| This study traces the history of commemorative public art in America during the last four decades of the twentieth century. Memorials in the Nation's Capital and across the country are examined in terms of chronology, stylistic topology, subject matter, innovation, and public reception. Special emphasis is placed on the National Vietnam Veterans Memorial (NVVM) in Washington, D.C.;During the 1960s and 1970s, commemorative public art was generally reviled. Attempts to commission monuments often failed, and the majority of the few dedicated were either based on nineteenth-century academic styles, or were unsuccessful attempts to blend Modernist abstraction with narrative commemorative programs. Halting attempts at innovation did occur, however, particularly in the steps taken towards the new participatory memorial type.;This type was fully realized in Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982), which allowed visitors to construct commemorative content through spatio-temporal experience, rather than passively receiving didactic content from an iconic object. Lin's Wall was initially controversial, but ultimately became the most influential monument in America, affecting the style, iconography, and positive reception of memorials in the 1980s and 1990s. Frederick Hart's Three Fightingmen (1984), an academic figurative group added to the site to placate conservative critics, influenced a resurgence of narrative statuary across the country.;During the 1980s and 1990s, commemorative public art proliferated. The NVVM sparked the creation of state and local Vietnam memorials, which in turn stimulated public desire for memorials to veterans of other wars, and many other subjects. Subject matter expanded to include women, minority groups, and victims of disasters. In 1993, Glenna Goodacre's figurative Vietnam Women's Memorial was dedicated on the NVVM site. Memorial types also expanded as contemporary artists embraced participation and developed innovative strategies for commemoration.;The aesthetic and political issues surrounding Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Hart's Three Fightingmen have resuscitated, framed, and expanded the critical and public discourse surrounding subsequent memorials in America. Conventional figuration and accelerating participatory innovation are practiced simultaneously, and often uneasily coexist in single monuments. |
