The centennial monument and 40 others are now under the equally critical gaze of the Chicago Monuments Project, an advisory committee of civic leaders, artists, designers, academics, and culture workers (including X) tasked with re-evaluating how the city handles its stock of monuments (which Schneider says he supports). The city formed the committee in the wake of the uprisings against racist police violence in July 2020. During a demonstration at Grant Park against a monument to Christopher Columbus, police assaulted journalists and activists; within days, Mayor Lori Lightfoot had statues of Columbus in Grant Park and Little Italy removed “temporarily.” To come up with long-term policies for monumentalization, the advisory committee began meeting in September and tentatively hope to release a set of recommendations by late June. [...]
No other American city has opened up this sort of wide-ranging dialogue about how cities make monuments. Swept up in this inquiry are five statues of Abraham Lincoln, as well as monuments to George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, and the Italian Fascist Italo Balbo. The 41 items under discussion are just a small percentage of the hundreds of monuments in the city, but committee co-chair Bonnie McDonald, president of Landmarks Illinois, says the work of the committee is just a start. She’s asking for public participation on how current memorials should be handled, as well an in the commissioning of new monuments. [...]
The Chicago Torture Justice Memorials (CTJM) Project arranged several exhibitions calling for public input, uniting survivors, activists and South Side residents through a radically democratic process. “That process of stepping back and inviting everyone to contribute their creativity, their imagination, the desire to work for justice really opened up a process,” says Joey Mogul, CTJM co-founder. “It invited different members of the public beyond lawyers, legal workers and organizers.” The task for CTJM is to communicate “the horror and the pain and the generational trauma that occurred, while also [making] sure we acknowledge people’s agency and resistance,” says Mogul.
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