FORWARD: Issue #7: Monuments & Memorials
Reinterpreting Sites
At the site of the 1904 World’s Fair “Philippine Village” in Clayton, Missouri, a man who was abducted from the Philippines sits on display outside a native hut. Written on the plaque is “Kario, Sinhigan, St. Louis,” the names of the hut's two residents. Today, artist Janna Añonuevo Langholz creates historical markers and animates the village’s history by offering guided tours, educating the public on the violence involved in it, and honoring the lives lost.
Using the history of a place to inform, inquire about, and inspire the present.
These projects emphasize public memory, creating monuments that highlight the place where an event occurred and underscoring the significance of that place.
Historic Site
A site’s absurdly long commemorative plaque encapsulates a reach of time from the prehistoric to the present, poking fun at absolute historical narratives, and emphasizing the always-evolving nature of memory.
Location: Pittsburgh, PA
Date: 2021
Artist: Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis
Partners: Black Cube, Pittsburgh Office of Public Art
Photos by Sean Carroll, courtesy Gallery Closed.
“Who gets to decide when history begins and ends, and who writes it?” This was the question behind Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis’s Historic Site, a project created as part of their 2021 fellowship with nomadic art museum Black Cube. On an exterior wall of their studio in Pittsburgh, a small, unassuming bronze plaque marked the building’s history as an incline train station. For Clayton and Lewis, it prompted further questions. What happened before and after the 12 years commemorated on the plaque? What of that history is worth remembering?
Their answer: everything. The artists spent a year scouring archives, consulting experts, and talking with neighbors, eventually compiling a 600-million-year history of the site. The resulting 1,000-plus-word plaque is unmissable next to its diminutive companion. Its story begins underwater, continuing breathlessly through the Ice Age, monarch butterfly migrations, European colonization, vineyards, funerals, floods, landslides, a silent movie theater, an ice cream shop, and a bank, and ending in the present with the casting of itself, an 8-foot bronze plaque.
Photos by Sean Carroll, courtesy Gallery Closed.
Collective memory is constructed— ... we choose what is remembered and what is not, and ... this is an imperfect, dynamic process.
Photos by Sean Carroll, courtesy Gallery Closed.
Photos by Sean Carroll, courtesy Gallery Closed.
The effect is dizzying. At first glance, the plaque seems to poke fun at the very idea of historical monuments. Its contents remind us that collective memory is constructed—that we choose what is remembered and what is not, and that this is an imperfect, dynamic process. “We’re not going to fix all the wrongs that come with trying to mark history,” says Clayton. “We’re trying to acknowledge the folly of memorializing. The moment the plaque was cast, we knew there were things that might need to be added or changed.”
It’s been rewarding to witness people stopping to look at the piece, says Lewis. “It’s one of our most-seen artworks, and by people who aren’t intentionally coming to see art. We see people laughing quite a lot as they read it. It pulls the reader back and invites them to look at time in a very expanded way, and it ends in the future. It kind of bends people’s minds.”
Photos by Sean Carroll, courtesy Gallery Closed.
Philippine Village Historical Site
At the site of the 1904 World’s Fair “Philippine Village,” an artist creates historical markers and animates the village’s history by offering guided tours, educating the public on the violence involved in it, and honoring the lives lost.
Location: Clayton, MO
Date: 2021–ongoing
Artist: Janna Añonuevo Langholz
Partners: The project itself is self-funded; Mayor’s Commemorative Landscape Taskforce will fund the marker
In addition to the temporary metal sign, Langholz also commissioned a hand-painted sign by a local sign painter, Ka Eric, in her family’s hometown in the Philippines. Photo © Janna Añonuevo Langholz.
Janna Añonuevo Langholz’s research into a 40-acre stretch of land in the Saint Louis suburb of Clayton, Missouri, began in 2013, while she was in graduate school. Langholz’s initial curiosity began a decade-long process that would reveal more than 100 years of buried history.
Born in Saint Louis, the site of the 1904 World’s Fair, Langholz, an independent researcher and interdisciplinary artist, always had questions about one element of the event: the “Philippine Village.” Following the United States’ colonization of the Philippines in 1898, the Philippine Village was set up as an “ethnographic exhibition” that made a spectacle of Philippine traditions and people. It also subjected its temporary inhabitants—1,204 people brought to the United States for the Fair—to violence, degradation, and unbearable conditions.
An altered map of the site, originally published in 1904 and updated in 2022. The Philippine Village Historical Site spans 47 acres in the Wydown-Skinker neighborhood of Clayton, Missouri. Artwork © Philippine Village Historical Site.
White men looking into a nipa hut, a native house of the indigenous people of the Philippines.
The admission booth at Visayan Village entrance.
1904 World's Fair grounds after exhibit demolition. Photographer unknown, ca. 1905.
After the Fair, the village was dismantled, leaving few traces of what had occurred there. The Filipinos who had been taken from their homes were sent back to the Philippines; many of those who died were buried at a cemetery outside St. Louis, denying their relatives the opportunity to commemorate them with traditional death practices.
While the World’s Fair remains a well-known part of the area’s history, the Philippine Village, an ugly symbol of colonial violence, disappeared from public memory.
