Empty Pedestals Earns National Honors for Reframing Confederate Monuments

The book received a 2025 Professional Award of Honor in Communications from the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) and was a finalist for the 2025 J.B. Jackson Book Prize from the University of Virginia (UVA) Center for Cultural Landscapes. 

Jurors from the ASLA recognized Empty Pedestals as delivering “moral clarity–with a steady grace–about the role of landscape narratives both in shaping contested spaces marked by prejudice and in offering ways to heal.”

The book’s co-editors, Kofi Boone, FASLA, Joseph D. Moore Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, and M. Elen Deming, DDes, FASLA, professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning, worked with 17 contributors, including landscape architects, architects, artists, historians, and philanthropic leaders engaged in the public realm to bring the messages to life. 

Intending the book to be a gallery of contemporary work, Boone and Deming approached individuals across their own academic and professional networks as contributors. Tania Allen and Sara Queen’s work on the Oppressive Infrastructures Colloquium, which visualizes the enduring systemic impacts of inequitable policies across the United States, served as foundational knowledge for the work. 

“When we prepared the book, we tried to present a number of different voices and a deeper historical perspective,” says Deming. “We aren’t dismissing Confederate monuments as a uniform evil in the world. We’re hoping to share that, as concrete forms of political speech, monuments can sometimes become weaponized, and have long been used that way in many places.” 

Boone chimes in, “Elen shares in the final chapter of the book the lessons we can discern from the communities that are dealing with these memorials and monuments, and being aware of their landscape literacy and awareness. Even though it’s a Confederate monument on the cover of the book, it’s a specific conversation more generalized – we expand from the Lost Cause narrative to other oppressive narratives in landscapes around the world.”

Both Boone and Deming are seeing more community organizations engaging in this work and partnering with designers to reconsider spaces that have perpetuated some form of trauma. Boone’s lab, the Just Communities Lab, is partnering with Stagville Memorial Project to talk about the legacy of Stagville Plantation, one of the largest plantations in the region, with direct ties to founding the City of Durham. 

Boone says, “It’s revealing that there are communities who have been thinking about this for a while, but they didn’t have a distilled way of framing it that gave them more support to pursue strategies that could heal the harm done by these monuments.”

“It was about helping communities to find their own way,” Deming adds. Communities could participate at many levels: from low-tech solutions to projects costing millions of dollars, made of steel and glass. Across the board, the ability for communities to come together and have a conversation was paramount. 

Something Boone hadn’t considered until after the book’s publication was how much these memorials suppressed community life. Removing these monuments allows the space left behind to become inviting rather than excluding. 

Receiving a finalist nomination for the J.B. Jackson prize for their work was significant for both Boone and Deming. The jury commented that, “(T)his groundbreaking book reframes Confederate monuments as evolving and dynamic cultural landscapes, advancing landscape studies through a ‘medicinal design’ framework that addresses trauma.” 

Both felt the awards reacted to different elements of Empty Pedestals: ASLA recognized the value of landscape architecture and the book’s contributions to that public discourse, while UVA acknowledged its scholarly excellence and theoretical contributions. 

“When we wrote the book, there was an immediate and obvious need for it to be written as a source book, for communities galvanized by the political events of 2020,” Deming says. “Little did we know that when the book came out in 2024, the need would be bigger than ever.”

“This book offers a strong foundation, through case studies and the contributors, on how these ideas were concretized and made into a form. So being able to spatialize it and frame it in a particular way can help communities make the case that replacing harmful monuments with places designed for healing is not part of a one-off set of incidents; they are components of larger systems that we should give more attention,” Boone says. 

“There are many lessons you can take from the book,” says Deming. “But one that sticks with me is that monuments are anything but permanent. They are cultural and political, coming and going over a long time. And that alone, I think, is worth remembering.”

Empty Pedestals features the contributions of:

• Tania Allen
• C.L. Bohannon
• W. Fitzhugh Brundage
• Elgin Cleckley
• Walter Hood
• Zena Howard
• Blair LM Kelley
• Bryan Lee
• Sue Mobley
• Sara Queen
• Richard Schein
• Dayton Schroeter
• Chantal Rush Tebbe
• Dell Upton
• David Wilson