Renée Ater

My project focuses on how we visualize, interpret, and engage the slave past through contemporary monuments created for public spaces in the United States. I use the term “slave past” broadly to include the transatlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage, slavery, resistance, emancipation, and freedom. From Mississippi to Illinois to Rhode Island, governments (local, county, and state), colleges and universities, individuals, communities, and artists are in difficult conversations about how to acknowledge the legacy of the slave past and its visual representation for their towns, cities, states, and higher-educational institutions.

My research is predicated on the idea that the memorialization of the slave past is plural and multi-vocal. I examine twenty-five monuments in the South, Midwest, and Northeast that tell a diverse story about our contemporary engagement with the slave past. I arrange these monuments thematically into six digital case studies that include monuments to the Middle Passage and slavery, slavery and the university, resistance to enslavement, Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, black soldiers and the Civil War, and emancipation and freedom. At the heart of “Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past” is a consideration of the interwoven nature of the social, the historical, and the spatial.

My approach is multipronged. I document how the objects are commissioned and how various constituencies determine how they should look. I analyze the visual language of the objects and the artists’ conceptualizations. Interpreting the various meanings of these monuments at the time that they were commissioned, I also evaluate the new meanings created over time that are often resistant to the original intentions and result in the transformation of public spaces. Lastly, I reflect on the concept of civic engagement and the role such monuments play in present-day conversations about race, history, and social justice.