Monument Lab

Stephanie Syjuco is an artist and professor from UC Berkeley. Syjuco is one of the four artists featured in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Disrupting Craft: Renwick Invitational opening this week across the street from the White House.  She works on monuments by scaling them to handheld objects, newly imagined commodities, and tools for protest.  - Monument Lab

Michelle Angela Ortiz,  visual artist and muralist, has collaborated with mothers and their families at Berks, an immigrant family prison, several hours away from her hometown of Philadelphia. Ortiz has worked to bring the stories of these detained mothers and their families to prominent public spaces where powerbrokers may connect with stories of these mothers in new ways – including last year at Philadelphia's City Hall as a part of the Monument Lab 2017 exhibition. This week, Ortiz installed a new phase of her Familias Separadas project on the Pennsylvania State Capitol steps in Harrisburg and around the city.

The Museum of Capitalism was co-founded by Timothy Furstanau and Andrea Steves of FICTILIS, a curatorial collective who the New Yorker has described as constructing “exhibitions and interventions animated by a playful interrogation of social institutions.” In 2015, Furstanau and Steves began opening up calls to architects, artists, and the broader public to dream up a museum for capitalism. The responses provoked speculation on how to tell the history of capitalism through artifacts and experiences that, in turn, mirrored retail, real estate, and industrial environments. FICTILIS opened the first iteration of their Museum in a decade-old retail space that had never been occupied in Oakland’s Jack London district, garnering thousands of visitors and international attention. Currently, the Museum is now open at the School of the Museum of Fine Art at Tufts University in the Boston area through October 25, 2018. FICTILIS also currently teaches a course on monuments at the California College of the Arts in San Fr

Paper Monuments from New Orleans — led by Bryan C. Lee Jr. and Sue Mobley – grew out of the takedown of four Confederate monuments in the city last year. Rather than look to replace the toppled figures and move on, Paper Monuments has gathered hundreds of under-told stories about the city’s history on posters designed by artists and storytellers, and wheat pasted them across New Orleans. They have been tapped by the city of New Orleans to help re-imagine public spaces around empty pedestals. They will stage temporary installations of public proposals throughout the city next Spring. https://www.papermonuments.org/ https://colloqate.org/

Professor and Art Historian Kirk Savage is one of the nation’s foremost experts on monuments and memorials. Savage is the author of several books including Monument Wars and Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America, which was recently reprinted in an updated edition from Princeton University Press. Savage’s landmark book reveals how African American soldiers were largely left off public monuments after the Civil War, in favor of sites dedicated to white leaders, as well as white union and Confederate soldiers. Savage traces how so many Confederate monuments were installed on public lands, who initially paid for them, and how they reinforced practices of white supremacy. In recent projects, he is collaborating with artists on permanent and temporary monument projects to shift the ways we experience history in public spaces.

Artist Hank Willis Thomas is a leading thinker on monuments and one of the co-founders of For Freedoms, the largest public art campaign in the history of the United States. Willis Thomas worked with Monument Lab last year in Philadelphia on the prototype monument All Power to All People, a monumental-sized afro pick installed across from City Hall. He also produced Raise Up on the grounds of the National Peace and Justice Memorial in Birmingham. A new survey of his work, Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal, is out in October 2018 from Aperture and the Portland Art Museum. In this episode, we are also joined by Evan Walsh, a photographer and For Freedoms Communications Coordinator.

Welcome to Monument Lab: A public art and history podcast. Each episode, we will be talking to artists, activists, and historians about the monuments we have inherited from the past and the people and movements who are critically engaging them now. These are the people building the next generation of monuments through stories of social justice and solidarity.