The King Memorial: Dreams at Odds

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/arts/design/24statue.html?ei=5088&en=0a2e0318c2d22168&ex=1348286400&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

September 24, 2007
The King Memorial: Dreams at Odds
By PATRICIA COHEN

None of the stars at Radio City Music Hall last week to raise money for the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial mentioned the quarrel that has been bubbling up over plans for the towering three-story monument in Washington.

For months now critics have been grumbling about the selection of Lei Yixin, a Chinese sculptor — rather than an African-American — to carve a stone statue of Dr. King on a four-acre plot between the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. Then last week Harry Wu, a prominent human-rights activist who spent 19 years in a Chinese prison, joined the fray, complaining that Mr. Lei has made statues of Mao. “How can you make statues for Mao Zedong?” he said in a telephone interview from Virginia. “He’s a butcher.”

Politics have dogged the King memorial since it was first suggested after his death in 1968. And trailing behind this latest squabble, like tin cans tied to a cat’s tail, are lofty concerns about cultural memory and racial sensitivities, as well as the mundane realities of turf battles, egos and flawed communication.

Public discussions have tried to fit this flare-up into a larger history. For the first time, said Cheryl Finley, an assistant professor of art history who teaches African-American art at Cornell University, “you are carving out a space for black history and a black man in the national context. That’s why there is this focus on who the artist should be.”

Paul Williams, who specializes in museum studies, said: “Memorials are explicitly about symbolism. A sculpture of one particular person is a very literal, realist version coming back to life, and the idea of who is making the person come back to life is very important.”

In this sense, the case of the King memorial is not unique. There were objections to the French provenance of the Statue of Liberty and to the choice in 1981 of Maya Lin, a young Asian-American graduate student at the time, to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Founders of the National Museum for the American Indian, on the National Mall, insisted that an Indian architect design the building.

FULL story at link.