Kill yr idols

The Complicated, Yet Undeniable Power of Sculpture.

In the past month, around the world, we have seen an unprecedented number of public sculptures toppled by the social justice movement or preemptively removed by municipalities, often citing issues of safety.  They are often not “removed”, just “being stored”—into the void.

As a sculptor, watching these memorials come down in shaky handheld mobile video, I experience a reflex action akin to a hangnail or toothache, I wince—it’s extremely difficult to watch.

The hundreds, if not thousands of hours of work that goes into modeling pieces of this scale, months or years spent with the form, you build a kinship, an understanding.

One would be remiss to classify these works of art as mere statues or forms.  They are sentinels, stylites, beings above the horizon, venerated. Often astride a plinth larger than a prison cell and 10 ft aloft, higher than any fence we can build legally, unapproachable.

They are also political, we should not lose sight of the issue at hand—Police Brutality—that is bringing these protestors together. I also will not be broaching the ‘historical value’ position here, whatever its debatable merits.

If you have never been suspiciously followed around a store, stopped on the street, or had to get into the back of a squad car in handcuffs (not easy) at no fault of your own? It may be difficult to truly understand these protests. Has anyone ever carefully asked—“What are you?”.

I remember as a child watching my father, an immigrant, as he methodically creased every other bill he received from the ATM, he told me a story about how my grandfather, an immigrant, always kept a one hundred dollar bill hidden away in his wallet so the police couldn’t pick him up off the street for vagrancy in the 1960’s.

They are mechanisms of control: profiling, policing, and sometimes public sculpture.

My first memorable experience of sculpture was fortunately a positive one, asides from it’s martial tone perhaps. It was the Polish national hero Tadeusz Kościuszko astride a horse. A Polish hero for a Polish neighborhood, after 70 years it’s mostly Mexican now, I wonder what it means to the neighborhood kids now.

It was the only thing in the park 4 blocks from my house that wasn’t a tree or building. I remember being transfixed by his sword—swords are often a hit with children, who doesn’t want to be a pirate at some point. Recently his memorial in Washington D.C. was vandalized [1].

At Fifteen, I had the great fortune of having a public sculptor move into a building on the corner of my block. She had put a few of her massive works in progress in the large storefront windows of the edifice stopped me in my tracks. Seeing them in a building, accessible, possible—being made—it lit a fire in me. I sped home and nervously wrote a letter, that evening I slid it through the mail slot. It was after my two paper routes, but I will always think of it as my first job, it was instrumental in developing my yearning to become an artist, she always has impeccable advice—I now knew it was was possible.

photo credit Bethany Guggenheim

In New Mexico, you take the Taos “Low Road” from Santa Fe to get to my house. It’s a hard stretch punctuated with incredibly painted and weather worn Mesas, the Pueblos Casinos, and that big southwest sky. Shortly after passing Ohkay Owingey; a pueblo that became the the site of the ‘first’ Spanish capital city (San Juan de los Caballeros) in what we now refer to as the “Lower 48” [2]. As you drive through Alcalde, on the eastern frontage stands the site of a county building that was originally christened the Oñate Monument and Visitor Center in 1991, the sculpture was installed in ‘92. 

Now known as the The Heritage Center, until a few weeks ago you would have seen a large equestrian sculpture of the Spanish Conquistador Oñate, sometimes referred to as the “Last Conquistador”, it was the only public art to be seen on the entire stretch—which is remarkable given the importance of art within the two tourist destinations.

Oñate is still a hero to some, a butcher to others. His career was rife with controversy and awash in blood. Considering the cruelty of the the encomienda, which had already been banned for over 50 years when he instituted its horrors upon the native New Mexico pueblos, he was subsequently banned from New Mexico for life.

His most heinous crimes in New Mexico were the murder of 800-1000 natives in the Acoma Pueblo massacre, the 500 survivors were put on trial and sentenced by Oñate. All men and women older than 12 were enslaved for 20 years. In addition, men older than 25 (24 individuals) had one foot amputated[3]

Rio Arriba County commissioned and installed the sculpture under protests from the pueblos. County Manager Campos ordered the removal of the statue that morning, after learning that high numbers of protesters were planning to show up Monday afternoon to demand the removal of the statue and that members of a right-wing militia were threatening to counter the demonstration.[4]

In 1998 the Sons of Po'pay severed the right foot from the Oñate leaving a note simply stating “Fair is fair.”. Repaired but not fully chased, the mend was still visible. In 2017 the foot was painted red and “Remember 1860”—the year of the Pueblo Revolt, was painted onto the plinth.[5]

New Mexico has a unique cultural makeup for America, we first have the Native Puebloans, The Tewa peoples of Ohkay Owingeh are believed to have arrived around 1200 AD during the Pueblo III Era. By tradition, the Tewa people moved here from the north, perhaps from the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado.[6] However there is evidence of Native presence on the nearby Mesa that goes back to Paleo times, Folsom points have been found which confirms about ten thousand years of human activity in the area. The Spaniards first entered the landscape in the mid-1500’s, and declared it a state in 1598.

[1]https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/rioters-vandalise-statue-of-polish-us-hero-tadeusz-kosciuszko-as-violent-protests-explode-across-america-13077

[2]"San Juan Pueblo". New Mexico Magazine. Archived from the original on 2009-01-05.

[3]Simmons, Marc, The Last Conquistador: Juan de Oñate and the Settling of the Far Southwest, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1991 pp. 143, 145.

[4]Montgomery, Molly, County Takes Down Oñate Monument, Rio Grande Sun 2020-6-15.

[5]Romero, Simon (30 September 2017). "Statue's Stolen Foot Reflects Divisions Over Symbols of Conquest". New York Times.

[6]Wroth, William H. "Ohkay Owingeh". New Mexico Office of the State Historian. Archived from the original on 2008-05-15