About the Commemorations Project

Artistic tributes to George Washington dot the American landscape. One does not have to look too far to find a bronze mounted Washington standing in a park or a bust of that very familiar head in a courthouse or library. There are plaques and bas-reliefs in churches, schools, and any number of municipal buildings. There even are murals adorning walls inside and outside of almost every kind of building imaginable. Most of these represent a collaboration between community and artists who worked together to fund and erect some form of commemorative art.

Each commemoration says something about the community that put it there. They reflect the thoughts of the artist, but also those of the people who raised the funds and lowered the legal barriers to erecting a piece of public art. Each commemoration has a story—many stories in fact, and more and more each year as people create their own memories and associations with their community’s own Washington commemoration. We want to know those stories—and we are inviting you to help us learn them.

What kind of commemorations should be included, and which should not?

Our main interests are those statues, plaques, busts and so on that reside in public places. They can be large—like a twice-life-sized mounted bronze statue of the General; or they can be small—like a plaque bolted to a courthouse or church wall. Some commemorations are representations of Washington, others might have only his name. Be they bronze, marble, or even wooden, as long as they exist in some form of public place, then we want to know about them.

There are a few exceptions though. Official or mass produced portraits hanging in government buildings, schools, and other public places are too generic to be what we are looking for. On the other hand, a one-of-a-kind mural would fit the bill perfectly. We are also not looking to record things like the names of schools. There is an exception though there because some school or public buildings named after Washington might also have a plaque commemorating the naming and that is something we very much would like to know about.

What we are most interested in are those pieces of public art placed there by a person or a group of persons as a patriotic artistic commemoration of the First President.