The Crazy Horse Memorial has been taking shape in South Dakota’s Black Hills since work began in 1948. Its planned form shows the Oglala Lakota leader on horseback, his arm extended across the landscape. The project remains a mountain carving in progress, without a fixed completion date.
Once completed, it will be one of the largest monuments in the world.
The unfinished monument sits on the granite peak of Thunderhead Mountain in the US state of South Dakota, not far from the famous Mount Rushmore which depicts the heads of four US presidents.
In 1948, sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski began developing and building the project. The proposal came from Lakota elder Henry Standing Bear, who wanted a memorial recognising Native American history and leadership. He approached Ziolkowski about the idea before work began. Their collaboration placed a Native leader at the centre of an ambitious project in the Black Hills, a landscape with deep significance for Lakota people.
Working alone, the sculptor set up a staircase over 700 steps high and began the painstaking task without water or electricity. As the years passed, Ziolkowski continued the project, eventually being supported by 7 of his 10 children.
After 34 years of work, Ziolkowski died in 1982 leaving the project to be continued by others. So dedicated was the sculptor he was buried at the foot of the monument, leaving behind to his family the words:
"Go slowly, so you do it right."
The work continued beyond Ziolkowski’s lifetime through his family and the memorial organisation. More equipment and a larger crew changed what could be attempted, but a mountain carving still has to proceed within the limits of the rock, available access and the work needed at each stage.
The planned sculpture measures 563 feet, about 171.6 metres, high and 641 feet, about 195.4 metres, long. Comparisons with the Statue of Liberty depend on what is included: the National Park Service gives approximately 151 feet from the statue’s base to its torch, and 305 feet from the ground to the torch. The planned Crazy Horse carving is therefore about 3.7 times the height of the statue alone, or about 1.8 times the full ground-to-torch height.
Admission and private donations help fund the memorial’s work. The site also includes museum and educational activities, so a visitor’s experience extends beyond looking at the mountain. The same site brings together the mountain crew’s long construction task and the daily work of welcoming visitors, maintaining collections and supporting education. That makes the memorial both a work in progress and a place people can already explore.
The visitor complex and fundraising have also prompted criticism about commercialisation and who benefits from the project. For supporters, admissions help sustain a long-term cultural undertaking. For critics, the questions include the treatment of the mountain and the authority to represent Crazy Horse. The memorial’s ambitions and its reception are separate parts of its history, and Native perspectives should not be treated as unanimous.
[h/t: The Mind Unleashed]
From scale model to granite mountain
A small model and a granite mountain require very different kinds of work. The memorial’s account of its carving process explains how laser scanning and survey measurements help position the intended sculpture within the existing rock. Digital models connect the proposed form with the surface the crew is working on.
Rock removal then moves through distinct stages: taking away bulk material, rough shaping, contouring and final detail work. Cable saws and drills can remove substantial blocks, while the final surface needs much finer control. Access is part of the challenge, too. Equipment must reach the relevant part of the mountain before it can be useful there. A distant photograph can make the task look like one continuous act of sculpting, but it is a sequence of different operations carried out on a very large scale.
A memorial represents choices about history
The mountain figure is an artistic interpretation of Crazy Horse, not a portrait he sat for. Its gesture, scale and placement express the choices of the people who conceived and developed the memorial. A monument can make a historical figure visible to a broad audience while still raising questions about which parts of that person’s life it emphasises.
The museum and educational spaces offer a different scale of encounter. Objects, individual histories and contemporary cultural work can give detail to a story that a distant carving can only suggest. Looking at the sculpture alongside those resources helps distinguish the historical person, the twentieth-century memorial project and the living communities whose heritage it seeks to honour. Each has its own history; the size of the mountain figure is only one part of the subject.
Further reading: Crazy Horse Memorial: project and educational mission.
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