Kansas City in Five Monuments
They're everywhere, once you start looking. (And I've started looking.)
Hello friends and fellow monument enthusiasts!
Last weekend after a book festival in Kansas City, I spent a few hours checking out monuments. This was before driving seven hours south through eastern Kansas and Oklahoma to attend a documentary film festival in Hot Springs, Arkansas. If that sounds like a lot, it was. Somewhere along the way, Covid finally caught up with me.
But before it did, I went to see monuments in Kansas City. I had only a few hours, so I picked five and plotted out a route.
Kansas City has at least 200 fountains, monuments, memorials and statues, making it an unexpectedly helpful place for conversations with other writers and early research to help clarify my next potential project. An individual city's monuments are distinctive enough to say something about it as a place. Yet they also reflect broader national cultural trends about art and design, power and taste—and what matters to people at particular moments in history.
Here's what spoke to me in Kansas City:
The Scout might be Kansas City's best-known sculpture. It sits on a hill overlooking downtown, in a park also home to a World War I memorial and museum as well as a pioneer mother monument and a money museum at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. The Scout was sculpted by Cyrus Edwin Dallin, an artist born in Utah who spent much of his adult life in Arlington, Massachusetts. The statue of a Sioux guide was made for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. When Dallin and The Scout came through on the railroad, Kansas City wanted the artwork to stay. So citizens raised the money to buy it; donors got their names printed in the newspaper. The Scout was dedicated in 1922.
In its early years, The Scout was plagued by vandalism. Vandals often made off with the bow and quiver of arrows, which seems not only annoying but ironic considering Dallin was an Olympic medalist in archery in 1904.
Dallin is equally famous for his 1893 depiction of the Angel Moroni, which sits atop the Salt Lake Temple of the Church of Latter-Day Saints. (He was not a Mormon, however, and initially turned down the commission.) I'm intrigued by Dallin's work because it has an anti-imperial bent that defied some of the artistic and cultural trends of his time and set him apart from his peers. And yet as Cynthia Culver Prescott notes in her book Pioneer Mother Monuments, Dallin also made several such tributes to the conquest of the western U.S.—as well as many works that depict Indigenous Americans as "the mythic noble savage."
Of all the monuments I visited on a Sunday morning, The Scout had the most active interaction with the public. Two younger people sat below it drinking coffee and looking out over the city; two older adults using walkers circled around the base to view it.
Bird Lives. A funky and apt memorial to Charlie "Bird" Parker, the saxophonist and bebop visionary. Parker, who struggled with heroin and alcohol addiction, died in 1955 at age 34 in New York City.
The memorial resides in the city's historic 18th & Vine Jazz District, where Parker got his start as a musician. It's near the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and the American Jazz Museum. The 10-foot-tall bronze memorial was crafted by the Los Angeles sculptor Robert Graham. The sculpture was dedicated in 1999.
No one else was visiting the plaza where it resides when I was there, but many people drove by. There are several youth baseball fields near the statue. I like to think of all those young athletes seeing this monument on their way to and from practice and games, and how a jazzman’s massive green head will plant in their subconscious and appear to them in unexpected ways the rest of their lives. Bird lives, indeed.
Abraham Lincoln and His Son Tad is one of those monuments that seems as though it's been there forever. But it was commissioned in 1983 and installed in 1986 at City Hall. It was made by the Oregon sculptor Lorenzo Ghiglieri, who died in 2020 at age 88.
At the dedication, Ghiglieri said he was trying to show Lincoln “as a caring and loving father…what's really important to the whole world is how we care for each other and how we care for the world.”
(For more on Ghiglieri’s family, see this classic 2001 Willamette Week piece about his son’s business dealings here in Oregon.)
Admittedly, this is not my best photo of the bunch. I snapped it quickly through the chainlink fence that surrounds the City Hall plaza; news reports say the plaza is closed until a parking garage beneath the building is stabilized.
I wish I'd been more thoughtful about the photo. It doesn't reflect how strange it was to see Lincoln—depicted in a domestic moment—across the street from a larger-than-life statue from 1934 of President Andrew Jackson on horseback. Kansas City voters in 2024 may decide they want to replace Jackson with a tribute to President Harry S. Truman.
You may be wondering why there are so many monuments to our seventh president. Jackson really is everywhere. The statue of Jackson installed in 1853 in front of the White House was the first bronze monument ever made in America. And while there were only four casts of that specific statute, its influence was wide. Having a Jacksonesque statue on horseback was considered the height of artistic fashion at a time when bronze monuments were just beginning to be made by American artists.
