THE VICKSBURG CAMPAIGN
(FINAL DESIGN FOR MONUMENT)
bronze
2003
24" X 24" X 24"
edition 40

“After it was over, many men were found dead with bayonet stabs. And others with their skulls broken open by butts of muskets
... the bravery of the blacks at Milliken’s Bend completely revolutionized the sentiment of the army with regard to the employment of Negro troops.”
--anonymous Union officer

How would this monument portray a look to the past while communicating the hope of the future? And what of the racial tensions of the day? I was aware the Vicksburg National Military Park was filled with classical figurative memorials and thus determined I should be thinking in terms of human figures, real men with real blood and guts and the beauty and mystery of the human body formed with a sensitivity to the fragile nature of our survival day to day. In a flash of light, our lives here can be extinguished. I had dealt with that certainty through the living memory that my own father had died instantly in a Volkswagen bug. Certainly among the rolling hills and marshes along the Mississippi River in 1863, that reality would be tangible to these men, inhaled with each muggy humid breath.