The Modern Art Notes Podcast · Tyler Green

Bethany Collins, Gladys Nilsson

February 26, 2026·1 hr 3 min·5 clips

Collins describes how 10,000 people—including 3,000 Black schoolchildren carrying roses—processed through Charleston on the first Decoration Day, a ceremony intentionally erased from history.

1. The Modern Art Notes Podcast presents Bethany Collins in conversation with Tyler Green about Love is Dangerous, her contribution to the MOCA Los Angeles exhibition Monuments. 2. Collins is a conceptual artist from Alabama who works across sculpture, works on paper, and sound, using archival material—songs, texts, monuments—to address race, history, and memory in the United States. 3. The episode's core question is how Collins uses transformation—of monuments, of song, of stone—to distinguish between destroying Confederate memory and actively replacing it with something else. 4. Collins's first sustained engagement with Confederate iconography came from a Davidson College commission, where she found a former professor had rewritten 'Dixie' and built a suite of works showing the song's lyrics shifting across American political causes. 5. She worked with a composer to transpose 'Dixie' into a minor key that prevents jubilant singing, then placed charcoal drawings of 2020 tear-gas deployment atop the altered musical scores—what she calls 'an intentional collapse of time.' 6. Collins came to the Monuments project after a chance meeting with co-curator Hamza Walker in Los Angeles; she submitted Love is Dangerous as the final and strongest of three proposals. 7. The pink granite base of the Stonewall Jackson monument, removed from Charlottesville in 2021, interested Collins partly because pink granite is unusual and partly because she had already been working with floriography—the Victorian language of flowers. 8. Floriography gives Southern state flowers unexpected meanings from 19th-century flower dictionaries: Alabama's camellia means 'my destiny is in your hands,' Louisiana's iris means 'I burn for you,' and Delaware's peach blossom means 'I am your captive.' 9. Finding granite carvers willing to work with high-silica granite proved difficult; Collins called every carver in a national association before finding one in South Carolina and ultimately finishing the petals with Sean Williams in Berry, Vermont. 10. Collins chose to exhibit 100 petals partly as a reference to the approximately 100 years the Jackson monument stood before being decommissioned, and partly as a marker for the span from the Civil War's end to the Voting Rights Act. 11. The Decoration Day origin story is central to the work: in Charleston, South Carolina, formerly enslaved people reinterred Union soldiers' bodies, built a cemetery and archway, and organized a procession of 10,000 people including 3,000 Black schoolchildren carrying roses—a ceremony that became the precursor to Memorial Day. 12. A reporter at the first Decoration Day wrote that 'by the day's end not a speck of earth could be seen beneath the holy mounds of flowers,' a phrase Collins connects to the quantity of petals in her installation. 13. This ceremony has been deliberately suppressed, Collins says, partly because the land was later absorbed by the Citadel—originally founded to train white slave patrols—and partly because the United Daughters of the Confederacy actively denied its existence. 14. Collins kept an uncarved chunk of the original plinth in Love is Dangerous because without it, viewers cannot understand 'how difficult the transformation was'; she places a single petal atop the chunk 'in triumph' over what remains. 15. She concluded that two remaining chunks made the Confederate cause feel 'still winning' and that one was exactly enough to show that 'destruction isn't enough'—the empty space left by a monument must be actively filled with something new. 16. Collins's Old Ship series consists of cast paper works made from molds of acanthus ornamental details on the Corinthian columns of the Old Ship AME Zion Church in Montgomery, Alabama, with granite dust from the monument's recarving embedded in the cotton-pulp paper. 17. The acanthus leaf in classical tradition carries allegorical meanings of rebirth, resurrection, and immortality—associations Collins says she accepts as 'perfect' for work that is explicitly about memorial transformation. 18. Collins discusses future plans to carve stone wreaths representing migration using Southern state flowers, with titles 'For Those Who Stayed' and 'For Those Who Left,' and mentions interest in corbels from Judge Frank Johnson's Art Deco Montgomery courtroom. 19. She frames her relationship to Civil War history through Sophocles' Antigone—currently part of her MCA Denver exhibition The Deluge—which asks how we remember the dead and how we memorialize contested histories. 20. Listeners interested in African American history, Confederate monument debates, and contemporary art that uses archival and material transformation will find this conversation substantive; those looking for purely formal discussions of studio practice may find the historical depth demanding.

As heard by us

A clear, grounded episode on monuments, mourning, and the craft choices that make visual art legible.

Tyler Green pairs Bethany Collins and Gladys Nilsson in an episode that moves from contested public memory to the mechanics of making images read at scale.

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Why you'd press play

If you want Lost Cause monument politics and art history without the gloss, press play.

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