Kent State/May 4 and Postwar Memory

In negotiating the historical meanings May 4, 1970, Kent State University has produced an official memorial site on campus that has evolved in context with postwar responses to the Vietnam conflict. Over three decades, many monuments and memorials were produced, permitted, rejected or neglected according to changing historical, political and institutional imperatives. Official monuments and memorials traditionally stood in tension with unofficial and unrecognized objects of memory. Contemporary efforts to come to terms with history at Kent State have afforded official status to many previously unrecognized art works and artifacts. Thus, the current memorial field not only commemorates May 4, but also embodies a history of contest and recovery after the event and war. This article surveys a number of May 4 memorial objects, including Bruno Ast's official monument, Donald Drumm's Solar Totem, George Segal's Abraham and Isaac, and Robert Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed, while it examines the persistence of forgetting in contemporary acts of commemoration.