Mount Rushmore: Curating Controversy in Stone

Sixty feet tall. Four presidents. Carved directly into the granite face of the Black Hills. Mount Rushmore, completed between 1927 and 1941, is one of America’s most recognizable icons. It was conceived as a tribute to democracy but built on stolen Indigenous land, with a legacy tied to white nationalism and erased narratives. For museum professionals, Mount Rushmore is not just a monument to four men. It is a test of how cultural institutions confront power, myth, and omission. What do we do when a national symbol is both a marvel and a mistake?

The Vision Behind the Stone

Sculpted by Gutzon Borglum, a man with known ties to the Ku Klux Klan, the monument was intended to celebrate “the birth, growth, development, and preservation of the United States.”

The four presidents chosen:

• George Washington , the founding

• Thomas Jefferson, expansion

• Abraham Lincoln, unity

• Theodore Roosevelt, global emergence

But this vision excluded Indigenous peoples, erased slavery, and glorified manifest destiny.

Museums must ask:

1. Who gets carved into permanence?

2. Whose stories are erased in the name of grandeur?

3. Can monumental art be reclaimed or just recontextualized?

Mount Rushmore is not just about who is seen. It’s about who was made invisible.

The Land Beneath the Sculpture

The Black Hills were promised to the Lakota Sioux in the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), then taken after gold was discovered. Mount Rushmore was built without consent, on land that remains sacred. This isn’t a side note. It is the foundation of the monument’s meaning.

For cultural institutions, this demands:

1. Land acknowledgments that are active, not performative.

2. Collaboration with Indigenous communities in interpretation, not just exhibition.

3. Reframing historical sites as places of dialogue, not closure.

The mountain holds more than faces. It holds wounds and resistance.

Granite Propaganda

The very scale of Mount Rushmore makes it difficult to challenge. Like many authoritarian monuments, it weaponizes awe. But awe can be dissected.

Museums can:

1. Offer critical counter-narratives alongside monumental art.

2. Use AR and digital tools to overlay suppressed histories.

3. Reconsider how scale shapes legitimacy and how to break it down.

The Response: Art as Protest

In 1971, the American Indian Movement occupied the monument, renaming it Mount Crazy Horse in protest. In 2020, Indigenous groups renewed these demands amid national debates on statues and systemic racism. The Crazy Horse Memorial, still under construction nearby, offers a counternarrative, one that resists closure, refuses simplification, and is being shaped by Native hands.

Museums must ask:

1. Can we curate dueling narratives in the same landscape?

2. Is inclusion enough or must we embrace active unsettlement?

3. What happens when the monument is the debate?

Mount Rushmore may never be undone. But it must never again be unquestioned.

Toward a Multiplicity of Memory

Mount Rushmore doesn’t need to be erased. It needs to be recurated.

That means:

1. Telling the truths behind the chisels

2. Expanding whose faces and stories get monumentalized

3. Refusing to let a single version of history dominate the view

It’s not about destroying stone. It’s about dismantling silence. Mount Rushmore forces a new definition of museum work:

• Not only preserving heritage,

• But interrogating which heritage we preserve, and why.

• A museum without walls can be made of marble or granite. But without honest interpretation, it becomes not memory, but mythology.