FORWARD: Issue #7: Monuments & Memorials
Narrative Shifts
A city replaces a Christopher Columbus statue with a monument honoring Harriet Tubman that also highlights community members’ stories of personal liberation. Read more below. Photo © Cesar Melgar, DreamPlay Media.
Changing who is creating monuments and what they're creating monuments about/to. Centering voices and stories that have been snubbed, challenging old systems of power.
Memory Work
Toronto artists create a multimedia memorial to “women’s work” that situates themselves in an imagined future in order to demand a different present.
Location: Toronto, ON, Canada
Date: Project began in 2019, installation at The Bentway 2022–2024
Artists: Project by Memory Work Collective, installation artwork by Tala Kamea, Naomi Skwarna, Rajni Perera, Omii Thompson, Macy Siu, Robert Bolton, Emily Woudenberg, Erica Whyte, Jac Sanscartier, and Sydney Allen-Ash
Partners: From Later studio, At The Moment, Museum of Toronto (formerly Myseum), Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, Canada Council for the Arts, City of Toronto, and the Toronto Arts Council
Photo by Samuel Engelking.
In 2019, From Later, a “foresight studio” that uses speculative design and futures studies to imagine what our future might look like, was invited to participate in a project exploring the past, present, and future of women’s work, starting from a broad definition of work as seen through lenses of class, gender, immigration status, and race. Initially planned to be documented in a zine, the project, led by Toronto-based collective At The Moment, turned into an online exhibition after Covid hit.
The exhibition eventually led to the creation of Memory Work, a platform for research and speculative world-building that explores possible “futures for women’s labor”—futures in which women and nonbinary people take the lead in radical reimaginings of planetary and social life.
Three years later, at The Bentway, a public gathering space for art and culture on Toronto’s Lake Ontario waterfront, visitors are greeted by a public artwork organized by and named after the collective: six towering, two-sided photographic portraits of artisans, scientists, healers, and organizers living in an imagined future version of the city. The people who portray these future visionaries are real, present-day women and nonbinary leaders and creators in Toronto.
For example, Black Canadian farmer and food justice activist Cheyenne Sundance is the future Dom, a climate-change refugee who teaches new ways of “patterning technical networks after natural ones,” as an on-site description explains. And Mecha Clarke, a graphic and UX designer, has become Sam, a “serial surrogate” for couples in an infertile future. “She carries for 31 trimesters before retiring to start an enterprise with her best friend Timesha, another figure featured in the project, portrayed by Filipina Canadian artist and energy healer Jennifer Maramba. Together they build a network of whole health clinics, offering spiritual and medical care to parents becoming.”
A community of artists and writers known as Memory Work Collective are the creatives behind Memory Work. The Collective describes themselves as "equally concerned with the relational and the imaginary," and engaging "in the mutual recounting and reconstruction of lived experience to contemplate possible worlds. [They have a] research-based practice [that] creates material for meditation, critique, and new ways of living — negotiating ethical and moral imperatives across (past, present, and future) time." Photo by Robert Bolton.
At a time when there was a lot of conversation about monuments and memorialization, we felt there was a lot of certainty about what we didn’t want to memorialize, and not so much about what we do want to. Memory Work is a different approach to imagining who we might want to remember in the future.
— Robert Bolton, From Later
This is just one element of Memory Work Collective’s multiyear project, which also includes a website documenting thinkers, activists, and artists whose work informed this imagined future. Visitors to The Bentway can also call a phone number to tune in to the audio explanation and an accompanying soundscape.
Even for this imagined future, the collective rejected the idea of a single vision or narrative, explains Macy Siu of From Later. “We had a lot of conversations with people in different communities around Toronto. We drew inspiration from women who were doing really interesting work within their fields today. We wanted to know, what’s changing? What values are surfacing? From there we thought about who the future leaders of that world could be, and what roles they would play.”
Memory Work has sparked further collective imagining, and Siu hopes for even more. “We did a workshop last summer at the site called ‘Worldbuilding with Textiles,’” she says, “where we invited people to use an apron as a canvas for imagining the futures of work. What kind of decorative, protective, or utilitarian properties might we need?”
Robert Bolton, also with From Later, says that Memory Work provides a way to imagine histories that haven’t been written yet. “At a time when there was a lot of conversation about monuments and memorialization,” he says, “we felt there was a lot of certainty about what we didn’t want to memorialize, and not so much about what we do want to. Memory Work is a different approach to imagining who we might want to remember in the future.”
Memory Work is co-presented by From Later and The Bentway with support from the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival as part of ArtworxTO: Toronto’s Year of Public Art 2021–2022. Additional support from the Canada Council for the Arts, City of Toronto, and the Toronto Arts Council. Photo by Serena Choi.
I Am Queen Mary
Denmark installs its first public monument to a Black woman, inspired by 19th-century freedom fighter Mary Thomas and installed a mile north of the prison where Thomas spent the five years of her sentence.
