The stately eagle atop the 50-foot-tall fluted column of the Illinois Centennial Monument can be seen from blocks away. Located in the gentrifying Logan Square neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side, the memorial was designed by Henry Bacon and Evelyn Beatrice Longman and built in 1918 as an allegorical representation of the history of Illinois. Representational friezes line the column’s circular podium: On one side, the monument’s base offers abstract personifications of Chicago arts, agriculture and industry; the other side depicts an early contact between Indigenous people and Europeans. A Native American man wearing a feathered war bonnet stands while a woman looks back at a robed missionary clutching a cross. The look in her eyes is somewhere between a wary gaze and a confrontational glower. 

It’s a vision of colonization that might be more nuanced than those you’ll find in many of the city’s monuments, but it’s still a source of controversy locally. For one, the Indigenous man pictured is “wearing the wrong headdress,” says Santiago X, an Indigenous artist and architect based in Chicago. (The strikethrough in his name is intentional.) “They’re wearing the wrong clothes.” 

Andrew Schneider, president of local preservation group Logan Square Preservation, defends the monument as a beloved local landmark. “It’s an iconic image of Logan Square,” he says. “The people that live here have a real attachment to it, and that cuts across all racial and socio-economic classes.” 

The centennial monument and 40 others are now under the equally critical gaze of the Chicago Monuments Project, an advisory committee of civic leaders, artists, designers, academics, and culture workers (including X) tasked with re-evaluating how the city handles its stock of monuments (which Schneider says he supports). The city formed the committee in the wake of the uprisings against racist police violence in July 2020. During a demonstration at Grant Park against a monument to Christopher Columbus, police assaulted journalists and activists; within days, Mayor Lori Lightfoot had statues of Columbus in Grant Park and Little Italy removed “temporarily.” To come up with long-term policies for monumentalization, the advisory committee began meeting in September and tentatively hope to release a set of recommendations by late June. 

The official charge of the project is to “[call] out the hard truths of our history — especially as they relate to racism and oppression,” because “telling a true and inclusive history is important, as is addressing who gets to tell those stories in public space. Our priority is to address ignored, forgotten and distorted histories.”

No other American city has opened up this sort of wide-ranging dialogue about how cities make monuments. Swept up in this inquiry are five statues of Abraham Lincoln, as well as monuments to George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, and the Italian Fascist Italo Balbo. The 41 items under discussion are just a small percentage of the hundreds of monuments in the city, but committee co-chair Bonnie McDonald, president of Landmarks Illinois, says the work of the committee is just a start. She’s asking for public participation on how current memorials should be handled, as well an in the commissioning of new monuments. 

“It’s an exploration, not a condemnation, because it needs to be a public conversation,” she says. 

The committee is looking at six criteria, though individual monuments aren’t connected to specific factors. 

• Promoting narratives of white supremacy 

• Presenting inaccurate and/or demeaning characterizations of American Indians 

• Memorializing individuals with connections to racist acts, slavery and genocide 

• Presenting selective, oversimplified, one-sided views of history 

• Not sufficiently including other stories, in particular those of women, people of color, and themes of labor, migration and community building

• Creating tension between people who see value in these artworks and those who do not.

Many monuments in this group were created from 1893 to 1930, around the era of the World’s Columbian Exposition, which was meant to secure Chicago’s place at the table of great Western metropolises. Funded by wealthy and powerful white people, many of these monuments represent (assumed) clear historical protagonists on pedestal or horseback. Their literal, representational focus leaves aside the points of view of those outside a “mainstream” that’s defined by power and colonial violence. 

“The limits of our historical imagination always want to pin the change on a charismatic, heroic individual, which is very much an imperialistic, patriarchal version of how history works,” says committee member Lisa Lee, executive director of the National Public Housing Museum. 

