History of Art & Architecture
Beyond Marble and Bronze: Women’s Counter-Monuments in New Orleans
Shortly after the bronze-cast statue of Robert E. Lee was unveiled in 1884, African American women began dressing in short satin dresses and feathered bonnets during New Orleans Carnival, forming a group that became known as the Black Indians. In 1874 the all-white, elite Ladies Benevolent Society constructed a marble monument to honor fallen Confederate soldiers. A decade later, the multi-racial followers of the Voodoo healer Marie Laveau transformed the burial site of this free woman of color into a makeshift shrine, painting red X’s on her whitewashed aboveground tomb and leaving offerings at its base. Since the end of Reconstruction in 1877, women in New Orleans have created counter-monuments, defined as alternative forms of memorialization created by marginalized communities. Women used visual culture to respond to and to complicate the narratives that Confederate monuments conveyed, including white male privilege. Moving beyond current debates centering on the ethics of removing Confederate monuments, this project tells the story of alternative styles of self-recognition enacted by women that emerged at the same time that the bronze and marble statues of Confederate generals were erected. It looks at how women marginalized from mainstream sources of power and restricted by Jim Crow laws created counter-monuments that challenged elite, white authority and asserted gender empowerment.