In Defense of the Logan Statue

Grant Park, a 319-acre park in downtown Chicago, is home to some’s of the city’s most controversial monuments, among them a bronze statue of Christopher Columbus removed in 2020 during the George Floyd riots. In 2021, the city formed the Chicago Monuments Project (CMP) to assess its collection of memorials, monuments, and public art, and make recommendations for rethinking the role of monuments in representing a more equitable, inclusive history. The CMP identified 41 works with problematic histories, including the equestrian statue of General John Alexander Logan that stands in Grant Park’s south end. Despite Logan being a controversial figure who opposed black migration, the Logan Statue’s cultural significance transcends this maligned history. During the social unrest and police violence of the 1968 Democratic Convention, it became a locus and symbol of public protest, its image indelibly marked in our public imagination. As current authoritarian policies threaten the public’s right to protest and assembly, the Logan Statue stands as an emblem and portal into key event’s in our nation’s political history, a “demonstration ground” that offers insights and inspiration for contemporary activism and oppositional movements. This paper explores urban landscapes as spaces of public history and commemoration, using the Logan Statue as a case study. Through comparisons to other controversial monuments in Grant Park and explorations of various artist activations that use this equestrian statue as both subject and site, I analyze how the Logan Statue embodies histories of protest, while offering a critical lens for reinterpreting places of memory.