Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts & Letters Volume 4, Issues 1 & 2 | Page 37

harassed me.
Kew Gardens still bears the scars of Civic Virtue’s 2012 exile. I visited the site
twice to draw the dilapidated fountain that was its former home, behind the haphazardly
erected chain link fence. The fountain has had a large piece broken off its front. It is
covered with grime and weeds growing amongst the pebble stones at its base. On both
occasions, Queens residents (I was one for over a decade) approached me to express their
wounded pride in having their statue torn from their midst.
After visiting Civic Virtue multiple times in Green-Wood, I feel sorrow
experiencing the banishing of that oversized and awkward piece of marble that
figuratively buckled under so much political baggage. Decades after Tilted Arc’s
destruction, as I sat drawing the utterly banal plaza that remains, I shudder at the
narrow-mindedness that led to the work’s destruction and the indifferent treatment of
the plaza it formerly occupied. No words can adequately address the murderous silencing
Jean Cabut, Georges Wolinski, Bernard Verlhac and Philippe Honore and their
colleagues at Charlie Hebdo.
I dedicate this essay and the pictures included in it to those four men of France
and to the artists of all eras whose persons and/or works, including Frederick William
MacMonnies, Andres Serrano and Richard Serra, have been exiled, mutilated, stolen,
held up for ridicule or erased as a consequence of intolerance.

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