The Columbus Monument at the Capitol: Public Interventions, Democratic Intentions
This case study of the former site of the Columbus monument in St. Paul, Minnesota supports a course module for the place-based course, “Art in the Cities”. Already well-documented in a chapter of Erin L. Thompson’s Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments; I will expand the site’s contexts to include the histories of Italian-American artists, artisans, and labor organizers, the radical labor history of Minnesota, and the Indigenous-led activist interventions at the site, including the monument’s takedown in a civil disobedience action in 2020. Other contexts include ecology and resource extraction specific to the monument’s composition, and finally, the site-specific performance art projects by Karthik Pandian, In the River (2022) and Surrendur (2025). Art in the Cities supports students working in the public realm. I demonstrate how liberal arts methods (archival research, oral history, cultural studies) can support artistic interventions on public sites. As Judith F. Baca, in their influential 1995 essay, “Whose Monument Where?: Public Art in a Many-Cultured Society” predicted, the work of the public artist is “to investigate and reveal the memory contained in the ground beneath a ‘public site,’...revisioning official history”. How might students' engagement with liberal arts methodologies support their public art practice?