Catherine Tsilionis ‘21

Public Art Class Project:

On August 16th, 2017 the city of Baltimore removed four Confederate monuments in the middle of the night. The monuments were bronze statues depicting white soldiers, generals, women and one Supreme Court justice who was responsible for the Dred Scott Decision.

Students proposed an artistic intervention for one of the empty plinths in Baltimore after doing further research on the contested history of this monument.

Catherine Tsilionis Statement:

To replace the Confederate memorial of Roger B. Taney created by William Henry Rinehart, I wanted to provide an opportunity to reflect on a large issue in American history that has been carried into the modern day. I have developed a sculpture that addresses the past and present injustices in the United States’ legal system. My concept confronts the issue at hand in a way that does not draw attention to Roger B. Taney himself. I have designed a broken and cracked balance scale from the well-known symbol of Lady Justice to represent the imbalance and brokenness of the justice system in the past and present, specifically addressing the lives of African Americans. With the previous statue in mind, I wanted to incorporate the history of the case in which Roger B. Taney was involved, which was the Dred Scott versus Sanford.

On the left scale, there would be facts about the Dred Scott versus Sanford case engraved in addition to any other information about this decision that would represent the injustices that had occurred. In relation to this continuation of injustice in the present-day, I wanted to highlight facts and statistics about legal injustices that African Americans have faced within the past ten years, such as incarceration rates, false accusations, etc. This information would be engraved on the right scale.