On National Mall, ‘Democracy’ drips in daylight

What weighed 3,000 pounds at dawn’s early light in Washington and will virtually disappear by sundown?

The correct guess is a large ice sculpture of the word “Democracy” placed on the National Mall on Wednesday morning in direct view of the U.S. Capitol as a vanishing reminder, its creators said, of rapidly eroding rights and an existential threat to the freedom on which America was founded.

That’s a lot of weight for nine cold carved letters to carry.

But Ben Cohen, a longtime activist and the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s, said it’s a fitting message for the country. His Up In Arms campaign, which calls to reduce Pentagon spending and increase funding for health care and education, helped bring the ice sculpture to the capital.

“Showing in real life that democracy is melting away before our very eyes, I think it’s a powerful symbol that helps express the feelings and the sadness and the horror of Americans,” Cohen said in a phone interview from his home in Vermont.

Cohen pointed to actions taken by President Donald Trump’s administration that, he said, have put democracy in jeopardy.

“Attacks on freedom of speech. Masked, unidentified secret police snatching people off the streets and arresting and deporting them. These are horrible things that we used to talk about as happening in other countries,” he said. “People being prosecuted and punished and sentenced without due process. Using the military against the population of the United States is undemocratic, right?”

The sculpture, 5 feet high and 17 feet wide, sat on a pebbled pathway on the Mall at Third Street. Conceptual artists Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese, who created the work in New York, arrived a little after 6 a.m. to help oversee the arrangement of the frozen letters once they arrived in a refrigerated truck. Spelling is not a detail to trifle with when installing art with a message.

The couple have worked with ice in the past in their “Melted Away” series, which included the word “Truth” in 2018 at the same location on the Mall and “The Future” in 2014 at the People’s Climate March in New York City.

“We do this work to spark thought and provoke awareness and encourage people to engage in discussion about the issues and hopefully take some action,” Ligorano said. “To witness it melting in front of the nation’s Capitol just adds theatrically, it sets the stage for what’s really going on.”

District resident Tracy Pritchett happened upon the ice carving while walking on the Mall and joined a growing crowd of people who stopped to take photos. “It’s a pretty poignant statement about everything that’s happening right now,” said Pritchett, 45. “Americans are not happy.”

Alejandro Sorondo, a criminal justice major at George Washington University, said he saw a post on social media about the sculpture and decided to check it out for himself. “It’s a message and I understand it,” Sorondo, 21, said. “I would definitely agree with it and understand why the people who made it were motivated to put this in front of such an important building.”

The melting Democracy artwork has no connection to other protest installations that have appeared at the same location on the National Mall over the past year, including a statue placed last month of Trump holding hands with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who was found dead in his prison cell in 2019. In June, a statue titled “Dictator Approved” showed up. It depicted Trump’s fist squashing the crown of the Statue of Liberty. The creator of those works remains anonymous.

Ligorano said she planned for the sculpture to last until evening. But with temperatures expected to reach the mid 70s and the sun beating down, the odds that Democracy à la mode could survive until sundown were not promising.

“It might be closer to 4:45,” she said, shielding her eyes from the glare.

By noon, soon after the frozen blocks were uncovered, they began to bead and sweat. The drips kept dropping. Soon rivulets of New York water ran down the sides of each letter and spiderweb cracks began to form. The forces of nature were against it. Democracy didn’t stand a chance.

Water from the statue would not go to waste however. The artists built a trough that fed the melted ice into a container and one day soon it will be distilled bottled into 1.7-ounce perfume spritzers and sold for $101.

Democracy, if anyone needed a reminder, does not come cheaply.