Scholar James Young once posed this provocative question: How does a nation memorialize a past it might rather forget? Art historian Renée Ater is exploring this question by researching 25 monuments to the slave past located in the South, Midwest, and Northeast of the United States.
A 2018 Getty Scholar and an associate professor emerita of the history of art at the University of Maryland, College Park, Ater plans to publish her findings in a forthcoming digital project, Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past: Race, Memorialization, and Civic Engagement.
A key site included in Ater’s digital project is the Contraband and Freedmen Cemetery Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia, which features the monumental statue Path of Thorns and Roses by Mario Chiodo, a California-based artist. The site is emblematic of challenges inherent in creating memorials to slavery.
Ater lives in Washington, DC, and remembers friends telling her 15 years ago that there was a cemetery located on the drive on Route 1 south into Virginia. “I would drive by and had no idea what they were talking about because I could only see a gas station,” she recalls.
Ater later learned that the site was a cemetery for enslaved people who had followed the Union Army during the American Civil War on their own free will to escape the bondage of slavery. Men, women, and children seeking freedom arrived penniless and malnourished to Alexandria, located on the border of the Union and the Confederacy.
A 2018 Getty Scholar and an associate professor emerita of the history of art at the University of Maryland, College Park, Ater plans to publish her findings in a forthcoming digital project, Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past: Race, Memorialization, and Civic Engagement.
A key site included in Ater’s digital project is the Contraband and Freedmen Cemetery Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia, which features the monumental statue Path of Thorns and Roses by Mario Chiodo, a California-based artist. The site is emblematic of challenges inherent in creating memorials to slavery.
Ater lives in Washington, DC, and remembers friends telling her 15 years ago that there was a cemetery located on the drive on Route 1 south into Virginia. “I would drive by and had no idea what they were talking about because I could only see a gas station,” she recalls.
Ater later learned that the site was a cemetery for enslaved people who had followed the Union Army during the American Civil War on their own free will to escape the bondage of slavery. Men, women, and children seeking freedom arrived penniless and malnourished to Alexandria, located on the border of the Union and the Confederacy.
