Though she never expected her expertise to be this timely, the attack on white, patrilineal statuary was right in her wheelhouse: “I had studied how the Islamic State, for instance, enforced their vision of a hate-filled future by destroying ancient statues.

As a professor of art crime, she has spent years studying the ways in which cultural heritage is replaced, erased, and destroyed-institutionally or otherwise. But if anyone would know the most effective ways to take down public art, Thompson would. It was tongue-in-cheek, sort of-and was, in any case, just a follow-up to an archaeologist’s tweet of a napkin schematic detailing ancient methods of moving obelisks. For many, tearing them down, or simply watching them be torn down, was both cathartic and symbolic: The violent tradition of racial oppression-against Native Americans and Black Americans in particular-might finally be rooted out.Įrin Thompson dove into this phenomenon somewhat infamously on social media, with a tweet about using chains instead of rope if you wanted to pull a statue down faster. Lee, men who articulated the degree to which the South’s Lost Cause mythology had been woven into the backdrop of American culture, totems of just how deeply racism had been institutionalized. For anyone old enough, the memes recalled watching the Berlin Wall crumble in real time, or the footage of Saddam Hussein’s statue being toppled by a tank during the fall of Baghdad in 2003.Īmid the public outrage over the murder of George Floyd, and what his death reminded us about racial injustice in America, the most popular targets of demonstrations were also the most familiar: Confederate generals like Stonewall Jackson and Robert E.

If the summer of 2020 had a visual refrain, it was of statues coming down, the likes of Jefferson Davis and Christopher Columbus being sawed and pulled from plinths, dragged into rivers.

Erin thompson smashing statues