Ella Baker Statue and Garden Project

Ella Baker Statue and Garden Project (currently in the planning stage):

1. name of project: “A Symbol of Diversity: The Ella Baker Statue Project”
2. Campus: Newark
3. Location:
   1. TBA
4. Detailed description and goals:
   1. Description: The Ohio State University at Newark not only features a beautiful campus with gently rolling green lawns, an outdoor amphitheater, a campanile, and a footbridge that bisects a pond with two running fountains, it also evinces our strong commitment to public art. Bronze statuary are strategically placed throughout the campus. These pieces reflect the university’s fidelity to many of the core principles of higher learning: there are statues of Shakespeare, Monet, Mark Twain, etc. While these images of white men certainly gesture toward important intellectual and aesthetic achievements, ideas, and values, collectively they fall short of capturing and mirroring back the richness and diversity of our student body, not to mention the diversity of intellectual and cultural traditions that inform our research and teaching. In order to begin to rectify this disparity, we propose to commission a statue of the famed civil-rights leader Ella Baker and install it on campus in a garden setting with benches; we see this not as an attempt at revisionism, but rather as an inclusive way of supplementing and diversifying the already-existing images. Our administration has been able to budget for and set aside half of our overall budget of 100,000, which includes funds for soliciting and vetting proposals, the artist’s stipend, the costs of production, and installation.
   2. Goals of Project: Our campus is a happily diverse place and we seek to make everyone feel welcome and included. To this end, many of us have long desired to have public art that more accurately reflects the diversity not only of our population but of the people and ideas that we study and teach. After deliberating for several months, the aggregated faculty agreed that Ella Baker would be the perfect choice for a new statue. This is in part because the Civil Rights Movement was perhaps the most important American social movement of the 20th century, but also because Baker impacted the movement in invaluable ways, a fact which is often overlooked in mainstream histories of the period. One of her biographers described her as a “radical humanist” because she embodied a philosophy of love for all people, while at the same time engaging in revolutionary activism to help empower people to create a democratic and just society. We believe that depicting and celebrating Baker as a representative and leader of civil-rights activism allows us to mirror back to students, faculty, and the community a more accurate reflection of who we are and what we represent. At the same time, it helps to tell a fuller narrative of the Civil Rights Movement, one that recognizes the contributions of people like Ella Baker and Rosa Parks.
5. Estimated total budget:
   1. 100,000
      1. 50,000 requested from IPPLG
      2. 50,000 from OSUN cash reserves