Stoney talked about how Richmond has changed over the past 200 years and said that adding “Rumors of War” to Arthur Ashe Boulevard will be Richmond’s “symbolic battle cry” to change.

“The installation of ‘Rumors of War’ at the VMFA later this year will be a historic moment for our museum and for the city of Richmond and the commonwealth of Virginia,” Nyerges said earlier in a statement.

“Rumors of War” is Wiley’s first public artwork and his largest three-dimensional work to date.

“The sculpture belongs right here on our grounds,” said Valerie Cassel Oliver, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art. “It allows us to shift the gravitational pull of Monument Avenue and the conversation in general. Given that Virginia has the largest number of memorials and monuments dedicated to the Confederacy, it is a watershed moment. We are expanding conversation about monuments — who gets memorialized; who is edified.”

Said Nyerges: “When you look at Virginia as a whole, at least 20% of all Virginians trace their heritage directly to Africa. The fact that Richmond itself is a black majority city, it is important to us to be able to put this in context with a great work of art, which will hopefully further the conversation about these 19th- and early 20th-century monuments.”