FORWARD: Issue #7: Monuments & Memorials
New Aesthetics
Inside an installation on the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a contemporary temple draws on a legacy of artists honoring Blackness, paying homage to people the artist considers living monuments in her community. Photo by Allison Meier / flickr / CC by 2.0 DEED.
Creating monuments that look different—using new materials, colors, cultural symbology, methods, crafts, media—to help tell the story differently. Centering the “look” of a memorial on BIPOC traditions and counter-traditions such as femme aesthetics.
the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I)
A contemporary temple draws on a legacy of artists honoring Blackness, paying homage to people the artist considers living monuments in her community
Location: New York, NY
Date: April–October 2023
Artist: Lauren Halsey
Partners: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source- Art Resource NY.
When creating the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I), artist Lauren Halsey spent time in the Metropolitan Museum’s Egyptian wing, listening to the iconic Black musical group Parliament-Funkadelic. This kind of aesthetic mash-up is a pillar of Halsey’s work, which blends imagery from across time and space. This piece, installed on the Met’s rooftop in 2023, is an expansion of an earlier work of Halsey’s, The Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project (Prototype Architecture), an installation at Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum that celebrated the visual culture of her hometown in South Central L.A.
For the Met, Halsey scaled up, building a structure that’s easily visible from the surrounding neighborhood. For inspiration, she drew from the museum’s Temple of Dendur, a first-century B.C.E. monument commissioned by a Roman emperor—who had himself depicted on it as a pharaoh.
Temple of Dendur, a key exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. According to the museum's website, Egypt gifted the temple to the US, and on April 28, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson awarded the ancient Egyptian temple to the museum. Photo by InSapphoWeTrust / Wikimedia Commons / CC by SA 2.0.
Halsey’s structure is a 3D collage, a temple to the aesthetic influences that contribute to her life and practice. Visitors are greeted by sphinxes modeled on her friends and family. The walls are inscribed with Halsey’s version of hieroglyphs: tags and signage from South Central, including phrases like “We are still here,” and references to Afrofuturism, jazz, funk, and queerness.
Halsey draws on the legacy of musicians like Parliament-Funkadelic and Sun Ra, who created highly original renditions of ancient Egypt and used them to honor and privilege Blackness in a world that did the opposite. Halsey wanted the temple to represent “community transcendence, self-determination, and autonomy,” to pay homage to people in her community she considers living monuments.
Photo by Allison Meier / flickr / CC by 2.0 DEED.
Photo by Allison Meier / flickr / CC by 2.0 DEED.
Halsey wanted the temple to represent “community transcendence, self-determination, and autonomy,” to pay homage to people in her community she considers living monuments.
Photo by Allison Meier / flickr / CC by 2.0 DEED.
The piece is a memorial to Los Angeles’s recent past, but it refuses staid notions of past and present. Halsey’s collaged approach challenges the typical understanding of monuments as representations of a single story. “I’m interested in creating legible, real representations of who we were centuries ago or five minutes ago, and of who we can become five seconds from now or one hundred years from now,” she says. “I’m interested in drawing connections among multiple histories and collective experiences of neighborhoods to consider the here and now, as well as past and potential futures.”
Halsey’s aim is to eventually install a permanent version of the temple in South Central as a continually evolving monument honoring the survival, vibrancy, and love of the city’s Black community.
Photo by Allison Meier / flickr / CC by 2.0 DEED.
I’m interested in drawing connections among multiple histories and collective experiences of neighborhoods to consider the here and now, as well as past and potential futures.
— Lauren Halsey, artist
No Pain Like This Body, No Body Like This Pain
Twin neon signs shine a light on a changing neighborhood.
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada
Date: 2010 originally, reinstalled November 2022–April 2023
Artist: Lani Maestro
Partners: Vancouver Art Gallery
Lani Maestro, No Pain Like This Body, 2022, site specific installation at Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite, November 18, 2022 to April 9, 2023. Photo courtesy Vancouver Art Gallery.
Twin neon signs glow an ominous and jarring bright red at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Reading “No Pain Like This Body” and “No Body Like This Pain,” Lani Maestro’s monument to the aching energy of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside invites visitors to consider the city and the neighborhood as a body, and calls attention to the vulnerability of the people who live there and their ability to survive in a city that once ignored them and now seeks to push them out.
