WASHINGTON — Four years after removing stained-glass windows honoring two Confederate generals, Washington National Cathedral officials said Wednesday they had chosen an acclaimed Black artist, Kerry James Marshall, to design their replacements.
The artist visited the cathedral for the first time on Wednesday after being given the task of healing a small wound in the country’s second-largest cathedral. Together with the poet and author Elizabeth Alexander, Mr. Marshall will design two stained-glass windows addressing themes of racial justice to replace those that paid tribute to Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
“Right now I don’t have a clear concept of what I think I will do,” He stated. “It will have to be work that is able to synthesize a multiplicity of ideas and sentiments about what the country represents for all of us. There will be some kind of imagery that presents itself as an invitation to reflection on the meaning of America now.”
The debate about removing the windows that was held in 2017 began in 2015 when a self-described white extremist shot and killed nine African Americans in Charleston, S.C. This became even more urgent after white nationalists rallied against the removal in Charlottesville (Va.) of a Lee statue. One of those protesters drove his car through the crowd of counter-protesters, causing the death of a woman.
“The windows became barriers for people to feel fully welcome here,” The Very Rev. Randolph Hollerith, dean of the cathedral, spoke in an interview Wednesday. “And so we came to the point where contextualization was no longer possible — but the windows needed to be removed from the sacred space.”
Marshall was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for 1997 and received critical acclaim when he opened a major retrospective of his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. It also traveled to the Met Breuer in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. He is well-known for his unapologetically Black paintings on a large scale. This was to correct their absence from Western art tradition.
For the cathedral, it will be his first time using stained glass. The installation will include four lancets (or window sections) measuring six feet in height and one-anda-half feet wide. He also plans to include figures in his cathedral piece.
“There are likely to be figures in the windows, some of them are likely to be Black figures, but I can’t say this is all you are going to see there because I think the scope of the windows needs to be more expansive than just that,” He stated.
In 2020, during nationwide protests after George Floyd’s death, the cathedral began working with Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (SNMAA) to plan the public display of the taken windows. The museum will be displaying the Lee window from this weekend.
Ms. Alexander — who will contribute a poem that will be inscribed in stone tablets alongside Mr. Marshall’s windows — has visited the cathedral frequently since she was a child growing up in Washington. She claimed that she had never been able to pay attention to Jackson or Lee windows. “But it is a great gift of the progress of our society that now we do notice and ask questions about why something is where it is and what it is teaching us.”
The Washington National Cathedral has been asking these questions for years. Its leaders have always remembered human rights figures in the cathedral’s western section. The so-called human right porch features stone carvings that include Mother Teresa, Rosa Parks, or other human rights icons. They also paid tribute to Elie Wiesel in April, who was a Holocaust survivor, author, and Nobel laureate.
Dean Hollerith acknowledged that there was controversy over the decision to get rid of the windows.
“But I am so proud that we spent time on conversation on why the windows were put in in the first place, what was going on in 1953, and what the legacy of Jackson and Lee is,” He said. “Cathedrals are never finished.”
In 2023, the new windows and poem will be revealed.