Until recently, it was a safe bet that people rarely noticed the statues around them. They stood, scattered all over the citys parks and public spaces: statues of people like Floyd B. Olson, Charles Lindbergh, Leif Erikson, or Nathan Hale in St. Paul; or Mary Tyler Moore, Kirby Puckett, Hiawatha, and Hubert Humphrey over in Minneapolis. Especially these days, with most noses buried in smartphones, theyve been the often-unseen background of everyday life.

Photo by Meg Spielman Peldo

Colleen Sheehy

I really dont think about statues that much, said Colleen Sheehy, when I asked the other day. Theyve really become a less important part of contemporary public art.

Sheehy is the executive director of Public Art Saint Paul, a nonprofit that has been dedicated to improving and maintaining art in the citys public realm. For Sheehy, statues are an old-fashioned idea of public art that does not reflect how she thinks about its role these days.

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Theyre upholding a longstanding tradition going back to ancient times of depicting people, most often historical leaders, and reifying official and authoritative perspectives on history, she explained. Public art has really moved away from that. Its not that treating a figurative sculpture never happens, but its not at the forefront of what public art is today.

Large statues of people are, indeed, a very old idea. They date back millennia the oldest life-size statue dates to 9,000 BC in modern-day Turkey but, as Sheehy describes, literal pillars of the community have mostly served the purposes of symbolizing power. For example, in a New York Times op-ed earlier this summer, art historian Erin L. Thompson defined a statue as a bid for immortality, a way of solidifying an idea and making it present to other people.

For some reason, maybe it was childhood memories from once being lost at Camp Snoopy, it wasnt the historical statues that bothered me. Instead, Ive always thought my least favorite St. Paul statues were the diminutive Peanuts characters scattered around the fringes of Rice Park. For years, Ive literally looked down at them as a clumsy attempt at placemaking, artificial vitality in a city that could use actual street life instead.

MinnPost photo by Bill Lindeke

Snoopy statues along Rice Park in St. Paul. Leif Erikson and Floyd B. Olson statues outside the Minnesota State Capitol.

You rarely see children depicted in public space, Sheehy explained. Theyre iconic figures that people know around the world, and it is sort a democratic gesture to have these children from the Peanuts comic strip, who are very philosophical, and youre just at their level. It creates a different kind of atmosphere in downtown thats friendly, that incorporates humor.

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Perhaps the best part of the Peanuts statues, their democratic playfulness, is anathema to the history of Western monumental culture. Statues are typically placed on a high dais, out of reach and imposing, and surrounded by stony inscriptions like He Discovered America. But it doesnt have to be that way, and one of Sheehys favorite St. Paul statues is more down-to-earth.

MinnPost photo by Bill Lindeke

Michael Price's F. Scott Fitzgerald statue in Rice Park, St. Paul.

I love that its at ground level, said Sheehy, referring to the sculpture of F. Scott Fitzgerald in Rice Park. [Price] really captures Fitzgerald as a regular person. I like that he is looking over the panoply of life and activity in Rice Park, and you can almost imagine that he might be thinking of writing a short story about it .

The other issue, of course, is who is depicted by our figurative monuments. For example, other than the former Twins greats around Target Field, its all but impossible to find a person of color or nonfictional Indigenous person in a statue. According to Sheehy, statues and monuments have an important quality, and the way that they symbolize social values can be both inspiring and incredibly oppressive. The ambiguity is certainly a feeling that holds true for many of the Twin Cities Black public artists.

I never had a great concern about statuesbecause I never saw me in them, said Ta-Coumba Aiken, a visual artist based in St. Paul. What I mean by that is, I did not see my African-American self in them, so I refuse to look at them. I refuse to believe they were greater than me or my people, so I did not study them.

Walker Art Center/Bobby Rodgers

In keeping with its democratic spirit, Shadows at the Crossroads is accessible, even in the age of COVID-19.

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It is an unconventional yet contemporary approach to how a memorial is bestowed and defined, said Christopher Harrison, a Minneapolis artist, who cited Shadows at the Crossroads as his favorite statue-adjacent public artwork. For Harrison, the grounded approach makes the Walker piece particularly poignant, and runs counter to a history of symbolism that has long neglected the lives of people of color and other marginalized communities.

I see statues and other monuments as encased historical records, archival institutions within the communal space, Harrison explained. How statues speak to truth from antiquity to present and future time for me determines their power and validity, their potency lying in how accurately they represent the character of the subject and the life that they portray.

Perhaps its the notion of permanence that is really the difference between a classical statue and contemporary public art likely to challenge, rather than reify, power structures. How can we assume that any statue erected in 2020 will still be relevant in a century?

Photo by Christopher Harrison

Come Together, a mural series, 2020 on Nicollet Mall.

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Instead of statues, after the George Floyd killing, artists like Harrison spent the last few weeks and months creating temporary murals. And, for a while, Harrisons work sat on Nicollet Mall, depicting timely messages. With downtown often deserted these days, I imagine that there were times when their only audience was Mary Tyler Moore.

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Twin Cities statues: ubiquitous but 'not at the forefront' of public art - MinnPost