Arkansas artist V.L. Cox, who for the past couple of years has been creating three-dimensional works representing discrimination against women, African Americans, immigrants and LGBT people, is returning her “End Hate” doors to the Lincoln Memorial on Feb. 11. They’ll be on exhibit 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on the Reflecting Pool steps.
Cox hopes the doors will help open conversations about the efforts to normalize discrimination that Donald Trump has brought to the nation’s capital. A news release says Cox hopes to “engage viewers responsibly in a dialogue no matter how uncomfortable. She believes that by truthfully looking in the mirror at ourselves, we take the first step in accepting the fact that we are all part of the link that needs to be prepared.”
Cox built the doors in response to Arkansas’s House Bill 1228, introduced in 2015, that would have allowed discrimination against LGBT people on the basis of religious belief. (The bill, thanks to pressure by Governor Hutchinson, the public and protesting corporations, was eventually amended to mirror the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993.) “This discriminatory bill would have brought back Jim Crow days where hatred and repression were the law of the land,” the news release says. The doors have been exhibited at the State Capitol twice, and in Washington, D.C., in 2015.
For this installation, Cox is adding a “Women Only” door. The image of the installation (now on display at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center in New York), made in D.C. in 2015, has been digitally altered to represent the new door.