Behind S.F.’s $3 Million Plan to Cull Its Monuments

San Francisco is about to embark on evaluating its nearly 100 statues and monuments to figure out which ones no longer represent the city’s values and should be removed from view, relocated or re-interpreted with explanatory plaques.

The debate over the city’s monuments began in 2018 with the removal of the “Early Days” sculpture from the Pioneer Monument in the Civic Center because it represented a Native American seated before a Spanish Catholic missionary. The effort gathered steam amid the racial-justice movement in 2020 that followed the murder of George Floyd. That year, crowds toppled statues throughout the country that glorified Confederate Civil War leaders, which critics said paid homage to the country’s racist past.

The survey of San Francisco’s civic art collection — funded by a $3 million Mellon Foundation grant — will be conducted by an outside firm and should be completed by January.

The project, called “Shaping Legacy,” was discussed at an Arts Commission meeting last week when senior project manager Angela Carrier explained that looking at San Francisco’s monuments and memorials as a whole shows “a concentration that talks about power, privilege, white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonialism.”

“These monuments no longer represent the values that we say the city stands for,” she added.

The monuments and memorial were listed in an inventory last updated in June, 2023. They range from Lotta’s Fountain installed on Market Street in 1875 to the bust of George Moscone at City Hall to a dozen or more statues of explorers and war heroes in Golden Gate Park. The most recent addition is a 9-foot bronze of Maya Angelou being installed at the Main Library in September. It, too, will be subject to review. The entire Civic Art Collection consists of 4,000 objects valued in excess of $100 million.

The project’s mission statement says its goal is to confront the inequities of the past in order to confront the inequities of the present.

The overall effort is a $250 million undertaking called “the Monuments Project” that seeks to remake the public art landscape, all funded by Mellon.

San Francisco is one of nine cities to receive grants. The city had its share of monuments destroyed in 2020 when bronze statues of Junipero Serra, Ulysses S. Grant and Francis Scott Key were all knocked off their pedestals by protesters in Golden Gate Park. The city removed the statue of Christopher Columbus at Coit Tower to avoid a similar fate. All four statues are now secured in storage.

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