How does The Embrace behave as a public work of art? We interviewed a critic, an artist and a journalist.

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In the week since the unveiling of The Embrace monument to Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King on Boston Common, there has been a lot of talk about it. But through all the noise, how does the monument stand on its own as a work of public art?

To find out, I spoke with a critic, artist and arts and culture journalist from GBH News.

Sebastian Smee, a Boston-based critic for The Washington Post, reviewed it this week.

“I saw a sculpture that was done in the language of what you might call realism or figurative realism,” Smee said. “It’s a realistic representation of enlarged human bodies, obviously. But I think for me it’s problematic because it leaves out parts of those bodies. It’s just kind of trying to turn a language into another language in a pretty clunky way. . And I think that’s partly why some people find it a bit ugly, or distorted in a way that makes them feel uncomfortable.”

Smee said he did not seek other reviews of the article before writing his own review.

“Public sculpture that causes a stir, that is in a very public place, is often mocked in that way,” he said. “It’s almost in the nature of public sculpture, that it’s going to divide opinion, and people are going to be very open about it. Because they’re aware that it’s been planned for a long time, that it costs expensive and it makes a statement. And if they don’t like the statement, or if they don’t like the amount of money that was spent, they get angry. But I think it had a side particularly ugly, and I think that’s unfortunate.”

Comments also came in from the likes of comedian Leslie Jones, who hosted The Daily Show and appeared on The Embrace this week. Before launching into how much she disliked the sculpture, she looked directly at the camera and addressed the proverbial white audience: “You don’t have to say [expletive] about that statue, she said impassively. You understand ? Black hands only.”

For me, it raised this question: with all the nuances of the sculpt conversations, there’s a part of it that gives the white gaze. So how does this figure into the conversation, from everyday people to art critics?

“She’s brilliant,” Smee said of Jones. “I kind of said, ‘Yeah, okay. Ouch. Fair enough. But, you know, it’s a public sculpture. It is over there. He’s an incredibly important national and international figure, Martin Luther King Jr. Coretta Scott King, also an incredibly important person. And the sculpture was made to speak to everyone. I really believe that.”

Artist Hank Willis Thomas and Embrace Boston had to meet high expectations, and different expectations from person to person. And as Smee writes in his column, the level of ambition in the sculptures is what really makes people care and perhaps makes him more vulnerable to being separated in the way he has.

“I think the sculpture itself will settle down,” Smee said. “People will be less animated about it. And, you know, it’s here for the long haul. And I commend Hank Willis Thomas and the people who endorsed him for going with something a little more ambitious than just a really conventional figurative sculpture.”

Thaddeus Miles, a local photographer who attended the unveiling last Friday, said he was puzzled by the response.

“I went to the unveiling, and the joy of the smiles on the dreams come true and the energy. And when it was unveiled, it was a beautiful structure to behold,” Miles said. “Now, I wasn’t surprised that some people didn’t like it. Because myself, I was like, ‘It’s going to take a minute to get used to it. I have to go up and touch it. I was a bit taken aback by the vitriol uttered by people who weren’t there, by people who didn’t have time to look at it, by people taking certain angles of a picture and make something out of it.”

I understand that the views of the monument are as unique as snowflakes dancing in the wind. I choose not to drink from the cup of cynicism, bitterness and hatred to satisfy my thirst for freedom. I prefer to drink from the cup of hope, love, unity and fulfilled dreams. pic.twitter.com/dhsqVyTvHL

— Thaddeus Miles (@Sifublack) January 17, 2023

People naturally turn to humor as a way to deal with difficult or complex things, and I guess there was an element of that. But the memorial’s existence in a city like Boston with its reputation for being racist toward the rest of the country but also has a hardy black population could make the jokes hurtful.

“I don’t disagree with people’s opinion about the statue, about the work that could be done. I think people just aren’t informed enough about the process,” Miles said. “I spoke to elders in the community who love it, who said to me: young people don’t understand that the movement was about love, that this statue is about love, that it was not about not necessarily the Kings. And then I’ve heard young people who have children say, ‘Why is a world outside of Boston and those inside of Boston so destructive and warping the minds of our young and how do they see it?”

“And we’re asking people, in order to change this systemic racism that we’ve faced, to think outside the box and be bold,” Miles said. “Why can’t Hank Willis Thomas think outside the box and be bold without us having a lot of over-criticism about how he saw the Kings, how he saw their love, how he was raised by his great -mother and looked at his hands, how Bill Withers song, “Grandma’s Hands”, what did it mean to him?

Part of the contribution of this monument to the Common was also to create a space for black Bostonians.

“People need to be able to talk about the pain this is causing for many, the feeling of being left out in the decision-making process for some, the hopes and dreams of others who have thought about it in a different way. I think those discussions need to happen,” Miles said. “And I think it’s really, when I start thinking about The Embrace and the statue itself, that we protect it in a way that the honesty was built, in the legacy of which it was built.”

Different schools of thought for Embrace reviews

Much of the criticism could be split into a few schools, said GBH arts and culture reporter James Bennett II. Academic style concerns like Smees say that the sculpture does not work well because it is executed in realistic language, even though it is not realistic sculpture. There are also the criticisms of those like Leslie Jones.

There’s the Leslie Jones critique you just heard on The Daily Show, there’s a handful of tweets about how it might portray a certain intimate act, Bennett said.

There was also a criticism, made by Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, that the sculpture essentially reduced kings to disembodied limbs.

That there’s a kind of violence there, and there’s no way to experience them in their real bodily fullness, Bennett said. I don’t necessarily agree with this review, but I understand where it’s coming from.

It doesn’t sit well with me that Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King are reduced to body parts – just their arms. Not their faces, their expressions.

For such a large statue, dismembering MLK and Coretta Scott King is… a choice. A deliberate. pic.twitter.com/Asi0SCHtPg

— Karen Attiah IS ON INSTAGRAM @karenattiah (@KarenAttiah) January 16, 2023

Finally, there are the people who look at the sculpture, in the absence of a massive plaque or a name tag, and ask themselves: what are we really looking at?

Here’s the thing, though: By virtue of it being public art and having a conversation, in my opinion, it’s like: You know his MLK now, Bennett said. There’s a degree of good faith that has to be taken with an argument like that, because we know what we were talking about.

Bennett recalled a sculpture by Constantin Brancusi called Bird in Space, an elongated column that widens in the middle, balanced on a small pedestal. It is a work intended to evoke the movement of birds in flight rather than their literal form.

But he said the online review of the sculpture was incomplete.

It’s a three-dimensional sculpture, and we kind of play with that proverbial feeling that everyone feels or sees a different part of it and can’t quite figure out what it is, Bennett said. A lot of the reviews I’ve read have been about sharing a single two-dimensional image, and a lot of people talking about it haven’t gone to see it for themselves. Many people talking about it may not have understood the connection the Kings had to the city of Boston and the Blackness therein.

Bennett said he hopes the piece will spark more conversations about the practicalities of creating public art.

One thing I liked to see was someone who was like… How come you don’t do hyper-realistic sculptures and paintings, in a neoclassical or romantic style, he says. And it’s like, well, how come you’re not paying a full-time salary for these artists, giving them the room, giving them the advice, so they don’t have nothing else to focus on than painting and a single sculpture for a period of three years? So I think that really opened up a discussion about how art is created in a contemporary setting.

GBH News Jeremy Siegel and Gal Tziperman Lotan contributed to this article.

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