 Welcome to Knight Foundation Discovery, a weekly show webinar thing where we talk about arts and society and its role in our communities. I'm Chris Barr, director of arts and technology innovation at Knight Foundation. And this week, we're excited to talk about how we might reimagine monuments in our public spaces and beyond. And my guests this week are Paul Farber, he's artistic director and co-founder of Monument Lab and serves as a senior research scholar for the Center for Public Art and Space at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Design. And Karen Olivier, who's a Philadelphia based artist who works across a range of media, including public art, sculpture, photography and installations. She's exhibited her works at the Studio for Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of Art, MoMA, PS1 and many others. And she's an associate professor of art and sculpture at Temple University. Welcome to you both. Thank you. It's really great to have you here to discuss this topic. It's one that obviously is in our media at the moment. I'm sitting in Raleigh, North Carolina, as you know, where several Confederate monuments have come down in front of our state house. We've had other monuments in our city come down. And there's a public reckoning with monuments. And where I thought we might start, because you all have been thinking about these issues for a while, is just to grapple with what is a monument, how do we start first defining what a monument is and what its role is in our spaces and really tap into the question of why are we reckoning with them right now? So maybe we'll start with you, Paul. Well, first of all, I just thank everybody for being here today with us and see some names of folks who recognize and others looking forward to getting to know. And of course, thank you, Chris, and to the Knight Foundation for your ongoing support and it's great to be thought partners with you. And to be here with Dear Collaborator, Karen Olivier is always a treat. For Monument Lab, we define monument as a statement of power and presence in public. And that definition has kind of come out of research, curation, art making for the better part of a decade that was meant to account for the ways we think traditionally about monuments in bronze and marble, elevated figures that are kind of put above us or as spectacles. But we also wanted to know when we thought about monument, all of the ways that people powered commemoration, resistance, activation has informed our idea of history. Monuments, despite what some apologists for racial terror, for example, would tell us about Confederate monuments, monuments do more to shape the past than the past shapes our monuments. They're as much products of the moment that they're produced than they are about any kind of eternal statement on history. And so we've looked to the ways that everyday residents, artists, activists have left imprints on their city and history. And it is possible that whether it's visual artists, poets, musicians have powerful things to say. And we're as interested in what is officially known as a monument as to what's unofficially marked, because that's where the interesting interplay and also new possibilities for justice and democracy go hand in hand when we're thinking in public. Yeah, absolutely. I was also thinking about how monuments traditionally offer a single perspective which we know is false because it's supposed to be the universal and history is always multiplicitous and simultaneous. So there can't be this one representation of an event, because we know that can't be true. I was also thinking about what you were saying in terms of invisibility. I was thinking about Robert Musil, who wrote this quote, says something about monuments are, by definition, they become invisible. Despite their material weightiness, despite this spectacle, despite their intention and declaration of being permanent and being authoritarian, in a way we don't see them anymore. But I started to think, what does it mean if we don't see them? Is it because, on some level, that invisibility is put into the monument, the idea that if we don't see them, they become a natural part of the landscape, which could be almost like a repressive act, the idea of it being invisible. We think it's natural that this is. So what does that mean, the range from the status quo to this repression it represents? Yeah, I'm so interested in this tension between the idea that many see these things as eternal and permanent. And what both of you are pushing back on is monuments can and should be about the present. And I think a lot of the work the monument lab does is about prototyping, is about trying these things in public. And this is where YouTube came together to collaborate. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that work that you did together and the impermanent nature of that work. Yeah, no monument is permanent despite its aura, despite its weight, despite even the way we talk about it. Monuments require maintenance funds, mindsets to stay up. And when you take those things away, we're reminded monuments like any other kind of element in the built environment, but us too, no one's permanent. We can communicate across generations. We can communicate in long-standing ways. But I think it's important that and why I am so grateful for collaborations with Karen and with the other artists from Monument Lab is that they've pushed the idea of what's expected. And they're reminding us of that fact that there is no such thing as permanence. There's actually relationships and contingencies and investments that we make for stewardship and care. So just the story of our collaboration, back in about 2015, we started working on a citywide exhibition in Philadelphia that was a public art and history project. We partnered with Mural Arts Philadelphia, 10 municipal agencies, numerous community organizations, and our organization, which we co-founded with Ken Lum and a number of other really great researchers, artists, and organizers. We set out to ask a question to the