Meet the semi-finalists for the Lex250 Monument

To mark the 250th Anniversary of the Battle of Lexington, the first battle of the Revolutionary War, a new public art piece will be commissioned to commemorate the events of April 19th, 1775 and their defining place in US history. 

The Semiquincentennial Commission (Lex250), a committee of the Town of Lexington, and the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), an official partner of the project, selected four artist teams to produce a concept for the Lex250 Monument based on the values and vision of the project. The final piece will be located in Belfry Hill Park, south of the historic Lexington Battle Green, and will be unveiled in April 2025.

Since the national “Call for Artists” in December 2023, the field was narrowed from thirty-five to four artists from across the country: 

• Miriam Gusevich, GM2 Studio, Washington, D.C. 
• Mark Aeling, MGA Sculpture Studio, Saint Petersburg, FL
• Jonathan Russell and Saori Ide, Ride Art Studio, Berkeley, CA 
• Zaq Landsberg and Thomas Robinson, Zaq Art & Studio North, New York City. 

LexObserver spoke with the semi-finalists to learn more about how they approached this unique project in a relatively short time. Funded by a generous donor from the Lexington community who has chosen to remain anonymous, the final artist will receive a grant of $250,000 to develop and install their artwork at Belfry Park. The finalist will be announced on April 15, 2024.

“The battle has a lot of significance for American democracy,” says finalist Miriam Gusevich, a seasoned public artist, scholar and teacher. In explaining her approach, Gusevich says that “the landscape itself tells the story, and because these are public projects it’s not really about me, it’s really about what the place wants to share.” She reflected on what she calls “rituals of remembrance that either need to be established or are already established. In the case of Lexington, the main ritual of remembrance of the event is of course the reenactments, for which Lexington is very famous. And so that also was sort of thematically something that I engaged with in my process.” 

For Gusevich, who is originally from Cuba, the political symbolism is clear. “I grew up under the revolution. So one of the reasons I wanted to work on this project is because I experienced the difference between a rebellion and the American Revolution that was successful in establishing liberty and establishing institutions,” she says. “This is something that has taken me a long time to understand, but I also think that it’s very fragile. We see how many people are trying to destroy our democracy.”

The  commission received submissions from across the country, Commission Chair Suzie Barry said. “Inclusivity is one of the most important values of Lex250, and through art, we hope to show that historical events can mean different things to different people, and that’s okay.”

Gusevich says her work is about storytelling, and inviting people to engage with the story in the environment she creates. “I don’t feel like the whole world has to become a museum,” she says, “but I think acknowledging that something happened, it sort of brings people together and hopefully not only for the present but for the future, too.”

By contrast, another semi-finalist, the Florida-based artist Mark Aeling, considers himself “an object maker.” 

“To be able to create an object that captures the essence of that significance,” is a challenge that he and his team of fabricators at MGA Sculpture Studio relish.

After a “deep dive” into Lexington’s history, Aeling was interested in “this idea of catalyst,” he says. “The specific events that occurred in Lexington were like the striking of a match,” he says. “It was the spark that ignited the birth of democracy, and it expanded across the entire planet. The French Revolution followed very shortly after and it called into question all of the history of how the Western world was run.”

Aeling approaches the project like a puzzle, “a game of playing with visual language and material and intention and see what you can do to capture that essence,” he says. 

This husband-and-wife artist team at the helm of Ride Art Studio have very different points of departure. Saori Ide is originally from Osaka, Japan, and Jonathan Russell was born and raised in Boston. They began working on public art together 10 years ago. “It really does start out at our kitchen table and we go back and forth,” Russell says. “We both do our independent research. We talk about what we’ve seen and what we know of the area. She’s looking at it from her perspective, I look at it from mine, and then we join forces and think, okay, how can we best approach this project?” 

Ide believes the process of “working together is about the collaboration and having different backgrounds, coming from different places and different upbringing, and putting ideas together.”

“That’s what public art is about,” she says. 

One artist team visited Lexington for inspiration — artist Zaq Landsberg and his longtime friend and frequent collaborator, Thomas Robinson, an architectural designer, builder and artist. Since Landsberg is from California, he called on Robinson, who is from Concord, to help him get acquainted with the area.

“My brother-in-law’s Native American,” Robinson says. “I’ve had this very experience where he comes to visit, and a lot of our childhood memories in this town are actually painful memories for his history” Robinson says. “You want to be sensitive to all these things or at least think about them. How do you create a piece that can be inviting to all of these different parties and create engagement, create opportunities for education?”

Landsberg says, “As an outsider, I’m very interested in the forces that came to shape that moment,” he says,“There is a connection between the men that assembled in front of the tavern and Mahatma Gandhi, other freedom struggles, other movements. It’s possible to do a through line and connect a lot of these things to this moment, or the impact of that event cascading through history and through the world.” 

Landsberg specializes in projects and objects that get a lot of human interaction, “a lot of activation by the public,” he says.

The anniversary symbolizes the beginnings of the dismantling of colonialism both domestically and internationally, coinciding with the birth of a nation. Commemorating this moment will be a weighty job for one of these teams.

Community members are invited to attend a hybrid presentation (in-person and virtual) of the artists’ proposals on Wednesday, March 13 at 5:30 p.m. at the Cary Memorial Building; attendees will have the opportunity to ask the artists questions following their presentations.