Resources for Reckoning Monuments
Selected resources for pondering and reimagining monumentality
For some Americans, history isn’t the story of what actually happened; it’s the story they want to believe.
By Clint Smith, The Atlantic, June 2021 Issue
"The early 1900s saw a boom in Confederate-monument building. The monuments were meant to reinforce white supremacy in an era when Black communities were being terrorized and Black social and political mobility impeded. They were also intended to teach new generations of white southerners that the cause their ancestors had fought for was just."
(Terrific article, adapted from the author's book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, 2021)
Monument Lab is a public art and history studio based in Philadelphia. Monument Lab works with artists, students, educators, activists, municipal agencies, and cultural institutions on participatory approaches to public engagement and collective memory. Founded in 2012, Monument Lab cultivates and facilitates critical conversations around the past, present, and future of monuments. Get lots of ideas from this amazing project website!
Monuments. How should art memorialise history? Since antiquity, this question has been central to the commissioning strategies of those in power and those who shape culture. History has never been as static as the monuments that seek to serve it; new rulers and fresh generations will inevitably cast history in their own mould. ... Today, statues dedicated to Confederate leaders in the US, or controversial colonialist figures in Europe, have become the target of angry protests around the world. As the conversations around monuments continue to develop, The Art Newspaper is collecting stories from past issues up to the present day that examine the complicated issues surrounding such works. [Nice collection of links to articles about monuments]
- "Monuments and memorials have become a focal point for conversation, protest, and activism in the city of Chicago.
- In response, the city has created a committee to review the city’s collection of [over 500] monuments and recommend solutions."
MONUMENTality
December 4, 2018–April 21, 2019 Getty Research InstituteMonumentality evokes an aura of greatness, a sense of power and gravity that demands public recognition. As markers of history and repositories of collective memory, monuments can project multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings. ... This exhibition investigates various paradigms of monumentality, how they are generated through systems of belief and structures of power, and why certain monuments endure and others fall.
Monuments, Monumentality, Monumentalization
From December 2013 to June 2015, DIA's Discussions in Contemporary Culture brought together artists, architects, scholars, and writers to address today’s monuments and counter-monuments as effigies of the multifarious forces at work in global society and to examine the current possibilities—even the need—for a redefinition of this important concept. Watch/listen to the four recorded DIA talks.
