An AI-generated rendering of a monument the size of Sabin Howard’s Grand Liberty Arch proposal, in the park on Capitol Hill. Represented sculptures are not those of Howard (due to copyright issues).

After pushback from community members—more about the site than the visual content—Sabin Howard announced this week that he’s leaving Utah and looking for a new home for his Grand Liberty Arch, the massive bronze monument he’d proposed for a park near the Capitol.

The Grand Liberty Arch is a planned 60-foot-long, 38-foot-tall bronze sculpture with 56 figures tracing a narrative of American history from the Revolutionary War through westward expansion. Howard, who is best known for the bronze relief at the National WWI Memorial in Washington, D.C., has billed it—in a time when big is supposedly better—as the largest multi-figure bronze monument in the Western Hemisphere. The price tag hovers around $55 million.

The project surfaced as early as September 2025, when Howard began circulating renderings. It moved from concept to state business on May 6, 2026, when the Capitol Preservation Board picked the Grand Liberty Arch over two competing proposals—one for the transcontinental railroad, one honoring Utah women—for a site on the small triangle of park land at 17 W. 500 North, across the street from the Capitol. The story really broke into public view on July 6, with reporting from KSL and The Salt Lake Tribune, when a six-foot model was unveiled at the Capitol as part of America’s 250th-anniversary festivities. Within days, neighbors were organizing against the site (traffic, loss of green space) and a coalition of Native nations was objecting to a figure depicting an Indigenous man wielding a tomahawk against a settler. By August 5, the Capitol Hill Neighborhood Council had filed a formal complaint alleging the board violated Utah’s open-meetings law. On August 11, Howard published an op-ed in the Deseret News conceding the site was “not the right home for a project of this scale” and announcing he and his wife would leave Utah to find the arch a new one. Probably Texas.

The first we heard of the project wasn’t any of that. It was a meeting of bigwigs—powerful and monied figures from Utah’s political, business, and artistic worlds—at the Grand America. Describing the vision of the presenter and the mood of his backers, one attendee said, tongue in cheek, “testimonies were borne.”

But there may have been another indication. This spring, at a conference for executive directors from Utah’s arts nonprofit world, which was hosted by Utah Arts and Museums, we were told that in the final days of the 2026 legislative session $1 million in Utah Arts and Museum’s budget normally allocated to project and general support grants for the nonprofit sphere had been shifted to “public sculpture.” As scores of nonprofits in Utah’s art community prepared grant proposals for the current cycle, we were told to expect less—up to 20 percent less.

Had that money been moved to help underwrite Howard’s vision? It was never clear. News reports stated the arch would be funded through private donations; but we’ve learned by now how easily a supposedly privately funded vanity project can end up dipping into public coffers.

Was that the move here? Did the legislature shift money away from dozens of Utah arts nonprofits and set it aside for this project? And now that Howard is moving on, will the nonprofits get their million dollars back? If not, where is that money going?

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.