Exhibit reimagines Confederate statues

A visitor to the Valentine museum looks over one of the proposals for changes to Confederate statues on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va., Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2019. A new exhibit in Richmond showcases designs and ideas on what to do with Richmond's Confederate monuments. Local artists hope the exhibit will spark conversations about how to accurately document the city's history while not glorifying Confederate leaders. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
A visitor to the Valentine museum looks over one of the proposals for changes to Confederate statues on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va., Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2019. A new exhibit in Richmond showcases designs and ideas on what to do with Richmond's Confederate monuments. Local artists hope the exhibit will spark conversations about how to accurately document the city's history while not glorifying Confederate leaders. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

RICHMOND, Va. -- The Confederate leaders memorialized on Richmond's Monument Avenue have become flash points in a national debate about how symbols of slavery and white supremacy should be treated today.

The angst over what to do with Confederate monuments has been particularly pronounced in Richmond, a onetime capital of the Confederacy.

Local artists hope a new exhibit will spark ideas about how to accurately document the city's history while not glorifying Confederate leaders.

"How do you honor that history of the street while at the same time trying to engage people who come to Richmond and the residents who live here in a meaningful conversation about what they mean today?" said Bill Martin, director of The Valentine museum, where renderings of 20 creative proposals for redesigning the street are now on display.

The exhibit grew out of an international design competition that asked architects, planners, designers and artists to reimagine Monument Avenue, a 5-mile historic urban boulevard where five giant statues of Confederate figures from Virginia stand: Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, J.E.B. Stuart, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson and Confederate Naval commander Matthew Fontaine Maury.

The contest drew 70 entries from around the world.

"Monument Avenue: General Demotion/General Devotion" features the designs chosen as finalists.

The proposals, depicted on oversized placards, range from elaborate to humorous.

One suggests burying the statues underground and leaving only the heads visible, a design that would eliminate some of the grandeur of the current statues and allow people to see the figures at eye-level or look at them in an underground viewing area.

Another depicts the J.E.B. Stuart statue as a garden where overgrown native plants cover Stuart. The Stonewall Jackson statue is shown covered in books -- a "temporary-interactive dumping ground" where people can drop off textbooks that depict slavery as a benign institution.

Still another calls for replacing all the Confederate statues with light-filled sculptures and pavilions and creating new monuments to commemorate major milestones in the civil-rights movement.

National debate over Civil War symbols broke out in 2015 after white supremacist Dylann Roof fatally shot nine black people at a South Carolina church.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has tracked the movement, estimates that 114 Confederate symbols around the country have been removed or renamed since 2015, but another 1,747 remain undisturbed.

A Section on 03/10/2019

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