About Washington’s Next!

Washingtonʼs Next! began as a response to President Trumpʼs tweets following the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017. One of these tweets read, in part, “Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson - whoʼs next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!”

Washington’s Next! aims to answer this question by adding to and complicating conversations about what monuments ought to be contested, who these monuments marginalize, and how they operate in the present-day to reinforce oppressive values from the past within our public space.

The choice to focus on George Washington was dictated not only by the President’s tweet, but also by the degree to which George Washington, among all of the founders, tends to be viewed as beyond reproach. We believe that the fact that the champion of (white) American liberty was also the enslaver of nearly a thousand human beings, over the course of his lifetime; and died a billionaire (in today’s dollars) due to the wealth produced by those he enslaved, as well as the land that he stole from indigenous people, gives us cause to argue that Washington should indeed be the next “Great Man” of the past whose memorialization must be called into question.

The centerpiece of Washingtonʼs Next! is a participatory commemorative experience, focused around the statue of George Washington in New York City’s Union Square Park. This was presented on Saturday, October 13, 2018, as part of the Art in Odd Places Festival. On that day we gathered at the statue and mounted a large painting in front of its pedestal, containing imagery related to Washington as an enslaver, as well as the date depicted in the statue (November 25, 1783, also known as “Evacuation Day,” the day that British troops left Manhattan at the end of the Revolutionary War), and the number 271, which we had determined through our research to be the number of people of African descent that Washington was enslaving on that same date.

We then set out empty chalkboards on the ground in front of the statue, to represent these enslaved people. The empty chalkboards invoked the metaphor of “erasure” that so powerfully describes the ways in which the oppressed—particularly those enslaved by men we are supposed to admire—are erased from our national narratives. For a few hours, these chalkboards stood empty, reflecting the absence of these people from public memory, in contrast to the man cast in bronze who towered over them. Then, we set out small plaques, each of which contained the name and a brief biography of one of those 271 people. We invited passersby to honor the Black people Washington enslaved by selecting a plaque, reading that person’s story, and writing their name on one of the chalkboards, leaving the plaque in front of it for others to read. For nearly six hours we talked, we listened, but most importantly, we engaged in a collective commemoration of a group of people who have been rendered invisible by the very fact that their forced labor enabled George Washington to become the first President of the United States.

In addition to this participatory commemoration, Washington’s Next! has engaged the public in several other venues and media, including:

Beginning on the one-year anniversary of Charlottesville, we tweeted daily from @WashingtonsNext, juxtaposing images of monuments to George Washington with archival quotations that conveyed how integral George Washington’s role as an enslaver was to his life, from the 1750s through the 1790s.

In the month leading up to the October 13 commemoration, we began a campaign on Instagram @WashingtonsNext, which offered more detailed elaboration on the themes and individuals that are at the center of Washington’s Next!

During the month of October, as part of the Art in Odd Places exhibition, we wallpapered a wall at Westbeth Gallery with 56 pages from George Washington’s diary, centered around the seven page list he made on February 18, 1786, of the Black people he was enslaving at and around his home plantation of Mount Vernon. Above and below this list “Washington’s Next!” was tagged in red spray paint.

On December 4, we brought together artists, activists, scholars, public historians, and policy makers for “Monument Racists: A Conversation about Challenging, Reframing, and Removing Statues” at Rutgers University-Newark. More information, including video from that event, can be viewed here.

In March through June 2019, an small installation representing the Washington’s Next! project was part of a contemporary art exhibition at the Old Stone House in Washington Park, Brooklyn, called “Race and Revolution: Reimagining Monuments.” The show was curated by Katie Fuller, and you can find more information about it here, and read a review in The Believer here.

Over Summer Break in 2019, Rutgers University-Newark undergraduate students from a range of majors in the humanities and social sciences engaged in a series of training to be ready to volunteer in the upcoming remounting of “Washington’s Next!” (date TBA). Their participation is supported by a Rutgers-Newark Cultural Programming Grant.

How You Can Support Washington’s Next!

There is a lot more to come in 2019 & 2020!

To keep up-to-date with Washington’s Next! join our mailing list.

We also welcome all kinds of support, including spreading the word about this project—we encourage you to use the hashtag #WashingtonsNext on social media, so that we can track the spread of the conversation prompted by this project.

If you’d like to make a monetary contribution towards our continued work to fully document the October 13, 2018 participatory commemoration in Union Square, and to create the installations and commemorations we are planning for the future, please contact us at WashingtonsNext@gmail.com or use the form below.

And if you would like to get involved as a volunteer, or have an idea for a collaboration, please reach out to us at WashingtonsNext@gmail.com, or use the form below.