Commentary: Goodbye, guy on a horse. A new wave of monument design is changing how we honor history

“A Surge of Power 2020” by British artist Marc Quinn. “The incident at Sleepy Lagoon is born from a series of interrelated events,” says Romo, who, like De la Loza, also creates work that engages the history of Los Angeles. Price, who is currently finishing a commissioned bronze statue of a Black “everywoman” that will be erected in east London, was critical in the U.K. edition of GQ of “the ambition and entitlement of this very privileged white guy, this white artist, Marc Quinn.” And though Reid participated in the making of Quinn’s statue, Price, who is Black, added: “It’s as if Quinn, by casting her in resin, and controlling her, is stealing that genuine moment away, claiming it as his own.” It all could very well mark the swan song for the monument style we can call “guy on a horse.” Jen Reid stands before the statue made in her likeness by artist Marc Quinn, “A Surge of Power,” 2020. “It was an almost horizontal monument,” Gang says of the landing, “a place that could also somehow represent democracy and the people, and not have a figural statue standing on it.” Her firm explored this idea for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale in an installation titled “Stone Stories.” Hundreds of cobblestones were assembled on the floor of the U.S. pavilion, accompanied by a wall piece that showed how stones might be shaped to tell individual stories — carved into the form of a hand or embedded with the relief of a ship. “It was a copy of, I think, her great great grandfather’s manumission papers.” “You know,” Otitigbe says, “we go to the city clerk’s office for parking tickets or to pay our taxes or get a deed to a house, but this showed how ingrained slavery is in our country — that you can go to a city clerk and get these documents that were about the enslavement of others.” Sacred ground Cameron Shaw, the deputy director and chief curator at the California African American Museum, sees strength in inclusiveness, especially in Los Angeles.