Unhappy With 'Confrontational' Image, U.S. Panel Wants King Statue Reworked

"I think that the metaphor of Dr. King being merged with the natural forces of this stone is absolutely essential to avoid colossal monumentalization," commission member N. Michael McKinnell said at the April 17 meeting.

Jackson, the executive architect, said his design team had aimed for a powerful yet reflective representation of King.

"The image of Dr. King had to be inspirational," Jackson said yesterday. "It had to be an image that projected this man as an intellectual. It had to be an image that projected Dr. King as someone in thought."

As for the idea of King materializing from the stone, Jackson said he met this week in Michigan with the project's artistic consultants, James Chaffers and Jon Lockard of the University of Michigan, to consider modifications "to even more enhance that concept of the individual emerging out of the stone."

The team wants to hold on "to the power and inspirational image" of the current version, he said.

The sense of confrontation in the sculpture is not a coincidence. "We see him . . . as a warrior," Chaffers said yesterday. "We see him as a warrior for peace . . . not as some pacifist, placid, kind of vanilla, but really a man of great conviction and strength."

"It's hard for me to put my arms around" the criticism that the sculpture smacks of Social Realism, Jackson said.

"When you look at something of this scale . . . things are bolder because of the scale of the project itself," he said. "Artists, either in Russia or China or other places where they actually do have a history of this, those artists have a common understanding of the material and what you can and cannot do," he said.

Last year, the foundation selected Chinese master sculptor Lei Yixin to work on the memorial. He was banished to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution but is now considered a national treasure with a lifelong stipend from the government.

Critics said that an African American artist, or any American, would have been preferable. And at least one black sculptor, Ed Dwight of Denver, has said Lei's models do not resemble King.

"Everybody has this problem with how Dr. King is represented," Dwight said this week. "You can't satisfy anybody, because everybody remembers him in a different way."

The memorial foundation has said that Lei is internationally renowned and was selected for his experience with large public sculptures.