FORWARD: Issue #7: Monuments & Memorials
From the Guest Editor
In Stay, by artist Sam Fields, a massive, nautical rope installation illuminates the often-overshadowed history of women’s communal labor in the Boston Navy Yard. Photo © Annielly Camargo. Read about this project in New Aesthetics.
Monumental Shifts
By Claire Flanegin
Monuments and memorials have long been a part of the human landscape. They are woven into the fabric of our communities, with avenues, buildings, lampposts, and even street signs bearing the names of long-dead men. You would be hard-pressed to think of a city without at least one bronze portrait sculpture or marble bust on a downtown street or in the hallway of a municipal building. Along highways and in remote rural areas, too, you’ll find plaques commemorating Civil War battles, forgotten settlements, or the time when a famous historical figure paid a visit or simply passed through. The conversation about who or what gets remembered and how they are remembered is not new, but the monumental reckoning of 2020 was a catalyst to center a discussion on new monuments. Statues of colonizers were decried, defaced, and toppled, but the question remains: who will decide what comes next?
A collaborative monument honors the longstanding tradition of Cherokee basketmaking and pays homage to the site’s location on an ancestral trading route. Find this project, ᏔᎷᏣ The Basket, in Public Participation. Photo by Swinney Creative, courtesy Center for Craft.
Los Seis de Boulder is one of two figurative sculptures on the CU Boulder campus commemorating the six Chicanx student activists who died in a weeks-long campus protest in 1974 for better opportunities for marginalized students. Learn more in Reinterpreting Sites. Photo courtesy Jasmine Baetz.
Who will decide what comes next? What must new monuments do?
The city of Newark, NJ replaced a Christopher Columbus statue with a monument honoring Harriet Tubman. That monument highlights community members’ stories of personal liberation, as a reminder of the city's historical connection with the Underground Railroad and with the wider world of the struggle for Black liberation. Explore this case study in Narrative Shifts. Photo © Cesar Melgar, DreamPlay Media.
In Memory Work, a project by the Memory Work Collective, Toronto artists create a multimedia memorial to “women’s work” that situates themselves in an imagined future in order to demand a different present. Read about this project in Narrative Shifts. Photo by Jeremy Glenn.
Artists have taken up the challenge of guiding us into the future of new monuments, with or without the help (or approval) of their local governments. Monuments and memorials are beginning to feel more personal, more reflective of their communities, and more willing to confront difficult and painful histories. To select the projects in this issue, New Monuments Taskforce consulted guidelines that we established, with the help of public input, about what new monuments should do. In our formulation, they must:
• expand public knowledge
• not be on the side of oppression
• disrupt old ideas of what monuments can be
• be dynamic
• tell stories on a community level
• challenge observers to stop and think twice
Artists have taken up the challenge of guiding us into the future of new monuments
When thinking about the intersection of monuments, memorials, and public art, a Venn diagram comes to mind. Many new monuments are public art, but not all public art is a monument or memorial. After hours of discussion, we were finally able to crystalize our thoughts about how monuments were changing by framing the changes we saw as “shifts.” These shifts are broadly based changes in emphasis and intention that include memorialization but go well beyond it.
A major part of my background is in historic preservation, so one of the shifts I was able to identify was place based: a shift in the way that artists are using the very history of a place to inform and inspire their artwork. This section is called “Reinterpreting Sites,” and the projects within this category range from the slightly absurd (a 1,000-word plaque that details everything that occurred on a particular spot over many centuries and tries to identify what gets committed to historical memory and what usually doesn’t) to hidden and uncomfortable local history (a work that engages with the sites of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and spotlights the degrading “human zoos” that were set up there, along with other racist spectacles that have been forgotten). These projects emphasize place, and the monument or memorial they erect invites the viewer to engage with events in the past by inhabiting the spot where they happened.
The second shift we identified is a change in whose stories are being told as new voices are being centered. This set of case studies is called “Narrative Shifts,” drawing on and subverting the idea that history is “written by the victors.” The narrative has shifted away from a selectivity that whitewashes the past and focuses mainly on comfortable stories toward genuine inclusivity. These projects are all based in an awareness of the politics of gender: the narrative has shifted so that women, trans folks, gender nonconforming and nonbinary people can finally come into focus. It’s a focus that challenges the systems of power that have told us for too long that male, white, and cisgender are the default settings of humanity and that the stories of such people are the most important ones. The initiators of these projects are all women or nonbinary artists, and their work has inspired us to feature women, nonbinary, and trans artists in all the case study categories.
