Up in Arms: The Embrace and Public Perception
by Catherine Lennartz
After six years of planning, The Embrace, a sculpture depicting the intertwined arms of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, was unveiled in the Boston Common on January 16, 2023, to mark Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (fig. 1). It was designed by Hank Willis Thomas with MASS Design Group in response to a call for proposals by Embrace Boston, the City of Boston, and The Boston Foundation. They wished to honor Dr. King and recognize his connection to the city. When it was unveiled, it faced scrutiny and lewd criticism, especially from commentators online. My investigation into this backlash fits into my broader dissertation research on three contemporary artists working in North America who create commemorative work addressing the human rights violations attendant to settler colonialism.
Grounded in postcolonial theory, my analysis of memorial trends accepts that the cultural, political, and economic legacies of colonialism and its power structures continue to shape relations, identities, and representations around the world. I document the way North American artists memorialize the rights violations of colonialism and the ways in which those ills persist in society today. My analysis of The Embrace will be part of a chapter dedicated to the public art of Hank Willis Thomas in the United States which addresses racial violence during and after slavery. The two other chapters of my dissertation examine the work of Rebecca Belmore and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, considering installations, performances, and interactive pieces as commemorative. As such, public perception plays an important role in how “successful” each of the studied works are at commemorating systemic injustices. In the case of The Embrace, I argue that it was not only aesthetics, but ill-defined and inconsistent goals that provoked negative feedback from audiences.
In 2017, project initiator and tech entrepreneur Paul English was quoted as saying, “I want it to be epic,” vocabulary not often used when talking about creating a memorial to a civil rights activist who was assassinated for his beliefs.1 The project’s website at the time stated that the goal of this new memorial was “to inspire visitors by Dr. King’s words, and to also reflect on Boston’s history with race and civil rights.”2 This broad and somewhat unfocused statement changed on the website over the years from “Dr. King’s words” to “Dr. King’s work,” (emphasis mine) and from an invitation to “reflect” on Boston’s history, to a challenge to “make Boston a better place for all our residents and visitors.”3 By the time Thomas was involved in the project, love had been added as a core value on Embrace Boston’s website. This stemmed from the artist’s focus on Coretta’s influence on Dr. King in developing their shared philosophy of nonviolent resistance.4 The sculpture’s form was inspired by a photograph of the couple hugging after Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 (fig. 2).5 Typically, monuments dedicated to resistance against human rights abuses—or, in this case, racial and economic injustice—must “develop and clearly articulate deliberate goals and strategies in [their] process, form, content, and programming,” according to a 2007 report on memorialization and democracy.6 Instead of driving the vision for the memorial, the focus on love was an afterthought, compounding the already mixed messages coming from organizers. The inconsistency around messaging primed the public for disappointment, as their expectations did not align with the completed monument.
In the days following the unveiling of The Embrace, critics online voiced their discontent with the aesthetic form of the memorial. Many commentors were unsure what they were looking at while others claimed that the statue depicted sexual acts (figs. 3-5).7 Beyond messaging, I believe that much of the sculpture’s formal difficulties stem from the positioning of its disembodied arms, and from the way it breaks from traditional sculpted monuments of whole figures standing or mounted on horseback. None of the four limbs attach to a body, producing physiologically confusing junctions: Scott King’s arms meet at a single point, skipping her shoulders and body width and creating an unnatural angle with her arms (fig. 1). Even with online backlash subsiding, these immediate misreadings limit the memorial’s capacity for remembrance.
Figures 3-5. Embrace Boston and Boston Ujima Project (@embracebos; @ujimaboston), Happy Launch Day, Instagram, January 13, 2023.
In my dissertation, I consider The Embrace in conversation with and possibly in answer to Alfred Frankowski’s pessimistic view of the landscape of Black memorialization in the United States through the context of post-racial discourse. Frankowski understands the post-racial discourse of memorials as designating “a series of contemporary practices that refers to our antiblack or racist past in a way that makes racism and its past far too distant and almost completely illegible,” thus limiting our ability to see the present as a continued yet distinct manifestation of that racism.8 By combining a physical memorial with extensive cultural programming and community outreach, Thomas and his collaborators do not restrict the problems of racism to the past and thus actively counteract the illegibility Frankowski describes. The activism they sought to inspire was overshadowed by the inflammatory public response, actually drawing attention to the “continued manifestation of racism” Frankowski believes is being erased. Though this was not intended by Thomas and his team, who focused on the impact of the Kings’ love for one another, negative and racist comments online highlight the need for a continued conversation around Black memorialization in the United States.
The issues of memorial intent and public perception are not unique to Thomas’ work; they will enter into my discussion of all three artists I am studying. Each of my chapters sheds light on the memorial practices of one artist, engaging deeply with a theme central to their work. For Thomas, this means a focus on community engagement and activism. For Rebecca Belmore, I explore the idea of empathy as it has been theorized both within art history and beyond. For Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, I use his concept of relationality to show how participation and interactivity have their place in commemorative practices. As debates continue across North America around the removal of monuments, my research seeks to understand what could or should be replacing the glorification of problematic figures. Studying what kinds of commemorative practices are emerging now can help us make sense of the problems and injustices that we are still grappling with in postcolonial societies.
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Catherine Lennartz is a doctoral candidate at Boston University in the History of Art and Architecture Department. Her research examines the intersections of contemporary memory-focused art, exhibitions, and commemoration, especially as they relate to human rights violations and Indigenous issues in North America. Catherine has previously held positions at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and Pointe-à-Callière, Montreal Archaeology and History Complex.
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1. Jon Chesto, “Mayor Backs New Plan to Build MLK Memorial in Boston,” The Boston Globe, September 20, 2017, https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2017/09/19/boston-mayor-help-tech-executive-build-mlk-memorial-boston/SE3bs0NuYOu4mUs75pbEHP/story.html.
2. Lisa Creamer, “Boston Seeks A New Statue To Honor Martin Luther King Jr.’s Legacy,” WBUR, September 20, 2017, https://www.wbur.org/news/2017/09/20/mlk-memorial-boston.
3. See the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for previous versions of The Embrace Boston website: https://web.archive.org/web/*/embraceboston.org*; https://web.archive.org/web/*/mlkboston.org*; https://web.archive.org/web/*/kingboston.org*.
4. Janell Ross, “The Artist Behind the MLK Jr. Sculpture Has a Message for Critics,” Time, January 22, 2023, https://time.com/6249068/martin-luther-king-sculpture-hank-willis-thomas-interview/. The call for proposals did mention the couple, but this was mostly absent from the original messaging on the website.
5. Anastasia Tsioulcas, “New MLK Statue in Boston Is Greeted with a Mix of Open Arms, Consternation and Laughs,” NPR, January 17, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/01/17/
1149491284/martin-luther-king-mlk-statue-boston-consternation-laughs-reaction-coretta.
6. Sebastian Brett et al., Memorialization and Democracy: State Policy and Civic Action, Conference Report (Santiago de Chile, 2007), 27.
7. Embrace Boston and Boston Ujima Project (@embracebos; @ujimaboston), “Happy Launch Day,” Instagram, January 13, 2023, https://www.instagram.com/p/CnXizgQOyUy/.
8. Alfred Frankowski, The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Toward a Political Sense of Mourning, Philosophy of Race (Lexington Books, 2015), Introduction.