The Map of All 98 SF Monuments & What We Should Do With Them
San Francisco has 98 “monuments & memorials” across our fair city. You know, the statues, plaques, and mounds of bronze and stone on street corners, parks, and even parking lots? Many of these “monuments” were given to the city as gifts from wealthy white men and placed somewhere over 100 years ago, without much public oversight. Some of these statues have been relocated arbitrarily over the years as the city grew, some were placed in small clearings and mostly forgotten about, and some still stand in places of prominance and are ignored in plain sight. The SF New Monument Taskforce did a wonderful accounting of all this back in 2020.
For example, we have a statue of Benjamin Franklin in a park named “Washington Square”, it was gifted to the city by a wealthy dentist and teetotaler in 1879, it was originally designed to house a water fountain and was placed on Kearny St., but was then moved to Washington Square Park in 1904 and no longer spouts water.
Is this a good or a bad monument? I don’t know, I personally like Benjamin Franklin a lot, AND he’s one of the few founding fathers who hasn’t been canceled lately. Perhaps this monument is one you’d like to keep around? Perhaps we should move it to a square actually named Franklin? (Because we have one of those.) There’s also a time capsule underneath the statue, should we open NOW!? How do we decide?!
San Francisco Arts Commission interactive Monuments map
If you’ve got an opinion on any one or all 98 Monuments and memorials in San Francisco, the people at San Francisco Arts Commission would like to know! They are the folks who care for and oversee much of our public art projects. For example when the Christopher Columbus statue was being vandalized so often that the city removed him and put him in hiding (storage). It was the SFAC that made the decision and handled the removal. And they want to know what you think.
Removing Columbus, from a square named after him. 2022.
It’s not easy picking and choosing public art, it’s perhaps harder still to do it in a democratic way. Art is subjective by definition, and most historical figures are controversial. People today are often not happy with the decisions made in the past, and monuments often represent those decisions. Do we want to be constantly reminded of poor past decisions or figures? Can we put something better there? What do we do with dirty old Columbus?
Tell SF Human Rights Commission and the SFAC yourself! Fill out the SF Monuments & Memorials Survey here.
The @SFHumanRights Commission poses the question: What do you think about the monuments & memorials in San Francisco’s Civic Art Collection? Visit bit.ly/sfacmmac to share your thoughts & feedback with the Monuments & Memorials Advisory Committee (MMAC) VM@415-252-2214
If you’re still reading, I wager you actually care about our public art and historical installations and you may take the time to fill out the survey or even attend an MMAC meeting for public feedback (listed below).
What we at Brokeassstuart.com suggest is voting on creating a “Graveyard of Fallen Monuments” in Golden Gate Park or the Presidio. This would be a place where we could put all the unwanted, irrelevant, or distasteful statues in San Francisco, with plaques and an audio tour of where they came from and why they “fell”.
This idea comes from a very cool Fallen Monuments Graveyard in Russia full of soviet era statues, which is now a popular tourist destination in Moscow.
We do not want to erase history, in fact, quite the opposite. By creating a park of fallen monuments not only do we preserve history we emphasize our cultural progress and recognition of past ills. Not to mention this creates another tourist attraction and frees up public space to put in new amazing monuments! Like the one SFAC is putting in at SF Public Library honoring Dr. Maya Angelou. (In case you hadn’t noticed women and people of color are woefully underrepresented in our monumental art in SF.)
So fill out the SF Monuments & Memorials Survey here. And let them know what you think, (hint: let’s build a Fallen Monuments Graveyard and open up space for new, much more representative monuments in our city).
Upcoming MMAC Meetings and Monuments & Memorials Public Feedback Sessions MMAC Meetings are open to the public via zoom and attendees can listen in to the committee’s discussions and deliberations. Two public feedback sessions are scheduled for October 15 and 19 and at those meetings, we would like to hear from you!
Monuments & Memorials Public Feedback Session #1, Saturday, October 15, 2022 (Virtual – 10 a.m. to noon PST) Click here to register for the 10/15/22 community meeting on Zoom.
Monuments & Memorials Public Feedback Session #2, Wednesday, October 19, 2022 (Virtual – 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. PST) Click here to register for the 10/19/22 community meeting on Zoom.
MMAC meeting #7: Monday, November 14, 2022 at 3 p.m. PST: Click here to register for the 11/15/22 webinar on Zoom.
You Might Also Like