[we were inspired] to feature women, nonbinary, and trans artists in all the case study categories
Artistic billboards, like this one by Sophia Zarders, become monuments celebrating the sacredness of trans life around the country. Discover some of these Trans People are Sacred billboards in New Aesthetics. Photo courtesy SaveArtSpace.
The third shift is a change in the way monuments and memorials are experienced by the viewer. This category is called “Public Participation,” and the projects within it invite audience members to become participants in the work, through the creation or activation of the monument. The viewer is invited to sit in a parklet designed to mirror the intricate traditions of Cherokee basket weaving, to “talk” with the dead over a disconnected phone, or to enter a church where Central American refugees were once housed and watch their story play out through theater. In these environments, viewers are offered a more immersive experience of the artwork and challenged to have a more committed response to it than simple looking provides.
The fourth and final shift that we identified was a change in how monuments look. This case study category is called “New Aesthetics” and draws on the ways new and different stories can be told by better pairing a monument’s meaning with a wider array of materials, presentations, and aesthetics. These projects use textiles, billboards, neon, and traditional materials in new ways to grab the viewer’s attention and challenge what a monument is allowed to look like.
Our goal is for readers to come away with inspiration as well as practical ideas for how they can reimagine monuments and memorials in their own communities.
Our goal with this issue is for readers to come away with inspiration as well as practical ideas for how they can reimagine monuments and memorials in their own communities, in order to uplift new voices and help people experience spaces in new ways. Artists continue to be valuable partners in this kind of work, with their capacity for imagination and their connections to community voices that could otherwise be lost or ignored.
Artists continue to be valuable partners in this kind of work, with their capacity for imagination and their connections to community voices that would otherwise be lost or ignored.
Through Little Central America, 1984, a performance series becomes a living memorial to Central American refugees and honors the history of the sanctuary movement, with the aim of inspiring political action. Explore this Public Participation case study. Photo by Stan Weinstein.
With Stay, by artist Sam Fields, a massive, nautical rope installation illuminates the often-overshadowed history of women’s communal labor in the Boston Navy Yard. Find more about this cast study in New Aesthetics. Photo © Annielly Camargo.
You’ll also find thoughts from my New Monuments Taskforce collaborators on the following pages, with a featured essay from NMTF founder and textile artist Cheyenne Concepcion about the destruction of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee and how our monuments reflect and shape our nation; and the sixth installment of Public Art Now from Anna Lisa Escobedo, who is a prominent public artist herself. Public Art Now is a recurring collection of selected works featuring leading voices sharing public art of the moment. As our next Public Art Now guest curator, Anna Lisa presents a collection that dives deeper into the role of community in public art—including, for example, a 9-ton Olmec head that trolls Elon Musk, an interactive wax replica of the Lincoln memorial, and a guerrilla project not sanctioned by its host city. Readers will also find a Toolkit filled with resources for working creatively in monument- and memorials-related fields, along with our popular Dream Job description. In this issue’s Dream Job, Sen Mendez imagines a Cultural Vibe Rizzard who would support the "development of a decolonial approach that will, through cultural celebrations and interactive participation, creatively engage the public audience to humanize the community being oppressed."
Bio
Claire Flanegin
Claire Flanegin is an architectural and urban historian based in Oakland, California (Huichiun, unceded Ohlone land). She is passionate about using her public history background to interrogate public spaces and their representation of the communities around them. Her work with New Monuments Taskforce allows her to use historical research to create cultural power and uplift stories that have been historically ignored.
New Monuments Taskforce (NMTF) is a POC women–led collective actively engaged in public dialogue about San Francisco's monument landscape since 2020. NMTF's mission is to broaden public understanding of local monuments and create space for radical research, critical conversations, political engagement, and monument prototyping through artistic initiatives. NMTF's inaugural art initiative, “The Relic Report,” was a two-part publication that evaluated the city’s public art and its intersection with the country’s racist history. In 2021, NMTF published In the Future, a digital zine featuring artists reimagining the boundaries of public art and cultural memory work. Since then, NMTF members have been included in the ICA SF artist-in-residence program and have worked with the San Francisco Arts Commission on its Monuments and Memorials Advisory Committee report.
FORWARD: Issue #7
Monuments & Memorials
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