Erika Doss

Death, art and memory in the public sphere: The visual and material culture of grief in contemporary America

This paper explores the commemorative dimensions of death, dying and bereavement in contemporary America as embodied in material and visual culture. Focusing in particular on the Oklahoma City National Memorial (dedicated in 2000 and now managed by the US National Park Service) and on temporary shrines constructed near Columbine High School in Littleton, CO (the site of a murderous rampage in 1999), it asks how and why such commemoration is organized - by whom and for whom? What do these practices and rituals - both seemingly spontaneous public practices and those managed by specific institutions - reveal about American attitudes toward death and grief? What do they tell us about who (and what) is deemed memorable in their absence, in US history, and in terms of an imagined national future? Indeed, what is the role of memory in the material and visual culture of death, dying and bereavement in contemporary America?

Spirit poles and flying pigs : public art and cultural democracy in American communities

Doss examines the way in which public art is a site of conflict and a symbol of struggle in cultural democracy by analysing in detail seven specific projects, the controversies surrounding them, and the reasons behind their failure. Doss argues that public art is most effective when it is linked to a notion of a public sphere that involves, at every level, the community in which the project is based. Index, 4 p. Biographical notes on the author. Circa 325 bibl. ref.

Spontaneous memorials and contemporary modes of mourning in america

ABSTRACT Who, and what, is worth mourning in the United States of America? Who and what “counts” in the American national imaginary and is, hence, deemed especially worthy of mourning and memorialization? Increasingly widespread commemorative practices such as roadside shrines, pregnancy loss memorials, organ donor memorials, and spontaneous memorials erected at sites of tragic and traumatic death—such as the shootings at Columbine High School in 1999—suggest new social and cultural understandings of who is valued as a person worth mourning and remembering in America. Challenging Freudian understandings of mourning as something to be “worked through” quickly and privately, new modes of mourning are public and continuous, embodying growing beliefs in the inseparability of life from death and the endless, although not pathological, presence of grief. Centering on spontaneous memorials, this essay considers what such seemingly impromptu public rituals of commemoration suggest about contemporary American attitudes regarding material culture, grief, death, and a national legacy of violence. It further considers the affective conditions, and possibilities, of grief in contemporary America.

Imaging the Panthers: Representing Black Power and Masculinity, 1960s–1990s

When the movie Panther premiered in American theaters in May 1995, it introduced a whole new generation to the rhetoric and radical politics of the Black Panther Party of a quarter-century earlier. It also sparked fierce debate about Panther fact, Panther fiction, and the power of images. Former leftie David Horowitz, now the head of the neoconservative Center for Popular Culture in Los Angeles, took out an ad in Daily Variety calling Panther a “two-hour lie.” Damning director Mario Van Peebles for glorifying the positive aspects of the black power movement — the childrens breakfasts and sickle cell anemia tests the Panthers sponsored, for example — Horowitz warned that people “will die because of this film” and faxed a seven-page press release to the media condemning the Panthers as “cocaine-addicted gangsters who … committed hundreds of felonies.”

“Revolutionary art is a tool for liberation'’: Emory Douglas and protest aesthetics at the black panther

Abstract From its emergence in 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self‐Defense deliberately projected an image of black power and revolutionary martyrdom that hinged on potent black masculinity and patriarchal authority. If that image was embodied in the Black Panthers’ paramilitary physical and public presence, it was also visualized in numerous posters and drawings designed for The Black Panther, the Partys newspaper and chief means of political dissemination. Emory Douglas, the primary artist at The Black Panther during the Partys peak from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, produced hundreds of pictures promoting the Panthers’ mixed agenda of armed militance and community welfare. Challenging long‐standing assumptions about race and racism, Douglas crafted a visual strategy of cultural resistance which aimed at convincing audiences of the efficacy of black power by offering alternative images of a forceful black masculinity.

