"In Memory. Remembering all victims of racial or ethnic violence or hate crimes. Just as many colors and varieties of bloom make this garden more beautiful, many skin shades and diversity in humans make our communities better places. Please take a moment to consider what you can do to prevent future victims."
Thumbtacks. Laminated paper. On a historic stone and iron bridge in a National Historic District.
This is not a minor oversight. It is the diagnostic center of the entire institutional failure.
Fiduciary Duty and the Phone Call That Was Never Made
The Bridge of Flowers Committee is a subsidiary of the Shelburne Falls Area Women's Club, operating as a Commonwealth nonprofit with fiduciary responsibilities to its stakeholders, its donors, and the public trust it holds over one of the most visited civic landmarks in Franklin County.
I had a long professional relationship with that bridge. The River Bench. The Trolley Gate. The Pothole Fountain with the Black Stones of Africa — designed and installed at the committee's request. The committee's own written record describes me as "a great supporter of the bridge and very responsive to particular needs." Their most significant active artist contributor for nearly two decades.
When a Change.org petition calling for the removal of my work circulated in June 2020 — created by an eighteen-year-old who was not present at the event she organized around, subsequently removed by the platform for defamation and misinformation violations — the committee held secret Zoom meetings to coordinate a response. These meetings were organized by Kay Berenson, co-founder of the Greenfield Recorder, who was simultaneously a committee member. The conflict of interest was never disclosed. The Recorder never reported why the petition was removed.
In those meetings the committee discussed the removal of my professional work from the bridge. They made decisions that ended a seventeen-year institutional relationship. They did it without calling me. Without emailing me. Without sending a single communication of any kind.
This is not how a Commonwealth nonprofit honors its fiduciary responsibilities. The Stone Spring fountain area where my work sits is a Memory Area in the committee's own designation — built with donations made in honor of loved ones, carrying specific obligations. When a petition called for the physical alteration of that Memory Area, the committee's fiduciary duty required at minimum a conversation with the artist who designed and built the installations within it.
Instead they held a Zoom meeting in private and hung a laminated sign with thumbtacks.
Committee member Ann Loftquist told me directly, some time after the fact, that the committee had "thrown me under the bus." She said it to my face. She knew. She said it. The acknowledgment existed. The correction did not follow.
Two Failures, One Institutional Pattern
Fast forward to April 2026. A contractor working on the bridge's $3.2 million renovation confirmed to me directly, twice, that the Bridge of Flowers Committee had specified the soil type for the replanting — not engineers, not professional horticulturists, not the people who actually work in the ground daily. The committee. The confirmed remediation cost for that specification error: approximately $60,000 in donor and public funds. There has been no public disclosure of who is responsible or who is paying. The committee's public explanation — that the plants "weren't thriving" — is the institutional equivalent of the cropped photograph. The problem is acknowledged. The cause is buried.
I hold a Cornell B.S. in Floriculture and Ornamental Horticulture and completed a semester of Soil Science. I was not consulted. I am the most credentialed horticulturist in the community with active permanent installations on that bridge and nobody picked up the phone.
The laminated sign and the $60,000 soil error are the same institutional behavior expressed in different materials. Both are products of a committee that acts without professional consultation, without accountability to its most qualified stakeholders, and without any mechanism for correcting its errors in public. Gesture where substance is required. Laminated paper where stone would do. Wrong soil specification where a phone call would have cost nothing.
The pattern is not a coincidence. It is a governance model.
The Group Psychosis of 2020
Understanding why a group of ostensibly thoughtful civic leaders could fail to see the nine-year anti-racist installation three feet from the sign they were hanging requires understanding the specific psychological climate of June 2020.
What followed George Floyd's death was not merely widespread outrage. It was a rapid and total ideological compliance environment that social researchers have subsequently described in terms approaching collective psychosis — a shared framework in which a set of premises cannot be questioned without triggering group rejection. The premises in progressive communities like Shelburne Falls in June 2020 were approximately these: anyone who does not fully endorse the full BLM platform is a racist; questioning any element is equivalent to violence; silence is violence; therefore action — any action — is required immediately, without deliberation, without evidence, without nuance.
This framework does not leave room for noticing that the man being called a racist built a nine-year anti-racist installation in the pavement you are standing on. It does not leave room for calling him. It does not leave room for reading the petition carefully or checking whether the person who wrote it was present at the event she described. The framework produces action calibrated to demonstrate moral urgency — and nothing demonstrates moral urgency more efficiently than a laminated sign installed immediately in response to a petition, without wasting time on phone calls to the people the petition is about.
The committee walked right past nine years of actual anti-racist work embedded in the ground and hung a fucking sign. That is not malice. That is what group psychosis does to institutional judgment: it makes the permanent invisible and the performative urgent.
When the psychosis receded, Loftquist could see it clearly enough to say "we threw you under the bus" to my face. The retrospective clarity was real. It just didn't produce any obligation to repair what the moment destroyed.
What the Sign Actually Says
Return to the sign. Read it again.
"Please take a moment to consider what you can do to prevent future victims."
In June 2020, while that sign was being printed and laminated and thumbtacked to the fence, the Bridge of Flowers Committee was holding secret meetings to erase the professional legacy of a man they had worked with for a decade — without notifying him, without hearing from him, without any process that could be called fair. The man whose work they were erasing had built the anti-racist installation three feet from where the sign was going up. He was being called a racist in a petition that had been removed for defamation. The committee was not calling him.
The sign asks visitors to consider what they can do to prevent future victims.
The committee was, at that moment, creating one.
The sign describes the behavior of the committee. It describes it accurately. It directs that description outward, toward an imagined external threat, while the committee proceeds to enact it. The institutions calling for prevention of racial and ethnic harm were getting behind the people who had just called a man a KKK member and a Grand Wizard channeler without a single piece of supporting evidence, while sitting three feet from nine years of his permanent anti-racist work that nobody apparently noticed or cared to mention.
What Fiduciary Reform Actually Looks Like
The Bridge of Flowers is a genuine civic achievement. Its beauty is real. Its governance is the problem.
A Commonwealth nonprofit that holds donated memorial funds, governs a public landmark, and makes decisions affecting the professional legacies of long-term contributors has obligations that secret Zoom meetings and thumbtacked signs do not satisfy. The structural requirements for reform are not complicated:
Open membership processes that end 98 years of gender exclusion. Mandatory professional consultation on horticultural and design decisions — the $60,000 soil error would not have happened with a single qualified phone call. Documented stakeholder engagement processes for decisions affecting long-term contributors. A public accounting of the soil remediation cost, who specified the incorrect soil, and who is bearing the expense.
Those are not punitive demands. They are what fiduciary responsibility looks like in practice for a nonprofit holding public trust.
The sign said to consider what you can do to prevent future victims.
That is the answer.
The Black Stones of Africa are still in the pavement. The River Bench is still on the bridge. The Trolley Gate is still standing. The work is permanent because it was made to be permanent — stone and steel and iron set in the ground to last.
The laminated sign has already started yellowing at the corners.
Stone does not rust. Steel does not deaccession. Thumbtacks do not hold forever.
The record is in the ground. Anyone can go see it.
John F. Sendelbach is a metalworker, sculptor, and landscape designer based in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. His work on the Bridge of Flowers spans seventeen years and includes the Pothole Fountain with the Black Stones of Africa, the River Bench, and the Trolley Gate. The complete documented archive is at johnsendelbach.com. No login. No fee.