Burlington
City Council is expected to consider the recommendations and make a decision on the mural next month.
The mural was commissioned in 2009 for the Church Street Marketplace and was intended to commemorate the history of the Lake Champlain area, starting with Samuel de Champlain’s “discovery” of the area.
Three years later, the artwork was completed on wooden placards bolted to a wall just off Burlington’s Church Street pedestrian walkway.
But missing from the mural are those who came before de Champlain, such as the Abenaki tribe, or minorities that came after. Critics say the omission has created a whitewashed history of the city and an unwelcoming atmosphere for people of color.
In late 2017, an activist spray painted the mural with the words “Off the Wall,” sparking a public debate over the artwork that in turn led to the creation of a city task force earlier this year.
After meeting regularly since May and holding several public comment forums, the seven-member task force released its recommendations to the city council last week.
The report includes recommendations that the city puts a stronger emphasis on public discourse around public art, commissions more murals with accurate representations of Burlington’s “diverse community,” and move the mural in question, replacing it with a new mural that shows Burlington “as a diverse and welcoming place to live.
The task force gave the city council until August 29, 2022, to move the mural. Until then, it recommended placing a plaque next to the mural explaining that it is not a “comprehensive representation of Burlington’s history.”
Weiwei Wang, chairwoman of the task force, said the 2022 deadline would allow the city to fulfill an agreement with the funders of the mural — whose names are worked into the artwork — that it would remain in public view for 10 years.
“There had been some verbal agreements with donors that it would stay up for ten years, so we felt this would fulfill that but it would also move it because it is problematic,” Wang said.
The committee has not come up with a plan for where to move the mural. Wang said that will be up to the City Council. She said she expects the city to consider the task force’s recommendations and take action soon.
“The president of the council said they were looking for a resolution for the end of September. So that seems fairly quick to me,” Wang said.
“Whether it’s to take action or to move down the timeline I don’t know, that’s up to the sub-committee, but based on what the president said, it looked like they wanted to take action and were going to take action,” she said.
Karen Mittelman, executive director of the Vermont Arts Council, said the question of removing public art should be taken extremely seriously, even if it seems like the right thing to do.
“Public art may not represent the community at this time and so it may be the right thing to take it down, but we do have to take decisions like this very, very seriously,” Mittelman said.