Public Art Chronicles: Louise Bourgeois' Helping Hands and Chicago's Identity Issues

In June 2011, Louise Bourgeois’ Helping Hands, a set of life-size hands carved out of black granite columns, was relocated to Chicago Women’s Park, a tastefully landscaped garden spot in the city’s Prairie Avenue Historic District (Figure 1). Originally installed at a windswept site overlooking Lake Michigan, Helping Hands is dedicated to Jane Addams (1860–1935), the Nobel Prize winning activist who promoted suffrage, social responsibility, pacifism, and public service, and founded Chicago’s Hull House, the first settlement house in the United States, on the city’s Near West Side. Despite public art’s strong presence in Chicago, Helping Hands is the city’s only permanent public sculpture commemorating a woman, and one of relatively few sculptures by women in the city. The story of its removal and eventual relocation suggests that honoring Addams and what she represents simply doesn’t mesh with Chicago’s sense of itself today. Helping Hands originated in 1989, when an ad hoc citizens group called the Jane Addams Memorial Committee came together on Hull House’s 100th anniversary and pressed for a permanent public memorial. Joining forces with the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, the group approached the B.F. Ferguson Monument Fund, established in 1905 by Chicago lumber baron Benjamin Franklin Ferguson and administered by the Art Institute of Chicago for the “erection and maintenance of enduring statuary andmonuments, in the whole or in part of stone, granite, or bronze, in the parks, along the boulevards, or in other public places within the City of Chicago, Illinois, commemorating worthy men or women of America or important events in American history.”1 Ferguson Fund trustees agreed to finance a Jane Addams memorial for

Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s The Puritan

250,000, picked a downtown lakefront location, and hired public art expert Mary Jane Jacob as the commissioning curator charged with selecting the artist. Jacob was then orchestrating the landmark public art exhibition “Culture in Action” (1992–1993), which included Suzanne Lacy’s Full Circle, a temporary installation of 100 limestone boulders scattered on sidewalks throughout Public Art Dialogue, Vol. 2, Issue 1, March 2012, 94–102

Public Art Chronicles: Michael Heizer's Effigy Tumuli

Dedicated in 1887 in Springfield, Massachusetts, The Puritan is a large bronze statue of a menacing figure clutching a huge Bible. Commissioned as a memorial to Deacon Samuel Chapin (1595–1675), The Puritan was designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and erected in an urban park surrounded by factories and tenements. After repeated vandalism, it was moved “uphill” to Springfield’s cultural quadrangle in 1899. Contextualizing The Puritan in geographic and affective terms, this essay argues that the statue’s public disavowal was conditioned by Saint-Gaudens’s general disdain for New England’s seventeenth-century founding fathers and in particular their fraught relationships with American Indians.

Makes Me Laugh, Makes Me Cry

[Beginning with this issue of Public Art Dialogue, Erika Doss contributes a periodic feature for the journal on the state and status of public art projects that have been removed, closed, destroyed, or otherwise “disappeared.” “Public Art Chronicles” is inspired, first, by informing PAD readers about the physical circumstances today of certain public artworks with which they are most likely familiar and may have visited or studied in the past. This includes site-specific public sculpture projects such as Michael Heizer’s Effigy Tumuli (the subject of this issue’s discussion). Second, recognizing the dynamic conditions of public spaces and places, “Public Art Chronicles” is especially oriented to issues of permanence and change. PAD readers are encouraged to send in their suggestions for works to cover in future issues.] In 1985, Michael Heizer’s site-specific public art project Effigy Tumuli was dedicated in Buffalo Rock State Park, near Ottawa, Illinois (Figure 1). Located about 80 miles south-west of Chicago, the 300-acre park occupies a sandstone mesa 90 feet above the Illinois River and features hiking trails, camping areas, picnic spots, a baseball field, and a pen holding two live American bison – a nod to the thousands of buffalo that grazed all over the central Midwest until the latter part of the eighteenth century. Effigy Tumuli, a series of five enormous earth mounds shaped like creatures native to the region (water strider, catfish, snake, turtle, frog) takes up more than half of the park’s acreage. Developed on a site that was severely damaged in the 1930s by strip-mining, the public art project was specifically designed in terms of land reclamation. Even 50 years after its thin vein of coal had been completely mined out, the area remained littered with 30-foot-deep furrows of toxic overburden (piles of pyrite and shale) and murky pools of contaminated water. It was surrounded by similar eco-disasters: the offal of industrial pollution from factories like LibbeyOwens Ford, Union Carbide Plastics, and Radium Dial (which used radioactive paint on clocks and watches). Virtually devoid of vegetation, the site was like a desolate moonscape frequented only by dirt-bikers, who came from miles around to ride its gorges and gullies. But, when high levels of acidic runoff were discovered Public Art Dialogue, Vol. 1, Issue 2, September 2011, 241–246

Between Modernity and “the Real Thing”

Volume 25, Number 3