“Is this a protest?”

Kelly Kristin Jones smiles at the question and thinks about how to reply. She doesn’t smile smugly or tightly. She smiles because it is a good question and when people ask this, she is not always sure how to respond. Plus, the person who asks is a stranger and Jones lives in River Forest and she’s not about to sound defensive on someone else’s home turf. What happened was this man was walking through Garfield Park and noticed Jones covering up a statue of Abraham Lincoln. Specifically, the axe-wielding Abe that’s been a part of Garfield Park for generations, at the busy intersection of Washington Boulevard and Central Park. All morning, drivers stop at its red lights, turn toward Abe and puzzle at what they were seeing: A protest? A renovation? An erasure?

Few, though, actually ask.

This man did, and like others who do later, he’s not angry or excited, just confused, and Jones, for her part, answers with a mix of self-deprecating humility and ingratiating shrewdness. She doesn’t say it’s a protest, just: “I’m camouflaging him for a photo.”

Ahh, the guy says, still confused.

“Did I get his face?” she asks.

“Yeah, you got it,” the man says. “But it’s coming off, right?”

“Right,” she says, which is not a lie — someone will take her covering off, and if not her, someone. After she wraps a statue, she often returns the next day, and every time, someone — she suspects angry passersby or Park District park-district employees — has removed her camouflage. She’s wrapped about 35 monuments this way, mostly around the Midwest. She’s primarily a photographer and her subject, broadly, is public monuments and historical markers and who we choose to honor. The most provocative part of her practice is also the most ingenious: When she selects a monument to wrap, she shoots its daily surroundings — the trees, buildings, grass and pavement around it. Then she prints horizontal photos of the surroundings and, without permission, wraps the monument in the images, until, at a glance, a statue seems to vanish into its backdrop.

When the man in the park approached Jones, she had been working for 90 minutes and the Garfield Park Lincoln, who is 104 years old and 13 feet tall, was about two-thirds disappeared.

Once fully covered, temporarily, he would appear erased, transformed into a shapeless totem of camouflage. Or considering the imperfect matching of the photographs and the surroundings, a rip in the matrix of reality. Or a wormhole to an alternate Garfield Park.

One in which this Abraham Lincoln statue never existed.

Which is the point: Jones has been camouflaging monuments for many reasons, but among the most intriguing is how it reveals possibilities for monuments and questions the amount of public land we give to dead, white politicians, soldiers and business owners.

As the man watches her, Jones says over her shoulder, “I’m an artist, so …”

As if that explains everything.

Because most of the time when someone asks why she is wrapping a statue in camouflage, “I’m an artist …” explains plenty. She thinks of her work as partly performative, and partly traditional visual art. The photos she makes of a fully wrapped memorial become the primary document of the piece. Sometimes, though, she simply cuts out cardboard shapes that are roughly the shape of a memorial and holds them in front of the camera lens and, through forced perspective, erases a monument from the final photograph. Other works are art installations and digital manipulations. But monuments and memorializing are always the raw meat. She is not alone, of course.

Artists have been questioning the ways in which we publicly memorialize and honor our history for ages. But as debate over how to live with contested history grows calcified and intractable, the questions proposed in Jones’ work are some of most vulnerable, openhearted and necessary: What does it mean for a community to live with a menagerie of unrepresentative historic figures looming over its streets? Will removing a monument actually address the root issue behind its removal? If memorials have become public wallpaper that we overlook every day, are we complicit for not noticing?

Teresa Silva, former director of the Chicago Artists Coalition, has been following Jones’ career for years. “It’s important to know that she’s not just reacting to the arguments everyone else has had these past years about public monuments. She was asking these questions before a lot of us did, and she’ll do it after it falls out of the spotlight.

“And that’s good because Kelly has settled into this interesting middle ground that speaks to you no matter where you fall on the spectrum of what to do with problematic public memorials. Some want them all down, some say it’s censorship. But here’s this provocative art, taking risks, seeking entry points into the conversation for everyone.”

But wait, is this a protest?