The Eastside, which is one of Vancouver’s oldest neighborhoods, has been plagued by poverty, lack of adequate housing, and high levels of drug use; it’s been a victim of neglect since city development and funding began moving westward in the 1980s. The area is home to people of European, African, and Asian descent, as well as to one of Canada’s largest urban populations of First Nation peoples.
Maestro says the phrases in the signs came to her while she was walking through the Eastside and thinking, How can one ignore the particularity of this place? The artist felt she had to consider the lived and often embodied experiences of residents, and she says that her phrases—“No pain like this body” and “No body like this pain”—“seem to sum up the energy that I absorbed there.”
“No pain like this body” and “No body like this pain” seem to sum up the energy that I absorbed there.
Lani Maestro, No Pain Like This Body, 2022, site specific installation at Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite, November 18, 2022 to April 9, 2023. Photo courtesy Vancouver Art Gallery.
The piece calls the viewer to consider the neighborhood as a body, consider its history and the pain it has endured, the wounds it has healed, the strength it has had to build. The artist uses neon, a material that’s long been associated with the tawdrier, “seedier” side of the urban experience, to instead make a tender statement about Downtown Eastside’s vulnerability and its needs for prosperity and safety—needs that have never been met.
Paradoxically, the area is regarded now as a strong example of autonomous community resilience—a resilience sparked by nearly a half-century of being ignored by the city government. The creation of the Downtown Eastside Residents Association in the 1970s solidified the neighborhood’s reliance on itself: its citizens take care of those among them who need the most help. As significant and necessary as these grassroots efforts have been, they can be co-opted; a neighborhood’s self-reliance and resilience can be used by people in power to romanticize perseverance in adversity, in lieu of addressing its causes.
While the Eastside has seen substantially more growth in the past decade, the sudden infusion of institutional investment has gentrified the area. So although in many ways the neighborhood is finally getting its due, its citizens are still being asked to look after themselves as gentrification displaces long-term residents. By drawing attention to the pain and plight of the Eastside community, Maestro’s monument shines a metaphorical light on a neighborhood that has always had to tend to its own wounds.
Lani Maestro, No Pain Like This Body, 2022, site specific installation at Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite, November 18, 2022 to April 9, 2023. Photo courtesy Vancouver Art Gallery.
Stay
A massive, nautical rope installation illuminates the often-overshadowed history of women’s communal labor in the Boston Navy Yard.
Location: Boston, MA
Date: July–November 2023
Artist: Sam Fields, with construction support from Kate Wildman, Beckett Brueggemann, Lex Morris-Wright, Emi Madsen, Leo Liu, Luna Tudor-Doonan, Rusty Janardan, Lily Cohen, and Maya Greenfield
Partners: Boston Public Art Triennial
Photo © Annielly Camargo.
When Boston public art organization Boston Public Art Triennial, formerly known as Now + There, invited artist Sam Fields to create a piece for an unused lot next to the Charlestown Navy Yard, she was immediately drawn to one element of the nearby landscape. The 18th-century warship USS Constitution was within eyeshot, draped in a complex net of rigging. As a textile artist, Fields was curious about these ropes as a portal to the history of the navy yard.
The piece that resulted—a 30-foot-high structure hung on the brick wall of the lot, made up of green, blue, pink, and purple nautical rope—is part of Triennial’s Lot Lab, a program aimed at transforming vacant lots into creative gathering spaces that uplift place-based histories.
Fields wanted to use the piece to explore the political, racial, and economic histories of the navy yard. She began by looking into the rigging and rope-making processes woven into its history. “This led me to think about which types of labor are valued and which are not,” she says. “Initially, men were weaving these ropes. During World War II, white women came in to do what was then considered ‘men’s work.’ And women of color had to fight to have access to those jobs.”
It’s an example of why Fields is drawn to textiles, which have historically been devalued as “women’s work.” “We have this intense, complex history of textile processes involved in every part of our lives from the beginning of humanity,” she points out. “It’s often a sordid and ugly history, but can be profound too.”
To create the piece, Fields and nine of her students learned maritime ropework techniques. Rather than tying knots, they worked together to splice the pieces of rope. Knots, Fields learned, weaken the rope over time. Splicing takes longer but maintains the strength of the rope. “It became a really beautiful analogy for community building,” she recalls. “Having to unweave something, unspin it, then reconfigure it and weave it back together.”
