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| Photo by Stefanie Keenan |
| LACMA Director Michael Govan and members of the Collectors Committee look at Mother and Child Figure, a sculpture from Mali that's around 500 years old |
See also:
*LACMA Collectors Committee's Battle Royale
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
The Resnick Pavilion, the newest building and the only single-story one on the Los Angeles County Museum's campus, was closed to the public this weekend. But if you looked in the window, you would have seen 30 gray monuments, some thigh-high, some as tall as two people, all roughly obelisk-shaped like the Washington monument. They were arranged in straight lines and striking. People kept trying to go in, even though a sign outside the Resnick told them they couldn't.
Artist Sam Durant made these gray obelisks as part of his 2005 project, Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions, Washington D.C., basing his shapes on those of actual monuments scattered across the U.S., marking spots where Native Americans and white settlers died as the result of bloody battles and massacres from the time of colonization onward. Durant proposes moving these to the National Mall, and has built a balsa wood model showing what that might look like.
The reason you couldn't walk in and around Durant's monuments was that LACMA did not own them yet. The Collectors Committee, a group of 77 dues-paying members, had not yet decided whether they would foot the bill.
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