Jones thinks of it as a “scar,” an untidy disruption. And maybe a protest, in the sense it’s an insistent public questioning. What it is not — and what Jones worries some think — is an art prank. This is not a Banksy-like cleverness for clever’s sake. It is thoughtful and questioned, fretted over: Jones goes to sleep thinking monuments and wakes up thinking monuments. Should she ask permission? Should she stick to the suburbs? Does the history of the person represented in a monument even matter? Or is this a larger cultural conversation? Lately, her targets, so to speak, come from a list of problematic monuments released by the Chicago Monuments Project, former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s initiative to rethink statues in Chicago and identify works connected to racism, white supremacy and “oversimplified, one-sided views of history.” It’s already led to plans for several new monuments, and the proposed removal of several others.

It was also, basically, an arts initiative, with an advisory council weighed toward artists.

Even Lightfoot’s controversial removal of a Christopher Columbus statue from Grant Park resulted in at least two works of art: “Sky Falling,” a photograph that Jones shot (coincidentally) the day before Lightfoot removed the statue; it shows hands holding up a patchwork of photographs of open sky over Columbus, removing him from the picture. Then there was the Columbus statue itself, wrapped for a time in a white shroud, a ghostly reminder of a monument. “I walked by it,” Silva said, “and heard people talking about it, wondering what it was and why it was so eerie.” Inadvertently, it became art.

“If anything there is a fascinating line in our public spaces between official commemoration and not necessarily sanctioned or intended works,” said Paul Farber, director of the Philadelphia-based Monument Lab, which encourages conversation about the history and works of public memorializing. Ghost bikes, for instance, the white-painted bicycles chained to utility poles, often meant to memorialize someone’s death on a public street, also become, in their permanence, unofficial public memorials.

“We forget artists carry a profound capacity to recognize presence and absence. They see the elements of the cultural imagination left incomplete. They see there is no single story here. Artists can let us see the layers and layers present beneath a monument.”

Monument Lab recently concluded “Beyond Granite,” a project on the National Mall in Washington that proposed temporary monuments for stories left untold in Washington, including a statue of singer Marian Anderson and a work about the legacy of desegregated playgrounds. In 2017 and 2018, performance artist Emilio Rojas based a set of works titled “He Who Writes History Has No Memory” around the seated Lincoln statue in Grant Park; for one, he curled into Lincoln’s lap and slept. Kehinde Wiley, who painted the 2018 portrait of Barack Obama, rose to fame by partly painting contemporary Black men into images of historical monuments. Hamza Walker, who was a longtime curator at the Renaissance Society in Hyde Park, is now director of LAXART in Los Angeles and is planning an ambitious show for 2025 titled “Monuments” that will exhibit decommissioned public memorials beside newly commissioned monuments.

Last summer, the Mellon Foundation pledged a $6.8 million grant to Chicago for the creation of eight new monuments, including works addressing police torture, the 1919 Chicago Race Riots and “Long Walk Home,” a memorial to missing and murdered Black women in Douglass Park. Scheherazade Tillet, a Chicago artist and activist, is leading the development of “Long Walk Home,” partly focused on the 2012 shooting of Rekia Boyd by an off-duty Chicago police officer. “I think what is happening (with works like this) is the reclaiming of legacy and some freedom of space for ourselves,” she said, noting the planned monument will be permanent after years of temporary memorials to Boyd. In 2021, Douglass Park also hosted a summer monument camp for young Black girls, “about reimagining what we could have here, and we saw benches with flowers as remembrances, but also several on play. There was a double-dutch sculpture. What’s missing? What isn’t being honored in our communities? Art can see our way into this.”

Jones keeps a Google Map of about 1,200 locations across Chicago, the Midwest, Northeast and South, where monuments and historical markers could be addressed through art (or removed). Though she has only physically camouflaged 35, she’s made works using 340. She started about a decade ago, after she left Chicago and taught art in Georgia. She was agog at how many historic markers she passed just walking to the supermarket. “You would see these things cast in aluminum but made to look timeless, the placards just straight-up fiction, myth, ‘on this site,’ whatever. I started to take pictures and manipulate (digitally) the language on them.” Slowly, she found her subject.

“I’m embarrassed to say, when it was looking like I was moving back, despite growing up in Chicago, I was worried that, to keep doing this, I wouldn’t find enough material.”

