The image depicts the famous equestrian monument of Robert E. Lee from Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederate States of America. After George Floyd’s brutal murder, the statue became the site of protests and the protestors soon used it as a site for expressing their alienation from a system that could both lionize Lee who fought to establish a separate America where milions of our fellow Americans would be held in boundage and treated as non-persons. The indiscriminate murder of Mr. Floyd suggests that these poisonous ideas still infect our cities and towns like Riichmond with the statue and Minneapolis where Mr. Floyd life was taken. The image recounts the monument’s appearance as people gathered in its shadow and declared in words and marks on its surface, no more!

Howard Skrill is the creator of the Anna Pierrepont Series, (howardskrill.blogspot.com/https:///) plein air and studio works on paper that represent extant public monuments, monument removals and monumental in order to explore their impact on the erasure of public and priivate memory. Works from the series have been published and exhibited extensively standing alone including a solo exhibition in the summer of 2020 at the Bellarmine Galleries of the Fairfield University Art Museum entitled ‘Monumental Folllies [www.fairfield.edu/museum/skrill] and incorporated into pictorial essays such as my Spring 2020 autobiographical pictorial essay ‘Death Wish’ [http://www.slagglasscity.org/dispatches/death-wish-2/] published in Slag Glass City. Howard is a long time resident of Brooklyn, New York where he lives with his wife.