The poet and author and one of the memorial's consultants, Maya Angelou, told The Washington Post, yesterday, the quote makes King seem arrogant. Actually, she put it in harsher terms.
"The quote makes Dr. Martin Luther King look like an arrogant twit," she said.
— kcrw.com
Today, All Things Considered's Melissa Block spoke to memorial's executive architect, Ed Jackson Jr., who explained the quote was paraphrased because of design constraints. At first, he said, the quote was going to be placed on the south face of the monument, but instead the designers decided that they wanted visitors to see the quotation ("Out of a mountain of despair, a stone of hope...") that explained the whole concept first. So they decided to move the quotation to the north side, where the sculptor had already done some work adding striations that left little room for a lengthy engraving.
That's the technical explanation. But Jackson also said he disagreed with Angelou. He said the quote did not make King sound arrogant and said the memorial includes 14 other quotations and that the full experience cannot be determined by one small part of it.
Seems like some of our members agree that the monument is not ideal - discuss
2 Comments
I also thought of Michelangelo's 'Prisioners' series . 19thC artists re-interpreted this transformation motif in many forms such as crashing waves that become charging horses. plant-life as garden furniture, bird or fish shaped transportation and other metonymy that I don't remember now.
The later larger- than-life social-realist memorials of the Stalin period trace back to those very expressive 19thC examples of transformation and this is the motif I see here, redone in the MLK monument. It is inspired in a sense , by Michelangelo's last , some argue, unfinished works.
eric chavkin
communist statue (north korea)
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