The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center (JSAAHC), a Black-led public research nonprofit in Charlottesville, Virginia, is looking for artists to transform the melted remains of the city’s Robert E. Lee statue into a new public work. Earlier this month, the organization opened the application for interested artists as part of the second phase of its Swords Into Plowshares initiative.
The project follows years of local community petitioning efforts and litigation battles over the infamous Confederate general’s statue. The monument’s dismantlement was at the center of the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, when James Alex Fields Jr. deliberately drove his car into a crowd, killing civil rights activist Heather Heyer and injuring dozens of others.
In 2021, the Charlottesville City Council unanimously approved the Swords Into Plowshares proposal to melt down the statue and use the remnants to create a public artwork. The sculpture was melted down two years ago into red bronze ingots.
“At the heart of the Swords into Plowshares initiative is a community conversation guided by research, public education, and opportunities for reflection — situated in a place where our nation’s ideals of freedom were developed, despite being rooted in a lucrative system of enslavement whose lasting ramifications continue to shape society today,” JSAAHC Executive Director Andrea Douglas told Hyperallergic.
Douglas cited Virginia’s history of having one of the highest numbers of erected Confederate memorials in the country. According to a 2019 data survey by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the state was home to 110 Confederate monuments, right behind Georgia’s 114 statues; notably, the same SPLC survey recorded that Virginia has also been a leader in Confederate monument and symbol removal efforts, largely due to grassroots and community activism.
For the project’s artist selection process, a jury will choose up to five semi-finalists, who will be given $10,000 to develop design proposals for the new piece. Applicants are asked to upload a resume demonstrating their professional credentials, a statement of interest briefly describing what drew them to the project, and images and details of recently completed work. There is a $10 fee for the application, which will close at 11:59pm PT on April 25.
Following a public parks survey, the site of the future artwork is expected to be announced by the end of this year. The location will be chosen based on conversations with city officials, community feedback, and historical research, which Douglas said has involved examining the broader history of public parks, many of which originated from plantations and were later subjected to racist segregation under Virginia’s Public Exclusionary Act of 1926.
“Our goal is to establish a democratic process — one that stands in direct opposition to the legacy of white supremacy embodied in the former monuments that once connected the center of Charlottesville and the University of Virginia,” Douglas told Hyperallergic.
The site will place the future artwork in dialogue with the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers and the Katherine Foster memorial at the University of Virginia; the Contemplative Site at Monticello; and the Memorial to the Enslaved planned for Montpelier; as well as other monuments elsewhere in the United States and abroad.
“As members of our federal government divest from historical accountability and attempt to reshape our shared history, it is imperative that institutions like the JSAAHC continue initiatives such as Swords into Plowshares, whose success relies on artists to help us interrogate the continuity of our past, present, and future,” Douglas said.
