Following the 2017 violence in Charlottesville, Virginia during the Unit the Right Rally and the 2020 murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, numerous monuments to the Confederacy were vandalized across the United States. In Phoenix, Arizona, a monument to former Confederate President Jefferson Davis was tarred and feathered. In Florida, protestors spray-painted obscenities and hate-group symbols on the façade of a Daughters of the Confederacy monument. Across the United States and Europe, hundreds of other monuments received similar treatment in response to the controversial presence of these objects in places/spaces fraught with institutional racism and segregational practices.
Although public forums about the presence of Confederate monuments continues, the conversation remains stagnate in many parts of the country. Supporters of the monuments often cite historical preservation laws or the need to protect one's "heritage" as reason for maintaining these objects. Considering these arguments, this paper addresses how artists and artist-activists engage and respond to divisive monuments, using the location of the objects as a site for intervention-based practices. In this paper, I examine several artists and collectives that seek to reposition the use/function of these monuments as sites/spaces for social intervention. For example, artist Kenya (Robinson) elected to cover monuments with feeders to attract birds, repurposing the objects as animal sanctuary sites. Questions to be addressed: will re-positioning/re-directing the function change how the public interacts with these objects? Can the monuments be successfully re-purposed as didactic tools or will they remain contested sites?
