ABSTRACT
Nowhere on the Centennial grounds were references to the Civil War so prominent or explicit as in Memorial Hall and the Art Annex, where detailed depictions of combat, emotional homages to its victims, idealized monuments to its heroes, and illustrations of its effects repeatedly confronted the Centennial visitor.1 Because ceremonies are by nature ephemeral, and the weapons assembled expressly for the Centennial would not continue to be objects of display after its duration, the military presence in the form of rituals and relics was generalized and transitory. But the fine art paintings and sculpture punctuating the fairgrounds and covering the walls of Memorial Hall were created as objects of continual display, and functioned as tangible, enduring cultural artifacts. Because collective memories are not located simply in the minds of individual community members, but in the form, function, and viewing circumstances of the object, the Centennial art objects, as “symbolic rituals of commemoration,” established an external framework or location for the expression of collective memories.2 It was through the design of Memorial Hall as the keeper of Centennial memory-the arrangement of its spaces and the objects it held-that the memory of the war was most readily constructed, articulated, and negotiated among visitors.
