During Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020, Louisville protestors graffitied an aging statue of King Louis XVI. The Louisville Metro Council budgeted hundreds of thousands to repair it, without consulting the city's Commission on Public Art.
Commission head Chris Reitz spoke with LPM's Justin Hicks about why he's resigning over the issue. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Chris, I’ve seen photos of the current state of the statue and graffiti on it. BLM is scrawled on the chest and there’s red paint all over the face. Some people have strong feelings about that graffiti and that it added historic or artistic value. What do you think?
I'm sympathetic to many of the voices that want the graffiti removed in that, it seems to me, [the graffiti] was an opportunistic act: that this statue happened to be in front of a building that was central to the protests, and so because it was there, it made for an easy target.
My gut says, this is a document to a protest or a monument to King Louis, and that's the debate. For something to be art, I do think there needs to be intention.
The caveat here is that the statue is damaged beyond repair. It has been through too many freeze-and-thaw cycles. It's kind of falling apart. Pieces fall off. It's just not safe outside any longer.
I see, so it seems like the biggest repair issue to you is not the graffiti itself, but that this statue is too damaged to go back outside where it was. So what specifically caused you to resign?
Metro Council, in their annual budget, has required that the city spend $200,000 of allocated funds to clean and repair the King Louis statue. Those $200,000, which would be really key to preserving a lot of art in the city, feel more like a message than just kind of “business as usual” care for monuments in the city, and that's what I don't want to be a part of.
I have met with city council members, and I do think that they have sincerely held beliefs… beliefs having to do with policing in the city and crime. That crime is high in Louisville, that it is hard to recruit police officers because of a kind of general anti-police sentiment after the protests, and that, because the graffiti is offensive to police officers, we need to sort of wipe that away.
We can have those conversations. Where it stops for me is where we say, “Let's take taxpayer dollars and throw it into a statue that really cannot support that kind of conservation in order to — something.” And it's that “something,” that “what is left unsaid” that bothers me.
You resigned in a very public way this morning, with an op-ed in the newspaper. I have to ask: how does this moment feel for you?
Very strange. King Louis’ statue was not the hill I would ever imagine dying on. If I had a time machine that went back 10 years, and I said, "You know, you're gonna quit this commission over a work of art," I would have hoped it would have been, you know, I had a very strong belief in some stylistic or movement – but it's not. It's a monument to a French king that we didn't make.
When I asked myself if there had been an accident, if there had been a storm, if it were damaged by an act of God, do we think the city would have said, “I don't care what it costs, fix it. This is essential to our identity”? I don't think so.
Now, the conservation company that usually works on Louisville’s public art has refused to remove the graffiti. They say it violates their industry-wide conservation ethics rules. So the city has opened up a new contract, where they’re specifically searching for a “conservation expert” to remove it. How are they going to find someone to do this if it violates ethics?
I think that the greatest likelihood for the graffiti getting cleaned off is: this [Request for Proposals] fails, and someone on Metro Council demands that we just go outside , I don't know, and someone pressure washer cleans it off. That will seriously degrade the integrity of the statue. It requires expertise, but experts aren't going to do it. I mean, it's hard to imagine that they would run the risk of losing accreditation for this one job.
