HOWARD SKRILL
Dallas Lee Removal
30×8 inches, ink, gesso, gouache, pencil on torn paper, 2019
Artist’s Statement
After Charlottesville, monumental presences such as statues of the Confederate general Robert E Lee that have stood in places of memory and identity such as Lee Park in Dallas were being removed. To many residents of Dallas, monuments such as Robert E. Lee on Traveler have for decades communicated what the Mellon Foundation President, Elizabeth Alexander, describes as “instructions in non-personhood.” Statue removal is extraordinary to behold as with these yellow vested workers scampering over an oversized Lee and horse in a work on paper from 2019. Since the Lee removal pictured here, removals, splashings, toppling and defacing of monuments that instruct in “non-personhood” are multiplying exponentially and I am dedicated to follow where they lead in my art project, the Anna Pierrepont Series.
Howard Skrill creates plein-air and studio works on paper of extant monuments, attacks and toppling of monuments and monumental absences in order to explore their role in the erasure of public and private memory and construction of identity. Works from the series have been published worldwide standing alone and incorporated into pictorial essays and also exhibited frequently, including a solo exhibition at the Fairfield University Art Museum’s Bellarmine Galleries in 2020. He is an artist/educator living in Brooklyn, NY with his wife and began the Anna Pierrepont Series in 2013. Follow him at howardskrill.blogspot.com and https://www.fairfield.edu/museum/skrill/).
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