whole city, what is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia? And we worked for a few years with artists on this project before it went live in the fall of 2017. And Karen Olivier, as an esteemed artist, we now think of her as a Philadelphian after many years of teaching in Philadelphia. We wanted to think with Karen about how she would answer that question in a park that was close to where she lived, Vernon Park in the neighborhood of Germantown. And then while our project took place in the five central squares of the city, including City Hall, right now square, neighborhoods were really important to this project. And just for those who don't know the area, Vernon Park marks a site going back to, of course, Indigenous time and Philadelphia pre-colonial, where the Lenape people who were the ancestral people of the land had a walking trail adjacent to where the park now sits. During the colonial period, the Revolutionary War was fought nearby, a key loss by General Washington's troops that is commemorated each year. And then since then, all kinds of other historic events, including former President Barack Obama speaking in that park a few years ago, and we asked Karen, what do you see in this park? What would you wanna build here? What's an appropriate monument? And I remember the site visit that we did a year before the project and just that's in the fall of 2016. This is before Charlottesville and they unite the right rally. This is before Dallas and New Orleans taking down Confederate monuments. But let's be clear, this is still years into the movement that we're seeing the fruits of right now, the full reckoning and re-imagining of monuments. And I just remember this moment when Karen, you said something to me that really stuck with me, which you said I'm really interested in bringing something to this park, but I wanna work with what is already here as a way to mark presence, but also absence. And that as a philosophy for monuments, like it really shook me and it stays with me today. And I'll pass it off to you to go from there. And I'm just gonna pull up for folks. I'm just gonna pull up an image while you're talking Karen so folks can see what we're talking about. I feel as though I'm always thinking about the what if, I'm always thinking about what is presented, what is here, but knowing that there are things that are always hidden for reasons of class, race, power, all those reasons. So I'm thinking all I need is already here. So what can I do that kind of reveals a history that we don't know about? And then if we think about this history, what does it mean to consider that with a present day narrative? So I was very intrigued by this, the Battle of Germantown Memorial, Memorial, which I wish I had an image of that as well. So that was about, that was a failed battle, the only revelational war battle that took place in Philadelphia. But in the far corner of the park was a monument dedicated to Francis Daniel Pistorius, who was an early German settler who led the first Quaker protest against slavery back in 1688. And I found out that during World War I and II, his monument was boxed over. So you think about what does it mean for that monument during those wars? And if you can kind of imagine why those were boxed over, because we're seeing the repetition of that today, the xenophobia in that way. So I thought what would it mean for me to transcribe history from one time onto another history? So I thought if I boxed over the George Washington Memorial, one, it speaks about two different men fighting for liberation. George Washington fighting for America's liberation for British rule while owning slaves. You have a German who's trying to become American who's fighting for blacks and seeing a population. So what would it mean to me to put these, these monuments in conversation with each other? I always think about history, how history isn't revealed to us kind of like on this platter, things get unearthed, evidence gets revealed. So all of a sudden this new evidence of what is highlighted or spot lit, all of a sudden makes this question of what we assume there are assumptions about what our history was. So by covering it, I felt like that was a way to kind of dispel or take away the hierarchy of monuments or the way we think about the y-axis. What would it mean for me to engage the y and x-axis? What would it mean for you to kind of see a monument that's never sitting still? The monument is never static. Every moment it is shifting because of the temperature, the climate, because of the people walking. So what would it mean for this thing to be unfixed, mutable, alive? Was it mean that I am reflected in the monument? So was it mean for me to have to become the monument? I'm the keeper and the protector of democracy. Was it mean for this to be another reenactment, very similar to a way that the battles get reenacted every year? It's another way of understanding history. Yeah, and I wanna just, I wanna add a note of profound appreciation for Karen's brilliant intervention and her broader work. Because I know that there are a few public art officers on this call and others who are part of the public art and history community cite her work, but also call Karen because she had an approach that I think could play out in any number of cities. This was, as we were talking about with like many invisible monuments, this monument is known, but it's kind of the everyday furniture of that space. It's not looked upon as a controversial site. It's not a Confederate memorial or clearly, right? It is dedicated to a lost battle of the Revolutionary War. But Karen asked, put into play this idea, we asked how monuments reflect us and reflect our values. And while making that literal by making a mirror that reflected everyone around, it was so sophisticated, it was so thoughtful. And we talk about community-engaged art and there's all kinds of different ways that that's measured or calibrated. Sometimes it's artists have a multi-year project where they get to know people in a community or they're of the