In that electric summer of 2020, as America began a nationwide racial reckoning following George Floyd’s murder, the Valentine Museum briefly served as a refuge for protesters.
On June 1 of that year, Richmond police teargassed peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstrators at the Robert E. Lee Monument. That evening, police again used tear gas outside of City Hall to disperse protesters. Roughly a dozen people, including Style Weekly photographer Scott Elmquist, hid near the Valentine’s parking lot. Bill Martin, the museum’s director, invited the group inside, where they treated each other with milk washes to combat the effects of chemical agents on their eyes.
Now, tear gas canisters and less-lethal — or “rubber” — bullets that were fired by Richmond police at the Lee Monument that day are part of the museum’s new “Sculpting History at the Valentine Studio: Art, Power and the ‘Lost Cause’ American Myth” exhibit. The weapons are just one example of how the exhibition connects Richmond’s past to its present.
“Sculpting History” is housed in the former studio of Edward Virginius Valentine, a sculptor who created statues that helped define the South’s Lost Cause ideology. Until recently, visitors to the studio found themselves surrounded by busts and statuary that honored Confederate generals and politicians who worked in favor of white supremacy.
This space has been radically reimagined to investigate the insidious nature of the Lost Cause, and how those in power used this myth to inject racist ideas into practically every aspect of society.
In 2020, the studio, like the rest of the museum, was closed to the public because of the pandemic. After Floyd’s murder, the museum decided it was time for a major makeover and kept it shuttered even after it reopened the rest of the exhibits that June. Over the next three years, the Valentine conducted surveys, focus groups, programming and conversations to help determine how to reimagine the space.
“There was such an energy,” says Josh Epperson, a writer and co-curator of the exhibit with independent scholar Kate Sunderlin and Christina Keyser Vida, the project manager for “Sculpting History” and the Elise H. Wright Curator of General Collections at the Valentine. “It was the wake of George Floyd’s murder, all of the protests throughout the summer, so people were hungry to address things and get truth out there, but also reconsider how we engage with these racist objects.”
The space had last been overhauled in 2003, replacing racist language from the 1960s that had been installed to celebrate the Confederacy for the centennial of the Civil War. Where the 2003 version sought a more even-handed approach to its objects, the 2024 revision comes with an overt message.
In clear language, “Sculpting History” shows how a concerted effort was made to recast the Confederacy in a heroic light to defend a just cause. It argues that the Lost Cause was a campaign to convince people that: a.) the Civil War was fought to defend states’ rights, not defend slavery; b.) slavery was beneficial to both the enslavers and the enslaved; and c.) the founding of the Confederacy was not a treasonous act against the United States.
“Clearly it was to protect slavery, not states’ rights,” says Epperson of the Civil War. “We have these lies, but how were they so successfully baked into our textbooks, our culture, our churches? That’s what we wanted to look at, and the answer to that question is power. It took a lot of power, money and influence to bake these things into our culture.”
Each section of the exhibit focuses on a different power structure: education, media, politics, money, religion and violence. Like a prosecutor making a case, the exhibition slowly builds its argument with evidence.
One featured quote is from Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, about the cause of the war: “African slavery as it exists among us … was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.”
Another, featured in a display showing how the Lost Cause was supported through media, quotes Joseph Bryan, former publisher of the Richmond Times-Dispatch and its predecessors: “I have aligned The Times with the white supremacy cause.”
In a move that has a ring of familiarity today, the United Daughters of the Confederacy — whose headquarters on Arthur Ashe Boulevard was set ablaze by protesters the weekend after Floyd’s murder — used its power to paint the Lost Cause in a sympathetic light through school textbooks. Virginia adopted a textbook in 1932 that stated that slavery was the cause of the war, but through the UDC’s efforts, the book was pulled from schools in 1938.
Connecting the UDC’s effort to today, Vida mentions the conservative political group Moms for Liberty. The group, which has been named as a far-right extremist organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center, advocates against school curricula that mentions LGBTQ+ rights, race, ethnicity and discrimination. Many chapters have worked to ban books from school libraries.
“This is still with us, and I think that’s where a lot of our most compelling questions [come] from,” Vida says.
In its previous incarnations, the Valentine Studio featured dozens of busts of white Confederates peering down on visitors. Epperson says putting these figures in an exalted position created an improper power dynamic. To remedy this, those busts are now placed behind scrim on a wall of the exhibit. As a 15-minute film about the history of the Lost Cause is projected onto the scrim, the busts are lit up in relation to what’s happening in the video.
Edward Virginius Valentine, who was the first president of the museum and shaped its initial collection to celebrate white stories and denigrate those of Black and Indigenous people, made a lasting effort to commemorate the Lost Cause ideology with his art. Many of his sculptures are still on display, including the Recumbent Statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, which is still the centerpiece of the University Chapel at Washington and Lee University. Lee is buried in a crypt beneath the chapel.
Valentine’s sculpture of Thomas Jefferson is still on display in the rotunda of the Jefferson Hotel. In 2020, Virginia removed Valentine’s sculpture of Lee from the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. That same year, protesters removed Valentine’s sculpture of Confederate President Jefferson Davis from its pedestal on Monument Avenue. It’s currently on display at the Valentine as it appeared after his fall: broken and covered in graffiti.
In breaking down the sources of the Lost Cause myth, Epperson says it should be evident that this racist ideology was a concerted effort to rewrite history.
“It’s difficult to argue with the facts of it,” Epperson says. “We can have conversations all day about how we deal with that, what we do as a society today, to deal with this past, but the truth of the thing is as plain as black and white.”
“Sculpting History at the Valentine Studio” is now on permanent display at the Valentine Museum, 1015 E. Clay St., 23219. The Valentine will host a free tour and conversation about the exhibit on Feb. 8 at 6 p.m. Registration required. For more information, visit thevalentine.org.