Strolling around her studio, in the backyard of her idyllic River Forest home, you’re never not thinking of monuments, public, private, official, decorative, temporary. In the center of the room, photos of monuments spread across on a table. White ornamental columns stand near faux-Grecian urns. Drawers hold an enormous cache of vacation and family photos of a very specific subject: white women standing alongside memorials and statues, a project that she began after finding images of her maternal grandmother posing with monuments. All of these pieces look a bit disparate and part of an ongoing conversation, a body of work that wonders how much we ever notice or question European heritage, legacies of empire and white-centered subjects of public memorials.

Stephanie Koch, a Chicago-based curator who showed some of Jones’ works at The Luminary gallery in St. Louis, said the conversation around monuments tends to be about a statue’s subject and “Kelly’s brought in an element of gender and used her own position as a white woman to consider whiteness itself. These conversations are often around Blackness and underrepresented communities, and she’s trying to consider what’s just beneath these surfaces, even in the guise of ordinary domestic objects.”

For instance, in the corner of Jones’s studio hangs a dark black-and-white image of a Michelangelo’s David, a cheap replica, the sort you might find in a suburban sideyard.

That’s where she found it.

Not content to wrap and photograph only public monuments, she’s been sneaking into private yards. That image of a partly-wrapped David was made like the image of Garfield Park’s Abe Lincoln — but in the yard in the western suburbs, at night, without permission. “I would argue (that David) signals a particular race and class,” she said. “(Grecian) urns in yards, wedding receptions, folk’s yards, it’s coded white, so ordinary and ubiquitous that it pushes the idea of white supremacy without having to be overt.”

Again, she’s not destroying or permanently altering these statues, but she understands, particularly with private yards, the law is clear — it’s illegal. As for public monuments, she says the law is murkier; she takes pains not to mark or deface. Still, she can imagine a cop arresting her. Her husband is certainly worried, she said, “though I am not doing this to provoke law enforcement! I’ve got to pick my daughter up at daycare! Anger doesn’t fuel this. Not to say I am not angry about some of the monuments I work with. As art, it’s ridiculous to have large white male figures looming over every park in America.”

Occasionally she’s challenged by a retiree in a public park who wants to know why this figure is a problem. Some ask why she spends her money on this. She’s stopped arguing the validity of historical figures she photographs. She’s not doing it to argue the importance of this or that man. She’s doing this to remind us that someone else could stand there.

She has another project called “Plinths for the People” that’s devoted to showing ordinary Chicagoans they are worthy of being the subject of a monument. Last spring when I first met Jones, she set up her homemade plinth (or pedestal) in the lobby of the Chicago History Museum, at the invitation of the Chicago Humanities Festival, which uses the building for events. She first did it a couple of years ago for the Chicago Architecture Biennial. Her plinth is four feet tall and mostly plywood, and because it looked like a work in progress, many sidestepped it. But children don’t need permission to climb and so many did. Jones photographed them all. She had to encourage adults.

A security officer trudged warily up its steps and put her hands on her hips.

“How do you feel?” Jones asked, camera against an eye.

“Good,” the woman said, sounding surprised.

As she stepped down, an older woman took her place. “I don’t belong on a pedestal,” she said. Many adults stood awkwardly, unsure where to put their arms, trying on gravitas as if it were tight pants. Yet of all of Jones’ works, “Plinths” may be the quickest to grasp.

As the Chicago-based artist Amanda Williams said, describing her time on the Chicago Monument Project advisory council: “A lot of (citizens) don’t think about the meaning of monuments or try to find out more. They’re busy. We heard from some: ‘Abe Lincoln gives me comfort’ or ‘Everything must go’ or ‘This person’s story needs to be preserved no matter what.’ But you wonder if this conversation is a race to build (new monuments) that everybody can point to as representing them specifically. Is this a problem creating another problem? Even that question: What other ways could we think of telling the story of Chicago? That’s an esoteric bordering on academic exercise in many ways, and I’m not sure the public has the patience or appetite for ‘What story of Chicago do we tell?’ You wonder, how do you reach people who can’t sit for months of listening to this?”

Williams herself is now working on a pair of permanent public monuments, one of the late Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm for the Prospect Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, and one a kind of adjacent monument to the George Washington statue in Washington Park on the South Side. In a way, Williams’ famed “Color(ed) Theory Suite” — a celebrated series of photographs of abandoned homes in Englewood that she painted monochromatic, culturally-themed colors (“Currency Exchange,” “Flamin’ Red Hots”) — was an act of memorializing. “I never saw that as monuments,” she said, “but many did, and it does make sense: What is permanent in a community where people there don’t have control and things sometimes just go away? Who gets to say what stays forever?”

