Allison Bigelow

“Monumental Sovereignty” is a book about the life cycle of the statue by sculptor Robert Ingersoll Aitken (1878–1949) of General George Rogers Clark (1752–1818), which stood at the University of Virginia (UVA) from November 3, 1921, until July 8, 2021. Although the statue purported to depict a campaign from the American Revolution, it was designed, funded, and installed between 1919 and 1921, when histories from the colonial era and early republic were folded into a monumental landscape that honored the Confederacy, Indigenous erasure, and racial segregation. These connections were clear to people at the time. At the statue’s dedication, one invited speaker stood before the jubilant crowd and praised Clark as “the Stonewell Jackson of the Revolution” (Henderson 1921: 5). “Monumental Sovereignty” traces the connections between and among artists, foundries, factories, mines, quarries, and patrons to show how UVA’s Clark statue was produced. Public art often projects a stable, smooth vision of the past, but when we examine a monument from the perspective of its materials, we see more contested and contingent histories. Early research for the book suggests that the Clark statue was a product of global Indigenous dispossession and coercive labor flows. Its plinth was made with granite from Connecticut, cut by Catholic immigrants. The bronze combined copper from Chile with tin from British-owned companies in Malaysia and/or Bolivia. At SAAM, I will be looking at object studies by the sculptor, correspondence with artists in his circles, and financial records from the foundry (held at the Archives of American Art) to understand how artists felt about creating these monuments, how they interacted with the patrons who sponsored them, and how much money was required to underwrite the Jim Crow era’s radical remaking of public space. 

From 2021-2022, I co-chaired UVA’s statue committee, and I am now co-authoring this book with Tribal consultants who helped develop a three-stage process to guide the committee’s work: 1) statue removal, 2) consultation with Native nations whose ancestors were directly harmed by Clark, as documented in oral histories, colonial archives, and secondary sources, and 3) landscape redesign, including commissioning Indigenous Futurisms installations made by local artists. My co-authors are Teresa Pollak (Monacan Indian Nation), the committee co-chair of phase 2; Beverly Payne (Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation); and Shaleigh Howells, former cultural resources director of the Pamunkey Indian Tribe.