Tumult topples plan for Angelou statue
Despite three years of promises from San Francisco City Hall, there will be no statue of Maya Angelou installed outside the Main Library by the end of this year. In fact, three years of bureaucratic bumbling have resulted in exactly zero progress toward the easily achievable, worthwhile goal.
And now the artist originally selected to design our socalled progressive city’s third monument to a reallife woman — of the nearly 90 statues in the public collection — says San Francisco isn’t even worthy of an Angelou tribute.
“I don’t feel like the city of San Francisco actually deserves a monument to Dr. Angelou — I really don’t,” said Lava Thomas, a Black artist who lives in Berkeley. “Dr. Angelou certainly deserves a monument, and I hope that San Francisco can demonstrate that it is deserving of her.”
After a year of attempting to pry information from the Arts Commission about why her chosen monument was rejected last year, Thomas finally received a public apology from commissioners at their meeting last week. The panel also voted unanimously to put its second attempt at commissioning an Angelou monument on hold.
That’s great, but now there’s no road map for ensuring the Angelou monument actually gets created. Or when. It certainly won’t happen this year, which was the original timeline
back in 2017 — the idea being to unveil a statue to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote. (That’s Aug. 18, by the way!)
Understandably, Thomas is still stewing, refusing to have her stunning monument built until the city meets a list of demands.
And, meanwhile, Supervisor Catherine Stefani is unfortunately sticking to her insistence that the artwork be a traditional statue and not a more modern, creative depiction. She said Monday she’s glad the Arts Commission apologized to Thomas, because it’s the one that mishandled the process, but she still doesn’t support Thomas’ monument.
“They gave the artist the impression that it was a done deal, when really the selection process was far from over,” said Stefani, the project’s sponsor. “The design did not reflect the intent of my legislation, and the artist never should have been given the impression that it did. I look forward to turning the page and seeing the next round of designs.”
Frankly, it’ll be surprising to ever see a monument to Angelou outside the Main Library at this point. And if the city can’t even come together to install one statue to a beloved woman everybody agrees deserves to be celebrated, how is it ever going to solve the barrage of far more complex problems we face?
The process began in much more promising fashion back in June 2017, when thenSupervisor Mark Farrell introduced legislation calling on the city to increase representation of women in the public sphere to 30%, starting with the monument to Angelou outside the Main Library.
Of the city’s 88 public statues, just two represent real women: Sen. Dianne Feinstein has a bust in City Hall, and Florence Nightingale is depicted in a statue at the main entrance of Laguna Honda Hospital.
“It’s important that young women and women of every age see their own gender depicted across the public realm,” Farrell said back then. “San Francisco is exactly the right place to make it happen.”
In theory, yes. In reality, apparently not.
Farrell’s legislation passed, and the Board of Supervisors and mayor allotted money for the Angelou statue. The Arts Commission began its process to pick an artist and in the summer of 2019, a selection panel opted for Thomas, whose proposal is modern, moving and beautiful.
Called “Portrait of a Phenomenal Woman,” it’s a 9foot bronze book with Angelou’s face on the cover and a quote from the artist along the bottom reading, “If one has courage, nothing can dim the light which shines from within.” It depicts Angelou in her 40s with a short afro and hoop earrings.
Thomas said her design was “grounded in an ethos of inclusion and Black aesthetics” and was partly inspired by a large rectangular monument to the writer Ralph Ellison in Harlem.
The selection panel called Thomas’ monument “quietly radical,” and it was expected to easily be approved by the full Arts Commission. But then Stefani, who took over the legislation after Farrell left office, said the whole point was to create a traditional statue to Angelou, and the Arts Commission started the selection process all over again.
Only after Thomas spent countless hours creating her proposal did she learn it wasn’t anything like what Stefani, the project’s sponsor, wanted. And she spent a year trying to figure out what happened, including, she said, filing public records requests with the Arts Commission that were never answered.
Meanwhile, the commission started the artist selection from scratch, and Thomas declined to participate.
Last month, the commission’s visual arts committee held a meeting largely about the San Francisco statues that have been removed or toppled and what should replace them.
During public comment, Thomas phoned in to talk about the importance of diversifying the collection and recount what happened to her proposal to honor Angelou. After the twominute time limit for public comment expired, Dorka Keehn, chair of the visual arts committee, cut off Thomas and declined to let her finish.
That prompted other people to call in to ask that Thomas be allowed to complete her statement.
“You can’t keep treating someone like this over and over and over in a public forum and not expect some repercussions,” Thomas said.
The Arts Commission agreed to let Thomas read her full statement at its Aug. 3 meeting, and Keehn and commission president Roberto Ordeñana issued public apologies to her. The commission also put the second attempt at finding an artist on hold.
Thomas said she’d consider applying again only if the commission agrees to her demands. They include Keehn stepping down as the committee chair, the commissioners and staff participating in racial and cultural equity training, and a meeting with the mayor for her and other Black women artists. There have been rumblings that Mayor London Breed didn’t like Thomas’ monument, but it’s hard to believe Breed would prioritize weighing in on the design of a statue when she’s coping with the COVID19 crisis and the city’s economic collapse.
Jeff Cretan, Breed’s spokesman, said the mayor is “supportive of welcoming a new monument to Maya Angelou to the city and looks forward to hearing from the Arts Commission on next steps.”
Keehn did not respond to a request for comment.
And here we sit three years later, nothing changed from when we started except for hurt feelings, time wasted and the city’s reputation in the arts world tarnished. Angelou certainly deserved far better than this.