“Plinths for the People” plays like a similar take on who is honored and who is temporary. The pedestal was built to travel around the city and, Chicago History Museum aside, Jones usually erects it in abandoned lots, in neighborhoods without many representative monuments. She asks her subjects if they feel monumental. She asks them to strike a pose. Some look as if they were waiting their whole lives to be asked. Shoulders go back, heads tip skyward and eyes peer off, into a distant future.

“To be honest, this feels more public than I expected,” Jones said the morning we met in Garfield Park. When she wraps a statue, she picks quiet times, and this is a Monday, sunny, pleasant, but Lincoln stands tall and obvious. Jones carries rolls of camouflaging photos and painter’s tape, sets up her camera on a tripod and frames the statue against a large honey locust tree. When she first wrapped statues, she wore a neon work vest, but gave it up. Few passersby paid much attention. Indeed, for a long time in Garfield Park, no one asks Jones what she is doing. Police fly past. Commuters idle at traffic lights then continue, songs on their radios replaced with new songs in new cars. Jones says as she works that she isn’t challenged because she is a white woman. Of course, she says. Despite 10 years of photographing monuments, she has never been approached by police. Jones, 39, grew up in North Lawndale “one of few white people in a Black community, so identity plays into how I approach a lot of this stuff.”

Eventually, a Park District cart glides past and Jones braces but the employees shout: “Looks good!” The more Lincoln disappears, the more people stop, honk or comment.

A driver gives a thumb’s up.

A shirtless man peddles by on a bike and asks what Lincoln did. Jones replies vaguely — not getting into details, how there are lots of Lincoln statues in Illinois and she believes in making space for others. Another man studies the wrapping and notes it doesn’t blend seamlessly into its surroundings. Jones nods and says it’s kind of silly, she’s knows — she doesn’t get into the ways that photography can lie and the ironic language of photography, with its digital “healing” tools and instruments for “dodging.” She doesn’t say she doesn’t want a monument — however much it may seem erased — to actually vanish from the final image. Because that, of course, would be a lie, too.

The titles of her pieces come from comments made by strangers as she works: “His Smile Doesn’t Reach His Eyes,” “Watchdog of the Lake,” “You’ve Got Nice Legs, Kid.” Certainly, she tells me as she continues wrapping, there would be easier ways to do this — just throw a huge piece of fabric over a statue and take a picture. She’s been burned by metal statues on hot, sunny days. But the process is key. Plus, she wants to be seen. Downstate, a firefighter watched her wrap Wild Bill Hickok and told her that Wild Bill was meaningful to his community; she assured him the wrapping would come off. In Lincoln Park, two elderly women jumped in to help wrap Illinois Gov. John Peter Altgeld.

After a few hours in Garfield Park, something happened that was new for Jones. A Park District manager asked her to remove the covering. He let her finish, but asked her to remove it all before she left. He was so polite and patient with her, she couldn’t argue.

“Besides,” she said later, removing her photos, it was a success. She wrapped Lincoln, she got a decent photograph and the process itself led to several good conversations.

Just before the Park District manager approached her, another Park District employee had stopped. He asked her what did Lincoln do — “Who can we make a statue of now?”

“Great question,” she said, “who else could be here?”

“You think the good he did offset the negatives he had — that every human has?” As she continued, he wondered aloud if she had a permit then quietly said to himself, “She has to.” He turned to me: “People want to divide us, and this is not unifying. It’s looking for excuses to argue.” He watched some more, then added: “But I argue for her right to have this conversation, and, look, OK, this is a clever way to start the conversation.”

She stepped back from Lincoln. “That’s what I hope to do,” she said.

“That’s common ground,” he said. “Should there be other statues? He’s an Illinois hero!”

“He is!”

“Maybe we should — what’s the saying — print the legend. We have always had these big ideals that we strive for, but I do think we’re better than we were 100 years ago!”

“There’s work to do.”

“You know, I saw you, I thought, ‘More nonsense?’ And now, look, we’re talking.”

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