GWAR's Dave Brockie shows us Richmond public art

That's pretty horrible. And humorous as well.

Oh wow that is funny.

Ohhhh...my...goodness--well, he said it, and out loud.

Let me just put in my half pfennig. Ashe was more than a tennis player. He produced memoirs and histories, and marched as an activist.

His passing diminished public discourse and I've thought several times in this political season how we'd benefit by having Ashe still here to give his observations.

The segregated Richmond of Ashe's youth gave him one basic choice if he sought to advance himself in sport: leave. Yet this was home to him, and of his immediate family, and being a Richmonder, there was always the tug of home.

He was in many respects, a Richmonder's Richmonder; eloquent, witty, courteous and at times self-deprecating, though driven and ambitious. And he had our vanishing slipped diphthong Richmond accent that few voices here possess anymore.

All this being said, not one of the Monument Avenue statues--except maybe for Maury's (my personal fave--from the artistic and historic perspective) was placed on Monument Avenue without controversy. Either the location was disputed, the commissioning process thought rigged, the size of the monument argued about, on and on.

Heck, in 1966 Monument Avenue almost got an aluminum Salvador Dali statue to honor Southern women. You think the Ashe is a strange piece...Richmond due to its misplaced pride let go an incalculable amount of tourism dollars for the curious who'd come to seen a colossal Dalí outdoor sculpture--featuring his pinky as the pedestal. But one image of the proposal ran large as life on the front page of the newspaper--and that killed the project quicker than you can say "melted clock."

Such is the nature of public art -- even if people approve of the installation, they seldom agree on any of the details.

But the tumult surrounding the Ashe placement was memorable, unique, and in the end, somewhat sad. One of the first sites bruited for the piece was next to the Byrd Park tennis courts--where he was not allowed to play as a young man, or in front of the corrugated metal Arthur Ashe Center on North Boulevard. Ashe himself never asked to be placed on Monument.

The statue was said to be "temporary" should a better site present itself. Nobody really believed this then, and I doubt anybody would seek now to remove him to another location now.

However, one of the aspects of the Ashe statue tumult that is little remembered now is that had not his declining health intervened, Ashe was considering placing in Richmond the "Hard Road To Glory African American Sports Hall of Fame." He named the potential center after his multi-volume work on black athletes in the U.S.

The statue would have gone there and nobody would've said a word about its appropriateness. But Ashe died, the project fizzled, and here we are.

Putting Ashe there makes a kind of sense, though you have to strain a bit. Traveling west, the statue is the newest of them all, and is the last after Matthew Fontaine Maury, whose greatest accomplishments were in oceanography, not the Civil War. (His statue contains one of the four women on Monument Avenue, or three, depending if you count "Vindicatrix" atop her pedestal at the Davis Monument as a symbolic figure, not a real woman).

And, among Ashe's talents, Ashe was not an artist. He discussed with the sculptor the shape and form of the statue a short time before his death. Then the piece had to go through a public committee, and, well, that's where everything went awry.

The horrendous uproar that followed was public and embarrassing. I attended the unveiling; but the mayor at the time didn't, nor did Ashe's wife. Friends of mine told me then they fully expected some yahoo with a truck and winch to come in the dark of night and try to yank Ashe down, or for potshots to be taken by drunken goofs. None of this has happened, and that's saying something.

Allmost every day, people park their cars and take pictures, some of them African American visitors with their children. Say what you will about its aesthetic attributes, or lack thereof, the Ashe monument possesses profound meaning for individuals some of whom wouldn't have thought a statue to an African American would ever be placed on RIchmond's Monument Avenue.

Dave Brockie Rules!

Um, no, excuse me, they were not fighting to keep black people enslaved. Please try to educate yourself. Robert E. Lee was the finest Gentleman whoever drew breath and a paragon of Christian virtue. Jefferson Davis said 'We fight not for slavery, but for independence"

Arthur Ashe was a great man , no doubt, but I dont believe that was the place for his statue. They should have put it at the Arthur Ashe Center on Boulevard.