 Welcome to Monument of Follies, an exhibition of my work, Howard Skrill, from my art project, the Anna Cyr Pierpont series at Fairfield University Art Museum's Bellamine Hall Galleries. The series is named after Anna Marie Pierpont. Anna is interred in this elaborate Gothic mausoleum surrounded by family members who act almost as centuries in Greenwood Cemetery close to my home in Brooklyn. Anna's family marked its existence in the very physical landscape of the Brooklyn that I have lived in and wandered through for decades. This tomb is also a monument to our efforts to be remembered and yet it is in many ways folly because the tomb is slowly falling into ruin. I had the opportunity, despite a pandemic, to visit Greenwood Cemetery to explore other ways that monuments create memory, erase memory, and are often at the mercy of the fate of memory. There is Battle Hill. Fast forward a few decades past the American's hard-earned victory in the Revolutionary War, George Washington riding triumphantly into Manhattan after the British evacuated in this place of ours becoming New York City and the United States of America. This beautiful place, this beautiful, final resting place for New Yorkers was established. The Civil War has now come and gone. We're in the late 1860s. Some people come to this very spot and they build this monument right here on top of it. I'm certain that those who built this monument were fully aware that underneath our feet right now are the bones of those who died in the American Revolution. Were they replacing the unhappy memory of the sacrifice of the young men who fought in the American Revolution in August 1776 with the memory of those dashing young men who fought so valiantly in the Civil War. That could make sense if the Civil War was fought on Battle Hill. The Civil War was fought many, many miles away. Did those men choose at that moment to commemorate the memory of the men who lay in slain under this pile of dirt? You see this dashing soldier with his mustache and van dyke beard and his crushed union cap with his hands resting upon his musket? I spent many times drawing this figure. This counterpart from the Revolution has eventually vanished. I thought that that peculiar circumstance involving building monuments to one thing over places where other things happened was a local story. In Brooklyn in a shame over the bad outcomes of George Washington's army in the Battle of Brooklyn conveniently wanted to forget and Brooklyn was unique. But Brooklyn's not unique. The entire Arapaipan series which deals with the erasure of memory concerns itself explores in words and in pictures and guess now in videos places where memory has been intentionally.