Ceding Ground

Public art installation in MONUMENTS NOW at Socrates Sculpture Park, NYC | Native plants; leaf mulch; and soil | 24.5 × 28 feet | October 10, 2020 - April 8, 2021

An empty center in Ceding Ground holds space for the contemplation of history’s relationship to current conflicts in this garden, which is rendered to match the dimensions of decorative plantings surrounding the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville, VA – the site of the infamously violent Unite the Right rally in 2017. Costello replaces Classical-style low hedges, English boxwoods, Japanese hollies and peonies – all associated with the United States’ colonial slavery-fueled economy – with plant species native to the region surrounding Socrates for centuries before European colonization.

Ceding Ground by Patrick Costello was selected through a competitive open call to be installed alongside nine projects in MONUMENTS NOW at Socrates Sculpture Park realized by 2020 Socrates Artist Fellows Daniel Bejar, Fontaine Capel, Dionisio Cortes Ortega, Bel Falleiros, Jenny Polak, Aya Rodriguez-Izumi, Andrea Solstad, Kiyan Williams, and Sandy Williams IV; major new commissions for contemporary monuments by acclaimed artists Jeffrey Gibson, Paul Ramírez Jonas, and Xaviera Simmons; and work by Nona Faustine featured on the Park’s Broadway Billboard. MONUMENTS NOW sought to address the role of monuments in society and commemorate underrepresented narratives such as diasporic, Indigenous, and queer histories. The exhibition was documented in an artist-focused publication made possible by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Artist Statement

In 2017, white supremacists descended upon my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, emboldened by the presidential administration and incensed by a proposal to remove the city’s Robert E. Lee monument. They murdered Heather Heyer, brutally assaulted DeAndre Harris, and terrorized antiracist protestors, including many of my loved ones. The events sparked renewed conversations about the roles and meanings of Confederate monuments all over the country. In response, the city of Charlottesville erected a barricade of orange construction fencing to protect the statue and its surrounding gardens, ensuring the site’s preservation while legal battles determined its fate.

Ceding Ground echoes and replaces the dimensions of Charlottesville’s fenced-in territory in an effort to transform that contested space. I’ve removed both the perimeter fence and the statue at its center, leaving garden beds surrounding an unoccupied rectangle of bare earth. Making that central void accessible invites viewers to come in and repopulate the position of the erstwhile statue, shifting our perspective from gazing up at a bronze figure to looking out, around, and down at the ground.  

Tending this garden in New York City, where I’ve lived for the past six years, provides me with a regular physical practice that helps reconcile the spiritual distance between where I’m from and where I currently reside. And as this year’s massive uprisings continue to illustrate, the two cities are more alike than their relative locations belie. White supremacy and racist systems of policing, incarceration, and housing continue to wreak havoc in both places, and indeed, all over the country. 

Monuments reinforce these power structures and uphold many long-held formal conventions, too -- from their bronze sculptures to the designed landscapes that surround their pedestals. Following suit, Charlottesville’s Lee monument is flanked by highly-manicured gardens of English boxwoods, Japanese hollies, and peonies -- plants initially found only overseas and introduced to this continent as a direct result of colonial economies. Interrupting that lineage, Ceding Ground references the historical ecologies of its specific site, overflowing with a collection of flora that grew within one hundred miles of what is now Socrates Sculpture Park for generations prior to the initial arrival of my European ancestors to this land.

These plant species remind us of a time before white supremacy sculpted our collective consciousness and our expectations of public space. I look to these plants as part of my practice of ecological horticulture and habitat co-creation, enabling more breath, proposing an alternative to bronze figures and orange fences.

In surrounding a space of absence with these specific plant communities, I’m not attempting to revive untouched native ecosystems of the past, or vilify introduced species, either. I am deliberately collapsing these ecologies across time and geography, in the hopes that doing so may help reshape our presence within potential landscapes to come.

Image credits: Patrick Costello, James Chrzan, Sara Morgan, and Ben Simon

Species List:
- Andropogon virginicus (broomsedge bluestem)
- Anaphalis margaritacea (pearly everlasting)
- Asclepias exaltata (poke milkweed)
- Asclepias incarnata (swamp milkweed)
- Asclepias tuberosa (butterfly weed)
- Asclepias verticillata (whorled milkweed)
- Baccharis halimifolia (groundsel)
- Carex albicans (white-tinged sedge)
- Carex bicknellii (copper shouldered oval sedge)
- Clethra alnifolia (summersweet)
- Deschampsia cespitosa (tufted hairgrass)
- Dryopteris marginalis (marginal woodfern)
- Eupatorium hyssopifolium (hyssop-leaf thoroughwort)
- Euthamia caroliniana (slender goldentop)
- Eutrochium fistulosum (Joe Pye weed)
- Eutrochium purpureum (sweet Joe Pye weed)
- Hamamelis virginiana (witch hazel)
- Helianthus divaricatus (woodland sunflower)
- Hibiscus moscheutos (Eastern rose mallow)