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Date: 2018
Artists: La Vaughn Belle and Jeannette Ehlers
Partners: The Danish government
Dedication of I Am Queen Mary. Photo by Thorsten Altmann-Krueger
“Queen Mary” was Mary Thomas, a 19th-century labor activist who was imprisoned in Copenhagen for five years. Painted all black, the statue commemorating her stands 23 feet high and presides over the harbor where slave ships docked, on a site a mile from Thomas’s one-time jail cell. The statue’s face is a composite of the faces of the two artists who collaborated on it: La Vaughn Belle, from the Virgin Islands (once a Danish colony), and Jeannette Ehlers of Copenhagen.
Installed in 2018 and intended to be temporary, I Am Queen Mary still stands; the Danish government decided to make permanent Denmark’s first public monument to a Black woman.
The artists. Photo by David Berg.
Though Denmark’s role rarely comes up in today’s discussions of the transatlantic slave trade, the country was significantly involved. Danish ships, for example, transported 120,000 enslaved people from Danish forts in Africa, 50,000 of whom ended up working in brutal conditions on plantations in the Danish West Indies (today’s US Virgin Islands). In 2017, Danish prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen acknowledged this episode as a “gruesome” and “shameful” chapter in Danish history, but he stopped short of making a formal apology for it.
Nevertheless, in adding this monument to Cophenagen’s most recognizable statues—the Little Mermaid (which is also seaside) and Hans Christian Andersen’s likeness at City Hall—the city not only showcases her importance but also underlines the impact of what she represents: the brutal enormity of the slave trade. In this way, Belle and Ehlers’s work expands the official historical narrative and the role of official commemoration to include even the ugly parts of Danish history.
Photo by David Berg.
Photo by David Berg.
Photo by Ambdi Brøner.
Photo by Sarah Giersing.
Shadow of a Face
A city replaces a Christopher Columbus statue with a monument honoring Harriet Tubman that also highlights community members’ stories of personal liberation, reminding Newark of its historical connection with the Underground Railroad and with the wider world of the struggle for Black liberation.
Location: Newark, NJ
Date: March 2023
Artist: Nina Cooke John
Partners: Monument Lab, Newark Museum of Art, Newark Public Library, Audible, Newark Arts, Community Apprentice Adebunmi Gbadebo, with research support from Dr. James Amemasor at Rutgers University
Photo © Cesar Melgar, DreamPlay Media.
In 2020, during a moment of national reckoning with white supremacy and anti-Blackness, the residents and leaders of Newark, New Jersey, began to investigate who and what were memorialized by monuments citywide. Like many across the country, they found an overwhelming majority of statues honoring white men, some of whom were perpetrators of colonial violence and oppression.
The city decided to replace a statue of Christopher Columbus with one honoring Harriet Tubman, in recognition of Newark’s connection with the Underground Railroad—the city was an important transfer point for those moving on to New England and Canada—and its ongoing history of Black liberation work.
The monument’s designer, artist, and architect, Nina Cooke John, wanted to create something that would go beyond a singular-hero narrative. “How can we bifurcate this singular image of a larger-than-life woman?” she asked. “How can a singular monument do more than one thing in marking history and creating public space?”
Photo © Tony Turner Photography.
Photo © Cesar Melgar, DreamPlay Media.
“How can we bifurcate this singular image of a larger-than-life woman? How can a singular monument do more than one thing in marking history and creating public space?”
— Nina Cooke John, designer, artist, and architect
Photo © Cesar Melgar, DreamPlay Media.
Tubman’s story, Cooke John believes, is one that reminds us of the liberatory power of a community coming together. “When she made it to safety, she realized there was no true happiness for her without her family. So she went back. Being free alone meant nothing to her. Our liberation narratives can’t be narratives of one single person.”
With that in mind, she and her team, including Newark-based artist Adebunmi Gbadebo, who acted as the project’s community apprentice, set out to engage Newark residents in creating the monument. In partnership with the Newark Museum of Art and the Newark Public Library, they set up workshops across the city to capture Newark residents’ stories of liberation in audio and in handmade clay tiles. Rutgers University political science professor James Amemasor conducted research to undergird the project.
The result is a multifaceted, labyrinthine space that connects past and present. Walls radiate out from the central figure, a 25-foot metal sculpture, each displaying a different element of the project’s story: a timeline of Harriet Tubman’s life, a mosaic of tiles created by community members, and on the external wall, a sculpture of Tubman’s face. Instead of simply replacing one statue with another, the project asks viewers to consider their own participation in ongoing liberation struggles.
Instead of simply replacing one statue with another, the project asks viewers to consider their own participation in ongoing liberation struggles.
“Without the network of the Underground Railroad, she would not have succeeded in her heroic tasks,” says Cooke John. “So having people feel ownership of and personal connection to those stories was really important.”
Photo © Cesar Melgar, DreamPlay Media.
FORWARD: Issue #7
Monuments & Memorials
© COPYRIGHT 2024 - FORECAST PUBLIC ART ISSN 2768-4113