To wit: There are a slew of Lincolns — sitting down with a book on his lap, standing up clutching an axe, and gripping his lapel with a world-weary sense of resolve in his eyes — and enough generals on horseback for a victory day parade. Friezes posit white figures in colonial landscapes as stoic exemplars of civilization in a maelstrom of danger and uncertainty, if not outright violence. 

The complicated records of foundational figures of American history (Lincoln is instrumental to Native American displacement, just as he is to the end of slavery) heralds a fissure in American ideals and monuments’ ability to embody them. In the wake of a generational critique of how power and race are intertwined in deeply undemocratic ways, power is shifting, and some monuments are coming down. Suddenly, says McDonald, there’s room to ask, “Who has the right to decide?”

Says Lee: “The monuments debate has everything to do with who has a right to the city, the right to claim public space, and the right to demand historical accountability.” 

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That accountability is central to Lee’s work in the grassroots effort to establish a new Chicago memorial — this one marking the victims of police torture in the city. But the gap between rhetoric, intention and execution for the project has meant long delays that underscore the resistance to accepting new narratives about monuments and culture.

From the 1970s to the 1990s, Chicago Police Commander John Burge and his infamous “Midnight Crew” tortured at least 100 Black men into false confessions. In 2015, the city agreed to pursue a package of reforms, pay $5.5 million in reparations, establish a Chicago Public Schools curriculum about the torture, and issue a formal apology, becoming the first municipality in the nation to endorse reparations for racist police violence. As part of that resolution, the city also promised to fund a permanent memorial to the victims of police torture. 

The Chicago Torture Justice Memorials (CTJM) Project arranged several exhibitions calling for public input, uniting survivors, activists and South Side residents through a radically democratic process. “That process of stepping back and inviting everyone to contribute their creativity, their imagination, the desire to work for justice really opened up a process,” says Joey Mogul, CTJM co-founder. “It invited different members of the public beyond lawyers, legal workers and organizers.” The task for CTJM is to communicate “the horror and the pain and the generational trauma that occurred, while also [making] sure we acknowledge people’s agency and resistance,” says Mogul. 

It’s a multi-layered brief that requires the ambiguity of abstraction to represent. The final design, selected by a jury of torture survivors, artists, activists, cultural workers, architects, educators and philanthropists, is by Chicago artist Patricia Nguyen and architectural designer John Lee. Called “Breath, Form, and Freedom,” it’s a concrete, circular pavilion bisected by a wall with an open courtyard at its center. 

In process and form, it’s a radical change from historical monuments. The space is envisioned as offering up a public forum for cook-outs, teach-ins and exhibitions — ongoing conversations and programming that demonstrate that this history is not settled. It invites visitors to take a position in the space literally, and ideologically. The cyclical act of breathing, reflected in the circular shape of the memorial, works at the formal level and as an element of historical recognition. (Suffocation was a torture technique Burge and others used, and police continue to use, as the murders of George Floyd and Eric Garner illustrate.) 

Nguyen thinks of the memorial as a “place where [survivors] could heal, come together, and just reflect on what happened,” she says. “I see CTJM as the model in Chicago of what it means to actually be survivor-led and be community-based.” 

One of those survivors is Mark Clements: At age 16, police tortured and sexually assaulted him in 1981, forcing him to admit to four murders that put him in jail for 28 years. As a CTJM advocate, he says the memorial will be “a perfect way to bring some form of healing to the men and women that were affected. We would like to have people in the community attend this memorial and to participate in the events. I think it would be a shining face on the South Side of Chicago.” 

The memorial is estimated to cost $2 million, an amount Clements calls “crumbs” compared to the trauma and economic disruption caused by torture, coerced confessions and false imprisonment. (It’s also crumbs compared to how much Chicago taxpayers pay out in compensation for police misconduct: more than a half billion dollars over the last 10 years.) But six years after the agreement, the memorial is still waiting for funding and a site. And Clements has little confidence that Mayor Lightfoot, who came to office from the review board that investigates police misconduct, considers the project a priority. (The mayor’s office did not respond to questions about plans to fund the memorial.) Lightfoot has acknowledged the torture publicly, but her administration’s Law Department, as recently as May 2021, has refused to admit in court that this systematic abuse took place.

