When flesh and blood meet bronze and marble

Sex, gender, race and ethnicity in contemporary protest art

[blood/red paint on white background]

On June 26, 2020, The New York Times published an op-ed by Caroline Randall Williams that begins with a line now permanently seared on my memory: “I have rape-colored skin.” In the piece, Williams describes her personal history as the descendant of slave-owning (and other) White men and the sexually victimized Black women they enslaved or, later, employed as domestic help. The essay’s title, “You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument,” though obviously meant as a bitterly ironic metaphor and clapback to defenders of Confederate statuary, also makes a deep and serious assertion: that the living body of a BIPOC woman can be deployed by her to simultaneously memorialize historical crimes and embody resistance to them.

[At left: Photo of Darializa Avila-Chevalier, Jewel Cadet, Alexis Yeboah-Kodie, and Jamilah Felix, in hospital gowns stained red as if bloody, in front of the statue of J. Marion Sims, Central Park, New York City, by Keegan Stephan via Twitter, in The Architect’s Newspaper, 1/12/2018. At right: (top) Courtney Miller, Grand Traverse Band Chippewa; Teia McGahey, Anishinaabe and Mexican (bottom, left); Hadassah Greensky, Little Traverse Bay Bands Odawa (bottom center); Joelle Joyner, Kauwetsàka/Cherokee (bottom right). Women are in traditional clothing, one atop and three in front of the pedestal where a bust of Christopher Columbus formerly stood, Detroit, Michigan, photo by Rosa Maria Zamarron, 7/1/2020]

It will surprise no one to learn that monumental art in the United States consists overwhelmingly of depictions of White men, created by White male artists. BIPOC, and White women, are almost entirely absent both as subjects and as creators. In the U.S., there are fewer than 400 statues of real women (not metaphorical often half-naked depictions of virtues like Liberty, Justice, or…