By Soren Sorensen
On October 16, 2011 the new Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial was formally unveiled in Washington, D.C. The monuments and memorials in and around the National Mall have come to symbolize citizens and events of immense historical importance to the United States. For many visitors to Washington, these spaces are sacred and, for them, the very act of traveling there is a pilgrimage, not unlike a visit to the grave of a loved one. For others, the National Mall is not much different than a shopping mall—a place to wander around on lunch break, read the paper or talk on the phone.
Regardless of the disparities, these contradictory uses seem to coincide harmoniously. As much as we hope others might mourn or pay tribute in a manner we prefer, these behaviors are as diverse as the citizens that call the United States home. Perhaps the apparent ease of the National Mall’s multiple uses has grown out of its cultural prominence.
Aside from the new MLK Memorial, Americans have begun to visit the 9/11 Memorial in New York City, which officially opened to the public on September 12, 2011. Both of these public works of art, quite different in scope and meaning, represent an occasion to observe the manner in which they are received. Projects of this magnitude, often fraught with controversial and sensitive subject matter, travel rocky roads to completion.
The most famous feature of the MLK Jr. National Memorial is the “Stone of Hope,” a thirty-foot statue of the celebrated civil rights leader, carved from 159 blocks of granite. A 450-foot crescent-shaped inscription wall allows visitors to read some of King’s quotations—purposely not culled from his famous “I Have A Dream” speech. According to the MLK Memorial’s website, organizers preferred to “shift the focus of attention from one example of King’s inspirational words to many.”
Jan Scruggs, founder and president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, is someone who has a unique understanding of the challenges facing public works like the MLK Memorial.
“With the Martin Luther King statue,” Scruggs told Tribe, “you had, of course, some very talented African-American sculptors who said, ‘Wait a minute. What about us? Why in the world is this being built by a Chinese guy? We are capable of doing this.’ So you have a situation with most public works of art in which there are many people who will ultimately, more times than not, come out and give you a public tongue-lashing.”
The MLK and Vietnam Memorials, though not far away from each other geographically, seem at first glance to have very little in common. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, certainly that memorial’s most famous feature, carves a swath in the land just northeast of the Lincoln Memorial not far from the persistent traffic of Constitution Avenue. Dedicated in 1982, the Vietnam Memorial now seems to have outlasted the controversies that permeated its design and construction, to the point where it now exists as an almost unassailable example of public art.
What then will people think of Lei Yixin’s Martin Luther King, Jr. statue in thirty years, especially considering that Yixin, the lead sculptor on the MLK Memorial, has been criticized for, among other things, his nationality?
Sculptor Ed Dwight, who has made several statues of King during his career, derided the design for its size and the look on King’s face. “This idea of having this thirty-foot-tall sculpture of this man, and this confrontational look,” Dwight told CNN, “he would not like that, because that was not him.” While it’s quite absurd to imagine Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson or George Washington designing their own monuments, for Mr. Dwight, consideration of what King himself might have wanted seems to be of paramount importance. Surely a man who’d reject the idea of a thirty-foot-tall statue of himself might reject any memorial design outright. “I feel strongly,” Mr. Dwight added, “that the whole thing should’ve been done here in America.”
Another artist, Gilbert Young, started a protest site called King Is Ours to demand that an African American be hired for the lead sculptor position. In an online essay entitled The King Monument: The Illusion of Inclusion posted to Mr. Young’s professional site, he calls Lei Yixin, a “communist Chinese artist famous for glorifying the mass murderer Mao Zedong.” Of the controversy, Lei Yixin said, “Martin Luther King is not only a hero of America, he’s also a hero of the world.”
The similarities between the thirty-year-old controversy over Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial design and the recent uproar over Yixin are not lost on Jan Scruggs. “In fact, the arguments are very hollow. The important thing is the quality of the product, not the racial or ethnic group of the sculptor. It’s just sort of a very lame kind of argument to make but it can evoke a lot of passion,” Scruggs told Tribe, “the wrong kind of passion.”
Maybe the Vietnam Memorial’s unfortunate history and its rough journey to fruition have been forgotten. Maybe it’s impossible to tackle a work of this importance without ruffling a few feathers. “There’s nothing new about all this to me,” said Scruggs, “I’m just surprised when I don’t see a controversy with respect to a public work of art.”
You don’t have to go very far to find criticism of the MLK Memorial. Thanks to Twitter, Facebook, blogs with anonymous comment threads and a host of other twenty-first century communication delivery methods, we’re a nation of reporters and experts, judges and juries. In a recent episode of NPR’s popular show This American Life called “Middle School,” one youngster says, “So I’ve heard that there is a new Martin Luther King, Jr. statue in Washington, D.C. That statue doesn’t even look like him. It looks like he has a unibrow.”
“I visited the King Memorial on four different occasions and people like it,” Scruggs said. “What you don’t see when you look at a picture or see it on TV is that it’s not just the statue. It’s the statue and where the statue is, which is gazing at the Jefferson Memorial. This is very powerful symbolism. Also what you don’t see is, in its totality, the memorial has two large wings coming out behind the statue and the wings have quotes from Martin Luther King about humanity and justice.”
Scruggs added, “He was a very brilliant and talented man. He was a civil rights leader but in some sense he was much more than that. He had studied Gandhi and he had incorporated some of the great thoughts of civilization into his personal philosophy so there’s a lot there.”
Scruggs said that, while he understands critics’ motives, the end result trumps everything else. “I can sympathize with anybody who feels that they should have had a shot at this and didn’t. I understand what they were saying and I think a lot of other people do as well.”
He continued, “But there comes a point in time where you’ve made your statement and now the party’s over. It’s built. You can accept it or reject it. In fact, the public is overwhelmingly accepting it. There is good visitation and when you spend a couple hours just hanging around the MLK Memorial, you’ll see people really do like it.”
It’s undeniable, however, that all memorials disappoint, infuriate and miss the mark for some people. The delicate balance for which artists strive eventually takes a back seat to what is left after the stone and metal tributes fade into the D.C. landscape years after the fervor subsides.
