In June 2020, Christina Keyser Vida shimmied up the pedestal that held Richmond’s Jefferson Davis statue to see if the bronze sculpture would fit inside The Valentine Museum.
On Tuesday morning, Vida watched as that same statue was carted out of The Valentine’s exhibition space ahead of its move westward to take part in an art exhibit in Los Angeles.
For decades, the statue was part of a monument to Confederate president and enslaver Jefferson Davis at the intersection of Monument and Davis avenues. The statue was pulled from its pedestal by Black Lives Matter protesters shortly after Vida, The Valentine’s Elise H. Wright Curator of General Collections, scaled it armed with nothing but a museum badge.
For the past three years, the statue had been exhibited at The Valentine as it appeared the night it was felled: dented, covered in graffiti and sporting a large gash in one arm. But that changed on Tuesday when six members of art transportation company Bonsai Fine Arts slowly maneuvered the sculpture from its exhibition pedestal onto a rolling wooden platform ahead of its westward journey later this summer. Vida and Rachael Ward, collections project manager and registrar at The Valentine, helped hold the platform in place as the statue was loaded onto it.
Out west, the statue will be part of “Monuments,” a new art exhibition co-organized and co-presented by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and The Brick. According to the exhibition’s website, “Monuments” will bring “together a selection of decommissioned monuments, many of which are Confederate, with pre-existing and newly commissioned contemporary artworks that address American history and national identity.”
“They’re really sort of exploring the ways art can be used to contextualize this moment in history with so many monuments being pulled down,” Vida told assembled press at the Valentine.
In a way, the statue’s exhibition at The Valentine was a homecoming of sorts. The work was created by Edward Valentine, a sculptor and the museum’s first president. The Valentine’s exhibit “Sculpting History” works to unpack the legacy of the Lost Cause in Edward Valentine’s former workshop.
“Edward Valentine’s Lost Cause statuary, including the Jefferson Davis statue, really did a lot of harm here in Richmond,” Vida said. “It was really our responsibility to bring this piece back into a museum and have that community conversation with folks here in Richmond.”
Preserving a damaged sculpture presented a unique challenge for The Valentine; on Tuesday there was discussion about conserving the remnants of a toilet paper noose that had been placed around the statue’s neck by protesters.
“We had a lot of conversations around this: Are you presenting the 1907 story, or are you preserving the 2020 story,” Vida said. Given the amount of Lost Cause artwork that is already part of The Valentine’s collection, the museum leaned to the latter. “Preserving the piece with its layers of spray paint, pink latex paint, and also the tissue paper that’s around its neck was a really critical moment for us, and it’s an object that we think is going to continue to serve the collection well for future generations.”
The statue, which is owned by The Valentine, will be exhibited at LA’s MOCA Geffen for an eight-month run that begins in October. “Monuments” will be curated by LAXART director Hamza Walker, artist and MacArthur Foundation genius grant recipient Kara Walker and MOCA’s senior curator, Bennett Simpson. The exhibition is sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation, among other donors. Participating artists include Bethany Collins, Karon Davis, Abigail DeVille, Stan Douglas, Leonardo Drew, Torkwase Dyson, Kevin Jerome Everson, Nona Faustine, Jon Henry, Kahlil Robert Irving, Monument Lab, Walter Price, Martin Puryear, Andres Serrano, Hank Willis Thomas, Davóne Tines and Kara Walker.
Two weeks ago, the Black History Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia stated that the Vindicatrix sculpture and granite base from the Jefferson Davis Monument and the Matthew Fontaine Maury sculpture and globe from the Matthew Fontaine Maury Monument would be headed west, as well as various granite slabs from the bases of Richmond’s Confederate monuments.
As the Jefferson Davis statue rolled away from public view after a couple tedious hours of effort, Vida crouched, pumped her fists and mouthed “Yes!”