Photo © Charles Mayer Photography.
Photo courtesy the artist.
It became a really beautiful analogy for community building. Having to unweave something, unspin it, then reconfigure it and weave it back together.
— Sam Fields, artist
The delicate balance required in rigging was inspiring, too. “Rigging is both soft and taut. It has to be flexible. It’s a lovely image of the skills I think we need to move forward in this time as we deconstruct the histories, ideas, and institutions we’ve inherited.”
Photo © Annielly Camargo.
Rigging is both soft and taut. It has to be flexible. It’s a lovely image of the skills I think we need to move forward in this time as we deconstruct the histories, ideas, and institutions we’ve inherited.
Trans People Are Sacred
Artistic billboards become monuments celebrating the sacredness of trans life around the country.
Locations: Saint Paul, MN; New York, NY; Bronx, NY; Los Angeles, CA; St. Louis, MO; Atlanta, GA; Oakland, CA; Chico, CA; Brooklyn, NY; Albuquerque, NM; Columbus, OH; Philadelphia, PA; Portland, OR
Date: 2020–2021
Artist: Jonah Welch, Jamie Malone, Malaika Ibreck, Sophia Zarders, Gabriella Grimes, MaryAnn George, Kae Goode, Shanisia Person, G., Art Twink, KaliMa Amilak, Ade Cruz, Maroodi, Kah Yangni, Nyjah Gobert
Partners: SaveArtSpace, artists selected by Dakota Camacho, Ryan Young, and Randy Ford
Cost: Roughly $1,000 for each billboard space and $1,000 paid to each artist, which came out of $37,000 in crowdfunding
Billboard artist: Shanisia Person. Photos courtesy SaveArtSpace.
In July 2019, curator Ellen Rutt partnered with New York City–based nonprofit SaveArtSpace to create an art show called Signs of the Times. Using billboard space across Detroit, Rutt wanted to platform artists whose work “vehemently subverted the ad space, challenged existing harmful beliefs, and criticized the culture of consumption that capitalism demands.”
One of these artists was Jonah Welch, whose piece Trans People Are Sacred took on a life of its own. “It immediately went viral,” says Welch. “That phrase hadn’t been thrown into the public eye on that scale. It was not something I had ever heard anyone say, other than the person who first shared it with me [Indigenous interdisciplinary artist/musician Dakota Camacho]. It’s a phrase that comes from Indigenous thought forms.”
In a climate of increasing public anti-trans sentiment, it had clearly resonated. After a successful crowdfunding campaign, Welch put out a call for BIPOC artists to create their own takes on the phrase, to be placed on billboards in the city of the artist’s choice. Over the course of 2020 and 2021, 14 billboards were installed in cities across the US, all celebrating trans divinity, some reading “Black Trans People Are Sacred.”
Travis Rix, executive director of SaveArtSpace, says the idea to purchase billboard space for art came from seeing murals covered over by advertisements in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Rix and a friend started SaveArtSpace in 2015, creating open calls for artists responding to issues such as climate change, gender-based violence, and queer and trans liberation. “The billboards make you think about who gets to create public space and at what cost,” says Rix. “We wanted to let artists have a word in the public space.”
Billboard artist: Jamie Malone.
“The billboards make you think about who gets to create public space and at what cost. We wanted to let artists have a word in the public space.”
— Travis Rix, executive director of SaveArtSpace
Billboard artist: Sophia Zarders.
Billboard artist: Nyjah Gobert.
Placing trans-affirming messages in public space, without asking for the approval of a city agency or other entity, removes the role of traditional gatekeepers. “It’s always surprising to people. How did this get here? Is this real? It makes it feel very magical,” says Welch. “It’s really important to me to create diversity of views and representation in public space. Our public, architectural ecosystems need to represent diverse populations and marginalized people as we go through a time of great change.”
Billboard artist: Maroodi.
Billboard artist: MaryAnn George.
Billboard artist: Kah Yangni.
“Our public, architectural ecosystems need to represent diverse populations and marginalized people as we go through a time of great change.”
— Jonah Welch, one of the artists
Welch sees these billboards as a way to honor and celebrate trans people who are alive today, a monument to trans existence in the present moment: “My main goal in creating my own artwork was for trans people to see themselves uplifted in the public eye.”
Billboard artist: KaliMa Amilak.
FORWARD: Issue #7
Monuments & Memorials
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