The Corps of Discovery was the only monument I saw from a living sculptor. This surprised me because I thought enthusiasm for Lewis and Clark monuments might be out of fashion. But this sculpture was installed in 2000 overlooking the Missouri River. It’s a tribute to the 150th anniversary of Kansas City by the sculptor Eugene Daub, who is now 80.
Left to right are the dog Seaman; York; Captains Lewis and Clark; and Sacajawea and her baby, Jean-Baptiste. I recently read The Lost Journals of Sacajawea by Debra Magpie Earling. I cannot look at monuments to the Corps of Discovery the same way after reading this extraordinary novel. (Earling will be on a panel at the Portland Book Festival on Nov. 4.)
Note that the sculptor's subjects are all looking elsewhere, like a group of people posing for multiple cameras. Also note that Sacajawea joined (and left) the corps in present-day North Dakota, some 1,000 river miles west of Kansas City.
The monument sits in the middle of a cobblestone turnaround. A few down-on-their-luck people were parked there in janky cars. While I was photographing the monument, a man asked me to call someone for him on my phone. He wasn’t in medical distress so I declined; I was wary because I had camera equipment with me. I'm sorry, I wish I had been able to do more.
Pioneer Mother is laden with cultural baggage, but it sure does photograph nicely! It is sited beautifully, too. It really does look like settlers coming across the tallgrass prairies.
I realize your tolerance may be low for the obsession phase of my early research into monuments, so I'll keep this section short even though it’s rich material. This monument is by Alexander Phimister Proctor. It's from 1927, and represents one of the earliest examples of the pioneer mother monuments that swept the West in subsequent decades.
The Kansas City statue may have been indirectly inspired by a 1922 illustration for the novel The Covered Wagon. Which then led to a silent film based on the novel, one of the first on-screen epic westerns. Which led to an explosion in the Western as a genre. (Again, according to Prescott's book, mentioned above.) All this in Kansas City, friends.
If you want to read more about Proctor's sculptures, including the ones torn down in 2020 at the University of Oregon, I wrote a piece for Stateline last year that touches on the impact of pioneer mother monuments in the West.
After seeing all these monuments in Kansas City, three things occur to me:
I'd like to visit a foundry to learn more about how bronze statuary is cast. And to film it, of course!
I'm feeling a need for a refresher art history course. I oughta be able to look at monuments and interpret the allegories and symbolism at work and understand what their placement says about them...and more.
It's fun to visit these monuments to photograph them and research them on my own, but I’m even more interested in how other people feel about these works and how—or if—they want to replace some of them.
Can you tell I’m getting more excited about the possibilities of this project?
Yours,
Erika
THE NEWS
All the links…
You can stream To Be Rich! It's playing virtually at the Green Film Festival of San Francisco for the next week. It costs $10 to stream it and several other short films. I apologize for the price. Film festival protocols require me to keep it password-protected for the next few months. I promise to release it for free in the spring!
Huh, oil tycoon Harold Hamm wrote a book. Some of you may get a kick out of reading the Amazon reviews, which suggest that even the title made grown white men cry. I will not be spending my hard-earned money on it, but if anyone comes across a freebie, I'll Venmo you the shipping costs.
The numbing sameness of modern war footage. (An astute analysis of the banality of drone footage in contemporary documentary filmmaking, too.) "The proliferation of images via cell phones may have taken away the war photographer’s ability to create a single, arresting, and iconic image, but their accumulation will haunt us."
A new emergency brownie recipe. I've told many of you about emergency brownies, right? It’s the brownie recipe I've made for years. When Chris and I met, I shared the recipe, which was a gift to me, really. I call them "emergency brownies" because they activate whenever you have a brownie emergency—a celebration, unexpected dinner guests, personal tragedy, chocolate cravings. You name it, they work. But this recipe may be the new household emergency brownie go-to. Chris made them for me last week when I was under the weather with COVID-19. His adaptations included mixing them in a separate bowl and lining his cast-iron skillet with parchment paper for baking. Pretty sure they have healing properties!
If you are homebound and need a break but not too much, one of the Louise Penny mysteries is about a statute that falls off its base and kills somebody. Now, if I just knew which one. Per google: A Rule Against Murder.
Ooooh, love it, thank you for the recommendation!