The San Francisco Arts Commission plans to spend $3 million to kick-start efforts to remove and replace controversial monuments.
At a meeting last week, senior project director Angela Carrier provided more details about the “Shaping Legacy” plan, a strategy to address more than 100 examples of monuments and memorials that display “a concentration that speaks more to power, privilege, white supremacy, patriarchy and colonialism.”
“We've taken this moment to acknowledge and confront this moment in our past, how these monuments and memorials no longer represent the values we say the city stands for and continue to ignore the stories of communities of color and reinforce inequalities of race, gender and culture,” Carrier said.
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The San Francisco Arts Commission last week provided an update on its “Shaping Legacy” project, which aims to potentially remove and replace statues and monuments deemed controversial. (Reuters/Evelyn Hockstein)
The commission described the plan as a “multi-year, equity-focused commitment to critically examine monuments and memorials in San Francisco’s civic art collection.” The first step will include an “equity audit” and review of the collection’s monuments.
“We will engage communities that have historically been excluded from the debate,” Carrier told the committee, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “The work of reckoning, repair and healing is not an easy task.”
The project will be funded by a $3 million grant from the Mellon Foundation and is part of a broader plan called The Monuments Project, which will invest $250 million through 2025 to reimagine the public landscape.
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San Francisco began reviewing statues after protesters began defacing them during Black Lives Matter protests. (AP Photos)
“This work requires us to center race as we confront the inequities of the past, reveal the inequities of the present, and develop effective strategies to move everyone toward an equitable future,” Carrier said.
The effort to review controversial statues began in 2018, after the commission agreed to renew debate over the sculpture “Early Days,” which depicted a Native American kneeling in front of a Spanish cowboy. The statue was later removed.
In 2020, following the George Floyd riots, Democratic Mayor London Breed formed the San Francisco Monuments and Memorials Advisory Committee on statues. The committee subsequently recommended an equity audit in 2023.
A statue known as “Early Days” depicting a Native American at the feet of a Catholic missionary and a Spanish cowboy stands on Fulton Street as part of the Pioneer Monument on March 12, 2018 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
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“What the audit will do is decide which monuments are considered offensive today and, if so, what should replace them,” former arts commissioner Dorka Keehn said in 2020. “A broader question is, 'How long should a monument exist?'”