community. There are other ways, but I will tell you, like when the monument was going up, before it ever went up, there were meetings with local artists and local community organizers that Karen is a part of and just the care that put in there was precise. When the monument was going up, the installation is not a neutral time either. And so I know Karen shared with me and I saw firsthand all of the conversations back and forth that's part of the artwork. And then once the artwork went up, we had all these plans, like what would happen if it was vandalized or what would happen, what people would say about it. And Karen, you said, trust people, trust that people will understand it. And not only was it never vandalized, but it was cleaned once a week by like a self-appointed conservator, a woman in the neighborhood who took it upon herself. There were prayer circles. There were of course selfies, but there were also other kinds of gatherings and just when you went to the park, sometimes you'd see it as the most important symbol there and other times it would disappear from the landscape. So that's why I say like site Karen's innovation and think of her as part of already, when we're thinking about what are our solutions in 2020, Karen's body of work shows us that over a long period of time. Oh. And Karen, I wanna see if I can ask you to talk a little bit about your work witness in Kentucky as well, because I think there are similar strategies happening within that work. And for folks who aren't aware, this work is being talked about in the New York Times. And I think we just shared in the chat, Karen's Washington Post op-ed around how her work witness works in relation to another mural in the same space. And if you wouldn't mind talking about that. No, I think it started with, well, okay, I'll speak about the work. At the University of Kentucky, there's a New Deal era mural by Anne Weisel-Hanlon, the Kentucky Inn, and the chargers to make a illustration of the history of industrialization of Kentucky. So looking back at the mural, of course it shows a sanitized version of history. It shows on stereotypes of a Native American, only one lone Native American, looking as though she's about to attack the little white woman, slaves in the center, black musicians performing. So you see, so they're things that are problematic, definitely problematic, but also it reveals obvious racism. And it's been contested for about 30 years. I was brought in, the president decided to cover the mural for a couple of years to figure out what the community, what we should do. And he'd spent two years of talking to the community in the meetings, the rigor I had to go through to get my proposal to go through. So it was pretty intense process, but it was great in a way. But I decided, why don't I, I don't want to add something new again. It's already there. Why don't I use what's there? So what I decided to do in the vestibule was to, in the dome ceiling, which means you think, why is there a dome ceiling here? I decided to go with it. And all the black and brown figures from the original fresco, I replicated them and put them there. So all of a sudden now, these anonymous subjugated figures are now seen, or they're allowed to exist without whiteness. It could also speak about being able to think of them in reference to Renaissance churches and Byzantine churches and the Gilded. And now I start thinking about George Floyd and his, the gold casket by relationship to that. And then I also, there were these four medallions in the space. And I decided to have porches of four underrepresented Kentuckians. And it's caused controversy because of course with the George Floyd, the movement, it was a moment where the president of the university thought of a quick thing to do. I could take, people have been complaining about this mural, let's take it down. And I just felt as though this was such an extraordinary time. This is not the time to make a rash decision. And I was thinking about the decision to make right up that happened after that HBO decision pulled down with a win and they're gonna reinsert it once there's context. And I was like, maybe think, okay, Confederate monuments have to go. Columbus statues have to go. Are there works that are in, that are, are there problematic works from the 20th century that could be useful? Are there any that are nuanced or that could be a tool or catalyst? And I thought maybe this is, we're at a place of higher education where this is the site where we can reckon with and actually go in and deal with the pain and the horror. So what would it mean to like kind of use these works along with programming and all this? So that's kind of like the background to it. But then the end, the president has kind of decided, instead of doing the hard work of kind of making, using these as two tools, he decided the quick symbolic act is to take this down as opposed to dealing with the fact that the faculty is saying, why there's so few black faculty? Why is there no this? Why is there no this? This is the easy one. And he's like, you already set it up to make this useful. Like artwork should be a catalyst. It's a space for discourse. There's a role for polemics. Like things can't be, it shouldn't be, it's not. And I said to them, I can't tie the waste problem up into both of you. You're gonna have to deal with institutional supremacy, white supremacy in your school. But this is like a site like James Bowman says, artists, the role of the artist is to ask the question, the answer hides. So this is to add a space for questioning, a space of pain. It's also like the protest, a space for healing. Absolutely, I love that. And this idea that art creates the space for discourse. I know Paul, that a lot of your work is around the critical examination of monuments. And I wonder if you could share a little bit about the field trip project that you all have started and the toolkit that can potentially help communities and others around the country go through these critical examinations and create discourse around what exists in the