The life-size bronze George Washington statue is a copy of a granite sculpture by the French artist Jean-Antoine Houdon. The original was created in Paris in 1796 and was shipped and installed in the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond. With special permission from the Virginia General Assembly, Gorham Manufacturing Company cast approximately 30 bronze copies of the statue in the late nineteenth century. One copy was acquired in 1933 by the Women’s Community Service, an auxiliary of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, and presented to Los Angeles County on February 22, 1933. During its lifetime, the statue was installed in several areas in and around the Civic Center, downtown Los Angeles. The statue was adopted into the LA County Civic Art Collection in 2009 and installed on Block 2 of Grand Park during the 2012 renovation. In August of 2020, the statue was vandalized with red paint and toppled. The statue was removed and transported to an offsite storage facility. After careful consideration, Arts and Culture identified Bob Hope Patriotic Hall, which houses the County’s Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, to relocate the George Washington statue. The move is part of a recontextualization that will place the statue in site-specific proximity with various artworks and ephemera relating to military history, figures, and events housed at the Patriotic Hall. Arts and Culture will work with the Department of Military and Veteran’s Affairs to engage local veterans of diverse backgrounds and perspectives, and a historian, to develop a new plaque that will accompany the statue and provide context about its history. Additionally, new digital content will be developed to reflect the complex perspectives surrounding the statue and George Washington as a historical figure, center the voices of those most impacted by this history, and explore the role of monuments and artworks in our civic spaces. Arts and Culture’s intention with this work is to provide opportunity to engage questions of: How do we reinterpret monuments and historical collections with today’s values of diversity, cultural equity, inclusion, and antiracism? How can we use arts to grapple with the complexity of our national and regional histories? How do we uplift the voices of those underrepresented and most impacted, to reflect a more diverse and more just LA County? For more on the Department’s work exploring the role of monuments and artworks in our civic spaces and shining a light on undertold and underrepresented histories and perspectives through art, see Illuminate LA.

Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1828) was formally trained as a sculptor in France and Italy. Over a 50-year period, he executed sculptures of many of the period’s most prominent figures including Napoleon, Voltaire, Moliere, Diderot and Rousseau.