The bronze and granite statue, sculpted by Paul DiPasquale, originally was intended to be located in front of the Africian American Sports Hall of Fame, However, upon Ashe's death, Virginia Heroes, a non profit organization founded by Asha, started to consider placing the statues on historic Monument Avenue, a street that primarily honors confederate generals, and that is when the disagreement over where the monument should be located began.
 

Designer and landscape architecture Barry W. Starke. FASLA Earth Design Associates. began studying the avenue for best placement of the Ashe monument in relation to traffice  patterns and the scales of the other nearby monuments. Stake ultimately recommended that the status be built at the edge of Richmond's historic district on the corner of Monument Avenue and Roseneath Street. a site that hadn't seen a new monument since 1927. The choices of this location added to the controversy, which was largely centered on issues of race.