symbolic realm of our public space. Yeah, you know, inspired in part by the pandemic, inspired by the movement for Black Lives and the reckoning around monuments, but also our kind of years of work thinking with people about public spaces in public spaces. We wanted to create something called the Monument Lab Field Trip. And you know, this is a tough year profoundly to say the least, where there won't be field trips as we know them for schools. And so we thought, well, what's a way to imagine a Monument Lab Field Trip? It's utilizing, you know, in the spirit of, as Karen was saying, like what we have in front of us, right? That there's no neutral public space, there's no neutral monument. You know, as I see a number of people in the chat and the Q&A point out, you know, that kind of legacy of trying to just add new layers on top without dealing with what's beneath it or what's behind it or who is missing, who's been displaced and what forces have displaced them. We thought, let's come up with an activity that anyone can download for free. That is, of course, kind of looks like it's for kids, but it's truly, it's all ages. We worked with two fantastic artists from Portland, Superfund Nature Adventures, who we met because one of the partners, Mike Murowski, is one of the kind of instigators of the hashtag museums are not neutral, along with Latanya S. Altry. And we started thinking, like what would a field trip be that could do the work in part to put out some tools for anyone? But we said, like let's imagine seventh graders, let's imagine I've done lead tours for amazing groups of retired folks, of social groups, and you work with what you have. And so the idea is, one, you can do it from home using virtual tools, but if you feel like it's a safe context to be outside with a monument and go and find one as a case study and really take a look at it, don't walk by it, don't drive by it, but really see what you can know and also what you can't know. And then we try to ask a question of, because so many monuments are to single figures of history, we know history doesn't happen because a white guy on a horse looks off into the distance, yet we settle for that. But we said, all right, every time you see a person on a pestle, come up with a list of the people who made their elevation and our knowledge of them in history possible, everyone who was associated with them, everyone whose work they benefited from. And of course the context here because many of our monuments are dedicated to people who also benefited from the institution of slavery is a thing about their role and exploitation. And there's not one kind of monument. So with this field trip, you may go to a site of Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson, but you may also see a monument to Harriet Tubman. And how do we think about collectives of people who are making history, not in one instant or flashpoint, but across time? How do we speak across generations? And part of this also is going to pick a place that doesn't have a monument, but try to imagine both with your speculation, but also with a little bit of research. What was there five years ago, 100 years ago, 400 years ago, especially to think about forms of representation that are often missing from our monuments, especially acknowledging not just the past of colonialism or systemic racism, but the way that those legacy shape our present. And then finally, there's a part to design and propose a monument and think about what that would be. And I think what we've already heard, we led a group talking about the field trip of high school educators in LA, New York and Mexico City. I know of a few graduate schools that are using this, but also fourth grade classrooms. And I feel like while we are definitely in the midst of a profound challenging moment, how actually can we have intergenerational conversations about all of the things, and Karen, you mentioned it, that it's both the symbols, but it's also the systems. Where, how do we resource our spoken values of inclusion? How do we acknowledge the systems of exclusion that are actually really important to talk about because they're still in operation? But how to put the fun in fundamental and bring that in with field trip so that it's something you can download and we'd love to hear from people who use it because it might lead to future chapters. And by having it on a piece of paper, you can break it and answer whatever question you want to and take it in your direction. I love this, because I love that it's proposing a what if, what would it mean to be reimagining what citizenship is? I can, and I love the idea of like having people think yes, a drawing could be the monument. I think about, I always think about that. It's supposed to be the most dispersed monument, the memorial, with the brass plaques in front of the homes of the Holocaust victim. I like the idea that could exist as this dispersed thing. It could be ephemeral. It could last for, it could be one conversation. I still think about this one conversation I had with a neighbor about that piece. To me, that was a monument in itself, even though it was fleeting. So I like this idea that was it mean for it to be as powerful on a piece of paper or even just that you let yourself imagine. That's the thing, the reimagining. We have a question from folks who are watching and this one plays into my space at Knight Foundation. Does tech play a role in this process? And if so, how can we use tech to reimagine monuments? And I know Paul, you have some experience here. Yeah, I mean, we've, we think about it a lot and for us where it's interested, we're interested in technology in context. So the analog and the digital and where they meet and even where they break down, that's the area that we're really interested in. We've had the great opportunity to be supported by the Knight Foundation, including the Art and Technology Prototype Fund to think about and experiment with augmented reality as one of those examples. And it's complex because I feel like technology in and of itself will not save