On my calendar, this essay was meant to run in early fall. But last night, flying home, I was watching the news on the seatback screen when something caught my eye. Over and over, the location of this sculpture kept appearing on the map—downtown Los Angeles. On June 8th, despite the governor’s objections, 2,000 members of the California National Guard were deployed to the city. Most were stationed around City Hall. But the 224th Sustainment Brigade stood watch in front of the Hall of Justice.

During coverage of the “No Kings” protests, I watched L.A. County Sheriff’s deputies use tear gas and flash-bangs to push peaceful protesters down Temple Street, away from the Roybal Federal Building and toward the Hall of Justice. I kept scanning the background, looking for Alison Saar’s Embodied. The cameras were locked on the street. The smoke. The aggressive tactics. I never saw the sculpture. But I knew it was there—watching all of it. A bronze figure standing tall in front of the building, holding a book, releasing a bird. A monument to the values that were supposed to guide all this.

I couldn’t stop thinking about how easily it might be missed—the sculpture, I mean—how something so powerful can be standing right there and still get lost in the chaos. So I went back to the piece, and to everything it holds.

Alison Saar’s towering bronze sculpture Embodied stands outside the Hall of Justice in Downtown Los Angeles, where the rhetoric of law and the reality of lived experience often find themselves in uneasy conversation. The figure is unmistakably rooted—anchored to the earth by a long, flared skirt inscribed with words of resistance and healing—but she is also uplifted, one hand offering a book, the other releasing a bird. She is a monument of contrasts: still and kinetic, burdened and liberated, mortal and mythic.

Installed in 2014 as part of Los Angeles County’s efforts to memorialize the victims of violence and to acknowledge institutional failure, Embodied carries all the hallmarks of Saar’s deeply physical and historically engaged practice. She has long used the human form—especially the female body—as a vessel for memory, myth, and mourning. Here, Saar sculpts a woman of dignified poise and quiet power. Her hair is woven into a thick, rope-like braid that splits in two and loops around her waist, held gently in both hands like a lifeline or offering. The figure’s dress, monumental in scale and grounded like a bell skirt, is inscribed with over 200 vertical words: “Compassion,” “Courage,” “Justice,” “Harmony,” “Serenity,” “Voice,” “Bond,” “Restore,” “Resilience.” These are not empty platitudes but principles etched into bronze—hard-won values demanded by survivors and families whose grief often goes unseen.

The Hall of Justice looks every bit like a place where justice might live— columns, symmetry, a sense of gravitas. Built in 1925, it has housed the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the District Attorney’s Office, and even the coroner’s office. Charles Manson was jailed here. It’s where Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin was booked, where autopsies were conducted, and where countless defendants have passed through in shackles. For decades, the Hall of Justice symbolized the weight of the law—but not always justice itself. It was shuttered after the 1994 Northridge earthquake and remained closed for nearly two decades. Its reopening in 2015 was meant to signal resilience and reform.

It’s no accident, then, that Saar’s Embodied stands just outside its polished stone façade. It’s a counter-monument. It doesn’t need a pedestal. She stands because presence—in this place—means something. It doesn’t demand space—it claims it quietly and without apology. The figure doesn’t point, accuse, or collapse under grief. She stands.

Her body is composed but not impassive. Saar has given her a contemplative gaze—her eyes fixed slightly upward, as though looking toward something unseen. From her outstretched right hand, a bird takes flight, wings just lifting. The gesture is hopeful but tinged with sorrow as if the release is hard-won. This is an act of letting go. The bird becomes a symbol of transformation, of memory released into the air, carrying with it the weight of testimony. The sculpture captures the tension between holding and releasing, between presence and passage, as if the woman herself is a conduit between past harm and future healing.

The symbolism is layered and open to interpretation, which is part of the work’s quiet strength. Saar doesn’t dictate a singular narrative. Rather, she offers an embodiment (the title is exacting) of many: a mother mourning a child lost to police violence, a survivor of state neglect, a community member testifying in court, a spirit bearing the burdens of the past while still carrying forward the tools of change—knowledge, resistance, care.

The open book in the figure’s left hand serves as a counterweight to the soaring bird. Its pages are thick and slightly uneven as if shaped by time and touch. It is not a legal code but something older and more tactile—oral history made visible, the accumulated weight of unrecorded lives. She holds the book open like she wants you to take it. To study it. Not hiding it. She offers transparency. Just: here. Look.

Saar has said in interviews that she often considers how to “sculpt memory,” how to give form to absences and render the invisible visible. Embodied does just that. Its power lies in its formal restraint—no tears, no dramatics, no violence depicted—and in the way it accumulates symbolic meaning through form, posture, and texture. The sculpture doesn’t scream for justice; it insists on it.

The engraved words are especially poignant. They aren’t random; they’re drawn from conversations with survivors, family members of victims, and community advocates. The inclusion of state names like “Idaho” alongside affirmations like “Dignity” and “Solace” speaks to the national scale of harm and the broad geography of remembrance. Each pleat of the skirt reads like a scroll—every fold carrying someone’s voice, someone’s memory. The skirt itself—reminiscent of both classical drapery and 19th-century mourning attire—grounds the sculpture in an aesthetic of solemnity without resorting to nostalgia.

Importantly, Embodied is one of the few public artworks in Los Angeles created by a Black woman that is permanently installed in such a high-profile civic location. For so long, monuments in this city have skipped over stories like hers. Saar doesn’t just correct the record—she expands the possibilities of what public memory can even look like. Instead of a lone man on a horse or a bust on a pedestal, we have a standing woman offering knowledge and release, surrounded by the echoes of a system still reckoning with its failures.

And yet, the work is not cynical. Despite its location—despite the building’s weighty past and the countless traumas embedded in its marble walls—Embodied gestures toward possibility. The bird lifts off. The braid remains intact. The book stays open. It is a sculpture of continuity.

Its placement in a landscaped garden offers a kind of sanctuary. Visitors can walk around the sculpture, read the inscribed words, and inhabit its space without mediation. The openness of the installation is crucial; it invites reflection but doesn’t prescribe it. You could pass by on your way to jury duty or stop to weep after a hearing. You could study it from the curb or sit beside it in the grass. It holds space without requiring performance.

Embodied joins a growing lineage of public artworks that seek to memorialize not just events but feelings—works by artists like Maya Lin and Simone Leigh that refuse to separate beauty from grief or dignity from damage. These works don’t offer easy catharsis. They ask us to stay with complexity, to learn from it, to feel it in the body.

In this way, Saar’s sculpture is not just a representation of a woman. It is a practice of remembering. It is a monument that holds and gives. It acknowledges pain without being defined by it. It opens a path—not away from sorrow, but through it.

In a city like Los Angeles, where things change overnight and stories get paved over just as fast, Embodied insists on remembering. It doesn’t promise justice or even peace. But it gives us a place to stand. A figure to stand with. And that, somehow, feels like a beginning.