeless, sheltered, black, white, yellow. WE ARE ALL GODS CHILDREN. WE ARE ALL HUMAN!

Represents suspicion and distrust of immigrants through telling the story of two Italian immigrants murdered by the state after being charged with sedition.

It takes a community Image credit: “lift” by pxfuel is licensed with CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

I Love line work, simplicity is bliss

It was Blm Because it made made after gorge Floyd good to help Blm

People be mean sometimes be nice to each others. People are bullying!

MLK is an important person to history and the world!

It represent that BLM and we are all beautiful 🙂

The grounds of the state house @ Columbia, SC have monuments to people like “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman + Strom Thurmand. I’m interested in what investment in heroes, especially such flawed ones, does to a culture and a state.

This monument addresses heroism in history and problem of putting people on pedestals. Thus a duality in Italy and the Italian sandwich captures that word with its many meats, cheeses, and toppings.

These are the two statues on either side of the federal courthouse in New Haven that held the trial of the Black Panthers in 1970. The statues of Cicero are emblematic of an event that is totally disassociated with the (non)meaning of the subject of deification.

Hope Springs Eternal is an ever-glowing firepit that, every hour or so, explodes in a spectacle that is part geyser, part Northern Lights. The community gathers around the base of the installation and anticipates the joyful eruption/disruption of color and light together. In addition to being fluid, lifeaffirming, and inclusive, the purge is a cleanse for the historic sins of the town on the very spot the statue of a controversial colonist stood, on the Palisado Green in Windsor’s Historic District.

Best monument to the legacy of Italian Americans in Connecticut would be a statue of Frank Pepe holding a pizza. The Italian food heritage is Italy’s best gift to America. I am not an artist so an artist would need to be found to create the monument.

The shape of Connecticut can be seen as an abstracted cross-section of the human brain, with the SW corner the medulla and spinal cord that links to the rest of the body. I would propose treating all of the streets of Connecticut as the winding squiggles that make up a typical rendering of the brain, tracing the following words in endless repetition upon them: no monuments: no remembering, no being, no forgetting, no past, no present, no future

It’s a statue of Isadora Duncan + represents freedom of movement.

What I propose is the Potential of Nothing, a monument pedestal in which nobody stands, a place to look, to imagine instead the potentiality of what could be there, the unnamable, and hidden to take place in the forefront of the mind. Sometimes the privacy to imagine whatever you wish and have the place to place it in the consciousness of the mind can be a revelatory exercise within itself. Maybe it’s because it’s okay to care about everybody and allow a space for radical imagination to take place, even for a moment. Maybe in these moments of unrestrained creativity we can see what is possible for the future.

This represents everybody, not just the people of Hartford but everyone who comes to visit as well. Now more than ever, we need a constant reminder that we are all apart of the same race, the human race. This monument will draw attention and also send a positive message to the community.

The monument represents those who are willing to open up their minds to greater things, knowledge is the “key”. The way I would tell the story is the more “knowledge” you gain the higher chances of you opening up more things what life has to offer.

Instead of celebrating a historic or political gure, this monument celebrates the everyday person, who by standing on the plinth and being commemorated by a photo, creates the image of change.

Everyone can have an equal say. No on is left out and no one is interrupted. We all coexist. We are all humans on earth. We are all one.

Specifically focused on the reputation of a town known for drugs, and the disproportionate toll it takes on less privileged people of color as well as all people.