The lost monument

Coleman Brown hikes his slacks slightly and steps across a rut that filled with yesterday’s rain to become today’s mud. He scans the horizon. To his right is a mountain of man-sized chunks of concrete destined to be culvert filling. To his left are a patch of shoulder-high Johnson grass and a bent chain-link fence. In the distance, the constant rumble of bulldozers pulls apart the old city.

And then, there it is: the Monument to Education.

In its heyday, the brick and tile sculpture perched on one of the most prime corners in the city, on the edge of what is now a burgeoning arts district at the corner of Claycut and Jefferson at Westdale Middle School. The avant-garde Westdale Monument to Education has been acknowledged by the Smithsonian Institute and has been the subject of art history dissertations. It was also disliked. Some believed it to be just plain ugly. Some even thought it satanic. The East Baton Rouge Parish School Board decided earlier this year that the sculpture had to go to make way for a new fire station.

The sculpture was moved to a back corner of a Department of Public Works lot on Valley Street. Its distinct pointed arches are crumbling without a strong foundation. Its slab, once a single, solid piece, thick as tarmac, sits sliced into a half-dozen weakened, chiseled cakes of concrete. Its masonry sinks under its own weight and sloughs off the brightly glazed, hand-painted tiles once made by kids more at home with making peanut-butter sandwiches than fine art.? “They told us it would be fenced off,” Brown says. He squints and gives the piece a once-over. It’s the first time Brown, an architect and leader of the Friends of the Monument, has seen the sculpture since its dismantling and relocation last summer.

Brown hasn’t quite shaken off his bitter feelings. He and other Monument supporters wanted the sculpture to stay at Westdale, and they even came up with a workable plan for it to co-exist with the fire station. The school board voted to level the brick behemoth, but the City of Baton Rouge decided to hold on to it. Brown, not wanting to seem ungrateful that it’s been preserved, goes quiet.

“It’s really not too bad,” Brown says. “I was pleased they didn’t demolish it on the spot.”? Pete Newkirk, director of the DPW, says the piece could’ve easily been chopped up and tossed into a ditch as erosion control.

“Concrete with none of the wire in it is very valuable to us,” Newkirk says. “We were told to mow it to the ground, but the mayor was really instrumental in preserving it.”

Then DPW brought in its chief engineer, Tom Stephens, to work out the logistics of moving the sculpture.

“Our bridge crew moved it,” Newkirk explains. “It took them two weeks.”

Brown and attorney Kyle Keegan, another champion of the Monument, shake their heads at this.

“It would’ve been easier to cut a check,” Brown says, explaining that the Friends of the Monument had screened moving companies and located Davies Shoring out of New Orleans, a firm that agreed to move the sculpture in one piece to another place for $40,000. The Friends of the Monument came up with $10,000 from a private donor. The City didn’t want to pay the rest, they say.

“The problem is, nobody wants it,” Newkirk says. BREC turned it down. So did the library.

One of the biggest hurdles the friends faced in saving the Monument was its appearance.

From the intersection at Claycut and Jefferson, the Monument seemed like a hodge-podge of bricks that kept evolving as more and more students contributed their ceramic efforts over a 21-year span that began in 1971.? Up close, the sculpture unfolds and scintillates. Beneath the tallest arch are illustrations of Alice in Wonderland and Huckleberry Finn. Another face explains the history of Gothic art, complete with miniature clay examples of different Gothic elements. Scenes from The Iliad and The Odyssey appear in relief.

The work presents different facets of human development, spotlighting themes such as exploration, dreams and truth.

“It’s like a novel,” Keegan says. “You have to read it. A hundred percent of the people driving by say it’s ugly. A hundred percent of the people who see it up close like it.”

There are elements to the Monument that are provocative. Words like “Devil,” “Haunted,” “Ghost” and “Hanging” appear pressed into pale clay fused to the rough bricks on the section of the sculpture that represents dreams. Ted DeMuro, who led students in creating the monument, was a bit of a rebel whose Baton Rouge backyard was a “labyrinth of kilns,” according to Keegan. DeMuro has since relocated to Virginia, and his friends say he’s a bit disillusioned by the city he called home.? “I’ve had friends who’ve said, ‘Coleman, it’s ugly. You know it’s ugly,’” Brown says.

He’s by no means an art snob himself. “I don’t like Picasso,” he says. “But these are high-school and middle-school children. For them to do something, anything, about the school is significant. Anybody who’s ever volunteered at a school would see losing the Monument as a disaster.”? Ants thread the Monument these days, moving its sandy innards industriously outward in their poisonous maws.

Newkirk inspects the sculpture regularly. It has worked magic on him, he admits. “I thought it was a piece of junk, but when you get up close, it’s really neat,” he says.

He hopes somebody worthy comes and gets it soon.