Langholz refused to forget. In 2021, she established the Philippine Village Historical Site to mark the death anniversary of one young woman, Maura, who died at the Philippine Village before the Fair began. Her research into Maura’s life and death led her to uncover the names of 16 others who had died, most from pneumonia and other preventable illnesses.
Langholz considers herself a caretaker of the site, and of the memories of those who lived and died there. For three years, she has led guided tours of the area, carrying a metal sign reading "Philippine Village Historical Site" and inviting visitors to hold the sign themselves. “When I’m doing these tours, what I tell people is, once you’ve carried this sign, you become part of this collective monument,” she says. “The monument isn’t just the sign—it’s the people who carry it.”
The artist in April 2022. Photo © Janna Añonuevo Langholz.
The monument isn’t just the sign—it’s the people who carry it
Jovelle Tamayo and her siblings carry the sign on a walk in 2021. Photo © Janna Añonuevo Langholz.
The mode, but not the spirit, of the monument, is about to change. In 2023, Clayton’s Board of Aldermen approved a permanent sign, which will be placed at the site later in 2024. Langholz hasn’t yet decided whether she’ll continue to carry the sign. “Conceptually,” she explains, “when the permanent sign is installed, the untethered sign can finally be ‘at rest.’” It will likely live on a shelf in her home, as she originally intended. Langholz will continue offering guided walks, though she’s uncertain what form the project will take after the marker is installed.
It’s been a long process, in part because, she says, “I really wanted to make sure I was doing it right, and that I sufficiently connected with descendants of that history. It was really important to me even at the beginning of this project that it remain autonomous from the city and from museum influence.”
Langholz’s work to make the history of the place visible continues: she is currently working to place markers at the gravesites of people who died and were buried during the Fair. This monument marks an ongoing process of collective remembrance and reckoning.
Community donations support grave markers, which Langholz leaves at the site. Photo © Janna Añonuevo Langholz.
A 2021 proclamation from City of Clayton's mayor Michelle Harris recognized Filipino American History Month and the Philippine Village Historical Site. Photo © Janna Añonuevo Langholz.
Los Seis de Boulder and El Movimiento Sique
Two figurative sculptures on the CU Boulder campus commemorate the six Chicanx student activists who died in a weeks-long campus protest in 1974 for better opportunities for marginalized students.
Location: Boulder, CO
Date: 2020 and 2024
Artist: Jasmine Baetz
Partners: CU Boulder (University Libraries’ department of Special Collections, Archives and Preservation)
Cost: $35,000, with many in-kind donations of organization, labor, and materials
Photo courtesy Jasmine Baetz.
On May 27, 1974, Una Jaakola, Reyes Martinez, and Neva Romero were killed by a car bomb at Chautauqua Park, blocks from the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder campus. Just 48 hours later, on May 29, Francisco Dougherty, Heriberto Terán, and Florencio Granado were also killed by a car bomb in a parking lot less than a mile from the university; it also severely injured Antonio Alcantar. The murders of these Chicanx student activists were never solved. “Los Seis de Boulder,” as they came to be known, had been part of a three-week-long occupation of Temporary Building 1 on the CU Boulder campus to pressure university leadership into continuing to fund educational opportunity programs that supported the enrollment of marginalized students.
Forty-five years later, family members of Los Seis and community members came together to create a sculpture etched with the faces of the murdered students and placed in front of the building they had occupied decades ago. Jasmine Baetz, CU alumna and the artist at the helm of the project, had never heard this story before she saw Symbols of Resistance, a documentary by the Berkeley-based social-justice nonprofit Freedom Archives that details the diverse activism of the early 1970s and the ways in which the US government attempted to silence it. Hoping that a physical monument might, in her words, “extend [the] impact for others who didn't have an access point to this history,” she’s worked to see that the story of Los Seis is enshrined in a form more permanent than the oral tradition that had preserved it so far.
Los Seis de Boulder, dedicated in 2019. Photo courtesy Jasmine Baetz.
Artwork has a powerful ability to memorialize loss and offer a space for reflection.
During the dedication of the first monument in September 2020, a member of UMAS y MEChA (a Chicanx and Latinx student group at CU) emphasized the importance of communal memory. As the organization wrote in a statement, “[We were] able to…create a lasting historical monument to commemorate the lives of these students who paved the way for our people to be here, and who demanded better for…their communities from the university.”
The second sculpture, titled El Movimiento Sigue (The Movement Continues), also created by Baetz, was donated to the city’s permanent public art collection and installed and dedicated in May 2024 at the corner of 17th Street and Pearl in Boulder’s downtown. While similar to the sculpture on campus, El Movimento Sigue embraces the movement for justice. An accompanying plaque explains, “the tiles reference the solidarity work between the United Mexican American Students and the Black Student Alliance at the University of Colorado–Boulder in the 1970s.”
“On the 50th anniversary of this tragedy in our community, we come together to remember those lost and share in their legacy,” said City Manager Nuria Rivera-Vandermyde in an official press release. “Artwork has a powerful ability to memorialize loss and offer a space for reflection. It is through pieces like this community-created sculpture that we can begin to acknowledge the past and heal from it.”
Photo by Lauren Click.
Photo by Destin Hernandez.
El Movimiento Sigue. Photo courtesy Jasmine Baetz.
FORWARD: Issue #7
Monuments & Memorials
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