20 Time April 25/May 2, 2022
many others—can be safer. “I hope
that the ways in which the humanities
move along the racial conversation
in this country —thorny, difficult,
unsettled,” she writes, “will help
us think in terms of process rather
than finish line and leave us ever
more open to the complexities that
the humanities and the arts can
reveal to us.”
The humanities, of course, have
a spotty record when it comes
to oppression. Alexander heaps
particular scorn on Stone Mountain,
a Georgia vacation destination,
where people picnic in the shadow
of the largest bas-relief sculpture
in the world (90 ft. high), of three
Confederate generals, which was
completed in the 1970s. “It is a
shrine to white supremacy, standing
today,” says Alexander. “I think
people should be curious about
that.” Curious too was the timing of a
stained-glass window at Washington
National Cathedral that featured
Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee.
It was installed in the 1950s, shortly
after, Alexander notes, Brown v. Board
of Education banned school
segregation. “These figures are put
up as worthy of veneration,” she says,
“when in fact, they were
traitors to this country in a war that
was lost.”In a way, the book acts as a
background briefing on Alexander’s
vision for the biggest initiative in
the Mellon Foundation’s history, a
$250 million five-year plan to help
rethink monuments. “How do we
tell the story of who we are and who
we have been, in public spaces and
in the built environment?” she asks.
The Monuments Project will sponsor
new public art fixtures and museums,
finance research into how many
monuments there are and what they
celebrate, and help recontextualize
some existing works.
It will also support the removal
of some monuments, but only,
Alexander notes, when “communities
come to us, to say, ‘We’ve done the
work, and this is our idea for why we
no longer want this.’ ” She points to
the National Cathedral as an example.PoeTry is rarely a Paying gig. never has
been. John Donne was a priest. Langston
Hughes was a newspaper columnist and
a lecturer. William Carlos Williams was a
pediatrician. But it’s possible that Elizabeth
Alexander has taken the day job to a whole
new level: she’s currently the president of the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the biggest U.S.
nonprofit dedicated to the arts and humanities.
Its endowment sits at about $9 billion.
Having a poetry insider at the head of a big
grantmaking institute does not mean, however,
that poets have moved to the front of the
line for funding. Alexander has a much more
ambitious vision for the role that the arts and
culture play in the formation of society. And
during the pandemic she codified it, in her 16th
book, The Trayvon Generation. It’s a series of
meditations on cultural and artistic artifacts that
illuminate “the color line,” which she identifies
as “a fundamental, formative, and constitutive
problem” in the U.S., and on the role the arts
and humanities play in both drawing and
erasing that line. Alexander is like a cultural
archaeologist, dusting off and examining relics
and shedding new light on the society that
produced them. Except in this case, the relics
are still in use.
Alexander offers a real-life example of the
role artists can play when she brings a poet’s
clarity of language to the fraught national
discussion of critical race theory (CRT),
which, she writes, “provides tools helpful for
understanding that race is a social category
and not a biological fact and that racism is best
understood systemically rather than instance
by instance.” Why then has CRT become such
a national flash point? “The term has been
hijacked,” says Alexander from her home desk in
New York City, in front of an enormous abstract
landscape painting, “and is now a misnomer and
doesn’t describe the intellectual tradition that
comes from the academy.”
Her book, which sprang from an essay in
the New Yorker, is an exploration of whether
cultural expression can shape a world where
Black mothers’ sons, like Trayvon—and Michael
Brown and Tamir Rice and Stephon Clark and
Ahmaud Arbery and Daunte Wright and too
Supporting the
arts in crisisLessons from a
paintingPresidential
poetryMellon moneyMellon Foundation head
Elizabeth Alexander on
The Trayvon Generation and
the power of monuments
BY BELINDA LUSCOMBE