Also for r157:
"‘The Embrace’ is a tribute to love, justice, and the unsung"
Under a spotless blue sky one morning in early December, the artist Hank Willis Thomas teetered 40 feet up on a crane over Boston Common, gripped its rail tight, and looked down. Below him “The Embrace,” his 22-foot-tall bronze memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, shimmered in the morning sun, the arms of its entwined couple forming, from above, the shape of a heart.
Five years before, it had been just an idea, one with no guarantees. But after Thomas and his partner on the project, MASS Design Group, won the public competition to build the memorial in 2019, things got very real, very quickly. Now, countless sketches, renderings, computer models, and tabletop-sized 3-D printouts later, “The Embrace” was finally here, in the place it was meant to be.
Back on the ground, Thomas, visibly elated and uncharacteristically at a loss for words, shrugged, incredulous. “I mean, what can I say?” he mused, looking back at the piece over his shoulder, again and again, hardly trusting his eyes. “It’s here. I almost can’t believe it. But it really is.”
It was a last look for Thomas before the piece’s official unveiling on Friday, and he can be forgiven the disbelief. Just a few months ago, “The Embrace,” all 40,000 pounds of it, was in hundreds of pieces at the Walla Walla Foundry in central Washington State, one of few places on the planet capable of such a feat of fabrication. It arrived on a caravan of trucks to be assembled in November; now, with its seams ground smooth and its final patina a uniform shade of dusky bronze, it’s ready to speak for itself. With its spot on the Common just off Tremont Street, the bustle of downtown all around, the opportunity for conversation will be boundless.
It’s now a permanent feature of our urban landscape, an instant icon destined to be an enduring symbol of the city — our Statue of Liberty, as Karin Goodfellow, the city’s director of public art, once said to me. And what a symbol it is.
In a city infamous for its ugly history of racism, it’s profoundly hopeful, an emblem of racial tolerance, justice, and love — the Kings’ life’s work, in the place where they met as students, galvanizing their sense of purpose. But let’s also give the piece its due as a game-changing work of monumental public art more broadly.
For centuries, memorial monuments have hewed to a standard: a solitary figure, sometimes a group, upright and gazing stoically into the distance. In Boston, we tend to like ours on horseback: George Washington, down the way in the Public Garden, or Paul Revere at Old North Church. They epitomize a persistent myth: that a single person, usually a man, almost always white, can claim the mantle of greatness alone.
“The Embrace” rejects that convention explicitly: Surrounding the piece is a memorial plaza studded with the names of dozens of activists whose own devotion to the cause of racial justice never earned them comparable renown. Gathered here, they raise each other up and reaffirm that justice is the work of both the many and the unsung.
(cont'd)