us. In fact, technology has the propensity to harm us. So what is the practices, the values behind technology? How do we think about technology and context? And just to give an example, for Monument Lab's work, we are, we always are collecting data. It's messy data. It's data that we do the work of putting it into municipal repositories and open data systems, but it's handwritten paper forms that are entered manually and then translated into data and then can be utilized and have been to argue for new monuments, new historic markers. But I think back to like early on, we first started, we had a group of student advisors and I came to them with an idea. It was a very bad idea, but I'll just say what it was quickly. I was like, all right, we're gonna make an app that can design any monument and will have all the different kinds of features and it'll be on an iPad and it will take five minutes. What do you think? And this group of students said, no one has five minutes for you, they don't know you. Have you ever tried to use an iPad outside? What if it's raining? What if there's no power? You're communicating to people if you have iPads in front of you, they're looking at you in public space from a hundred feet away, that you have something that's not for them that you're eventually gonna take out of their hands. More heavy-handedly. So think of the whole experience as the interface. Think of when someone sees you from a hundred feet away and you're doing a project outside and they're looking at you for a month and they need to see from that far away that they feel safe, secure, and that's a welcome space for them. When they come in, understand that there's an exchange and mutuality, they're donating their time, there might even have to be a reciprocity of some kind of gift or offering and then make the final part of that interaction when they hand off a piece of data and they see it being counted. So go to great lengths to show them it being scanned, show them a dot on the map and that has guided our principles where the whole interaction from the moment we step outside is the interface to the moment you see it in a data stream. And for me, that's the kind of thinking around technology, understanding can do harm, but it can also do good if you have relationships face-to-face or person-to-person that are part of the equation. So I think one final question as we come to the end of our time and this is to both of you. How do you think cities, governments, parks departments, folks who are concerned with public space, place-making enthusiasts, how do those folks work better with artists, with activists and communities to really bring to life new ideas around what monuments and public memorial, public memory is really all about? It seems like such a no-brainer. Have us included at the beginning. Don't bring me in. Here, we need a memorial for that. We need to, no, we should be part of it from the beginning and listen, right? And trust that our skills, our skills have the same amount of value as the organization that has the money. Like you have to trust us, you know? That to me is like listen and trust us and include us from the beginning. Yeah, I just echo that. Artists have their ear to the ground, they're prophetic, they see things before they come into the kind of larger recognition. And I've seen this go really well where someone says, we're gonna build a memorial we're actually gonna start from the same point. We don't know what that will look like. We have values that we need to work on. We need to think about that. Let's put our values in our budget and in the time that we spend. I've seen it on the flip side, where artists come in, where everything is cooked, where people clearly wanna check off a box that says community engagement. And I'll ask people when they're sponsoring community engagement or participation, what do you wanna learn? Do you have anything you want to learn? If you already know the answers and this is Performa, then you're gonna have pushback. So I think just to be clear, like it's especially at this moment where everyone is sacrificing around COVID and the economic crisis we have, investing in artists is not just money well spent, it's about your values and your visions. And so this is true of a public art office, but this is true of the sanitation department, it's true of the city manager, it's true of public property, it's true of schools, artists from the beginning through the middle and the follow-up there in the end are gonna push us and are gonna help us think in holistic ways that are about the reckoning that's necessary, but also the reimagining and the fostering connectivity. I really love that. And one other thing with that is like, and it's not resolved. That's right. And the other thing is done, it's not resolved, there's always a bit of perpetual resolution that should be happening, right? Because if we're open to that resolution, it will lead to the next. So it can't be like done, right? I think to that point, like I was talking about this recently, the rush is to not fix a problem to make it go away. The rush is to repair, to listen, to understand. And that's going to have long-term profound impacts for the way we, our democracy lives in public and the way we live together. Well, that's so wonderful. And with that closing thought, invest in artists, I think is the ringing headline. I wanna thank you both. Karen and Paul, thank you for joining us today. I'm sure there are more questions that folks have and you can find us on Twitter, you can find us on Facebook. This will be on Facebook Live, it's archived there. Folks want to watch back later. And I'm not sure that the chat is on Facebook, but there are comments on Facebook as well. And I'm sure we can engage there more if folks wanna head over to that venue or tag us on Twitter. Again, thank you so much for your time today and the great work that you're doing in our communities. Really, we can't express our thanks enough. Thank you so much for having us here. Great. Thank you, thank you, this was wonderful. Take care.