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Looking for McKinley
Where is the statue? Only the Timken Foundation knows By Kimberly Wear kim@northcoastjournal.com
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wo years have passed since the statue of President William McKinley was taken off his pedestal on the Arcata Plaza in a quiet pre-dawn operation and, since that morning, the bronze work has remained out of public view. After being placed on a cushion of tires in the back of a flatbed truck for the 2,600-mile trip due east to McKinley’s longtime Ohio home back in March of 2019, barely a trickle of information has been forthcoming from the Timken Foundation of Canton, the official procurer of noted artist Haig Patigian’s sculpture. “The statue has been relocated to Ohio and the foundation has restored it at its own expense,” Executive Director Mark Scheffler said in statement this week, responding to Journal questions about the statue. “It is currently in storage in a secure location. It will be moved to the Canton area for public benefit once a suitable location has been identified. We do not plan on having further comment.” One of the few public glimpses of the McKinley statue since it left Humboldt County was an article with photographs done by an Ohio art conservation center, detailing the extensive restoration process that Scheffler mentioned. And the pictures showed a marked transformation. Gone is the patina — cast by time and decades in the North Coast’s elements — as are the vivid sea-green splotches left by an apparent acid attack that occurred just a few months before the sculpture’s departure. After the statue was returned to its original tannish coloring, a coffee-brown wax layer was applied to protect the bronze work underneath. But the art conservation center recently took down the piece about McKinley’s September 2019 makeover, as well as accompanying social media posts, after the Journal asked for permission to use some of the photographs in a story as the anniversary of the statue’s removal from the Arcata Plaza approached. Originally, the director wrote back to say he would “have to check with the responsible entity for permission to release
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NORTH COAST JOURNAL • Thursday, April 1, 2021 • northcoastjournal.com
images.” But within two days, the page’s link resulted in a “404: page Not Found” message. Why? It’s not clear. Neither Scheffler nor the art conservancy responded to Journal questions about the article being taken down. But suffice to say, McKinley looks quite different than he did back in February of 2018, when the Arcata City Council made the decision on the statue’s disposition — the culmination of more than a decade of efforts by removal advocates who viewed McKinley’s likeness sitting court in the town’s center as a vestige of American imperialism and genocide. The last push gained momentum in late 2017 as a national conversation swirled around what should be done with historic monuments to once honored figures with legacies now seen by many as symbols of colonialism, white supremacy and slavery. As Arcata wrestled with that question, some deemed the 1906 statue of the nation’s 25th president, which survived the Great San Francisco earthquake and stood on its plaza perch for more than 100 years, simply part of the city’s history — for better or worse. But most felt the statue should go. In the end, another year would pass before the Arcata City Council sat down in February of 2019 to make the final call on McKinley’s future. On the table were four offers to take the statue off the city’s hands. One was from a resident who offered to assist with the costs of moving the nearly 9-foot sculpture to a local private or public site, with the Eureka Veterans Hall expressing interest. Another was from the owner of the Fountainhead Auto Museum and Wedgewood Resort in Fairbanks, Alaska, whose wife grew up in town, with the offer to pay all relocation coasts and to come retrieve the statue. A third was from a person described in the city’s staff report as “an anonymous donor,” who would pay all of the city’s costs to move the statue to the East Coast where it would join a private collection with other works by Patigian, as well as pieces related to McKinley’s presidency.