“Lori Lightfoot has always been a person that has protected the interests of law enforcement over the interests of common people, poor people out of Black and brown communities,” he says. 

As the monuments committee surveys the city’s past and future memorials, it’s also had to reconsider their temporal dimensions. In a moment of dramatic cultural and social change, how long should any monument last? 

“I think it’s an outmoded idea to think that we have to put something in place and it has to be there forever, untouched, for it to be a monument,” says McDonald. 

As a historic preservationist, much of her work is grounded in the idea that for history to be understood, original artifacts must remain, but the monuments dilemma is pushing this idea to its limits. “Does everything have to be saved in order to understand our culture?” she says. “Can they be further contextualized?” 

Instead of viewing monuments as an authoritative account of an immutable past, this revisionist view sees them as momentary sparks of alignment between an evolving view of history and the will to bring a community together around these changes. 

Santiago X says the city’s next monuments should be conceived with a plan for their end, a “death date.” At predetermined junctures, there should be a set of questions interrogating monuments’ point of view. “These monuments should be as finite as our existence,” he says. “If we can comprehend the built environment in the same finite way that we exist, I think we’re better off.” 

And as an Indigenous person focused on histories before Native contact with Europeans, X approaches history with a wider geologic timescale. The fluted column seen at the Illinois Centennial Monument is a fundamental building block of Western architecture, even though it was developed in a distant Mediterranean empire and photocopied across culture and space countless times. Indigenous mounds like those in the pre-Columbian city of Cahokia, a few hundred miles away, are a key element of X’s work. He calls them the “original foundations of civilization in this country.” 

Even outside of explicit Indigenous content and context, “what we see is the long-lasting, residual effect of colonization,” says X. Statues of Abraham Lincoln or Christopher Columbus are “past their due date. I think they’re spoiled. I think they need to be re-evaluated.” 

But he’s not a statue-removal hard-liner. X envisions a “museum of fallen monuments,” he says, a place where monuments could be placed in a context that clarifies why they lost their legitimacy, preserved as part of the story of the evolution of culture. 

Across the political spectrum on the committee, there’s broad skepticism that monuments can still bind people together in any shared vision of culture, and agreement that monuments need to tell a fuller story. 

That’s the opinion of Nicholas Sposato, an alderman who describes himself as the most conservative voice on Chicago’s city council, and a member of the committee. “I’m all for adding on,” he says, instead of tearing down or replacing monuments. An Italian-American, Sposato criticized protesters who attempted to tear down the Grant Park statue of Christopher Columbus in July 2020, calling them “savages” at a police budget hearing in October.

Sposato raises now-familiar conservative gripes about “cancel culture” and talks about the need to “put things in the context of their times,” he says. But his openness to laissez-faire monumentalization may have limits. If a bevy of monuments enter the public sphere to make up for centuries of cultural marginalization, eventually, new ones will call out the old. Asked if he would support additional monuments that critique historical figures as responsible for genocide, Sposato was hesitant. “I certainly wouldn’t like to see that next to it,” he says. “I’d rather see something representing Indigenous people, rather than saying that [Columbus] was a genocidal maniac lunatic. I certainly don’t agree with that.” 

For Lee, the monument debate reflects the changing dynamics of urban power, and who gets to wield it. Historically, these spaces have been places where those in power shape narratives to assure themselves and the world of their righteousness, and where others have been erased. Perhaps the most meaningful step that Chicago’s monument-watchers can make is to create a forum that makes this process clear.

“What we’re really talking about in this conversation,” she says, “is another version of sovereignty, of the ability to say, ‘This is what I need in my community; this is what I need in my public space.’”