 I'm going to steal this mic and make sure it works. Hi, everybody. Welcome. My name's Kim Cito. I'm the program director of Public Art at the New England Foundation for the Arts. Yay. And I'm really happy. Thank you. Really happy to have you all here this evening. We have a really tiny panel here, and they're going to get a chance to introduce themselves in a little bit. But before, I just wanted to say a couple of thank yous. This event tonight is a partnership between the New England Foundation for the Arts Creative City program, WBUR, our host here at the Roxbury Innovation Center. I imagine missing a few folks here. Of course, our funder is the Bar Foundation and the Boston Foundation. And we also have HowlRound recording tonight's event. Unfortunately, we won't be live streaming this evening, but it will be archived on HowlRound TV for folks to see after. And this panel discussion tonight was really inspired by La Merchie Frazier's Creative City project. La Merchie Frazier's project is called New Urban Monuments, Stand Up Inside Yourself. And if you didn't get a chance to interact with the poster boards in the back, she has an interactive activity in the back, and there's, in your program, you have some instructions. So you can take a look at that. And at the end of our event tonight, feel free to go on back and share your voice and share your story. La Merchie has been looking at this idea of how our monuments have been shaping our public space, our public culture, our public memory. And she's also interested in lifting up the monumental you, so the idea that each of us have stories to share and to think about what stories we want to carry into the future. So if you haven't yet, feel free to participate in the activity in the back later this evening, and it's going to be a part of an exhibition that she'll be doing in Evans Corner in 2019. So as you all know, unless you stumbled in here because you were looking for the Metco meeting, tonight's event is about public monuments. We're looking at how monuments shape our understanding of who and what is the public, and we'll examine how monuments can honor stories that we want to carry into the future. And we also want to recognize that this is a complex topic, and we're not going to be able to talk about everything here tonight. We have about an hour, hour and a half for this conversation, and we know that there's so much more to say about monuments and public spaces. But in the spirit of fostering civic dialogue, I'd like to encourage us to practice a few grand rules for engagement while we're here tonight. So I apologize, I didn't type them up and put them on the big screen, so you'll just have to listen and remember them. So first is try to listen for understanding, and not in order to debate. We're really here to listen and learn from one another. It's okay to agree to disagree, and value diversity and thought. Understand that we may have differing opinions, and go back to that first one of, try to listen for understanding here. And last, allow everyone to speak for themselves, not on behalf of groups, and speak your own truth that goes for our panelists as well as the audience here. Can we all agree to that, if anything? Awesome. I agree. Awesome. Great. Here, here. Come head nod. That's great, awesome. So, that's great. Well, we'll get started, and you'll notice on your chairs, you have a program, and inside there's the instructions for the Merchis Project, also a post-event survey that you can fill out later. But there should be an index card on your chair as well. So, we're gonna really give the panel space to have this conversation, and if you have questions, feel free to write it down on the index card, and just hold it up, and the NEPA staff here will pick them up, and we're gonna kind of organize them into themes so that we can try and talk about as much of, we can address as many questions as we can during the Q&A, but we're gonna bundle them into themes. So, feel free to write them down, lift them up, and we'll come around and get them. If you need another card, just raise your hand and we'll bring you another one. Awesome. Okay, so without further ado, I'm gonna hand up the mic over to our wonderful moderator, Maria Garcia from The Hardering, and she'll introduce our panelists, and we'll get to introduce themselves. Awesome, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Kim. Well, thank you so much, everybody, for coming. I think I'm really excited, and then so honored to sit with you all. I consider all three of you, four of you visionaries, and I'm really, really honored to be here. So, I'm the editor of Arts and Culture at WBUR, and when Kim told me about this panel, I thought what a way to sort of reflect on what we long for in monuments and what we're yearning from spaces that shape our public memory. And so, before we begin, I think I'm just gonna ask each of the panelists to introduce themselves and introduce the work and the ethos that connects them to the idea of monuments and public remembrance. And I think we can just go in order. Kenneth Bailey, I'm a principal at Design Studio for Social Intervention, and we do work here in Boston and nationally sort of bringing artists and activists and academics together to rethink the public and come up with new ways to address social problems. And one of the concerns and one of the issues we thought a lot about is this concept of spatial justice as a way of conceiving of how problems are overlapped, social problems different than social problems overlapped. And so, I think one of the things we can contribute to this conversation is sort of this framework of spatial justice and how does space, what is the role of space in holding or shaping or in acting forms of justice and injustice? Good evening, I'm Margie Frazier. I am a visual artist and I participated in many different types of art to affect discourse and have conversations around who we are as human beings. And in this realm of monumentality, I wanted to think about, as I created the proposal for the NIFA grant, this idea of bigness and our neighborhoods and extraordinary ordinary people being big also who have not been heard from or had their voices invested in the monuments that currently are peopling, eventing and taking up the space of the American landscape. And so, with that, one of the avid poets that I listen to is Rita Dove. And as she critiqued a Jacob Lard's painting that had three men who were handcuffed and standing in front of a judge, she said, remember the name your mother gave you, stand up inside yourself. And so for me that affected and impacted my work in terms of looking at community and taking a stand on what we want to remember, what we want to see in our public spaces. And so this investment is what I was really interested in and hearing and learning more from community members about everyday items, everyday people, places and events. So I'm delighted that this panel is happening and that NIFA embraced my work and allowed me to work with community and with people. I get this one. Vivian, you wanna go ahead? I'd be happy to. Yeah. Thank you. I'm Vivian Johnson, a retired professor of education from Boston University and I am speaking to you from space. What's the point of like? My work at the university, my research focused on strengthening relationships among families, communities and schools. And in this project, I'm particularly interested in learning about how public space and monuments can be used to strengthen those relationships. I am particularly interested in individuals as Lemerche has just mentioned who stand up inside themselves. And so my research recently has uncovered the lives of some of those individuals, one of which I will talk about a little bit later. Her name is the poor Potter Atkins and she is someone who truly stood up inside herself. I'm Steve Lougham, a visual artist and educator. I grew up in Detroit, Michigan, came here to go to school. I am trained formally as a painter. Most of my work exists in the realm of objects, paintings, sculptures, video, performance, some performance. Lately, throughout the history of my work, I've been very interested in memorialization and the built form, right? And not the found form or the selected form. I'm thinking much more of the objects that we make to remember other things. And so that has inhabited my work. I grew up, like I said, I was born in Detroit. I came to school here. I'm a gay man. I live through the teeth of the AIDS epidemic. So all of my work deals with the idea of loss, of absence, and of extermination. And so those are things that I think about as I'm making my work. And recently I was the one of seven city of Austin artisan residents, where my work investigated this idea of memory and erasure. And I'll talk a little bit more about that as we progress. Dr. Johnson, I wonder if we can start with you. Your research has led to an unusual marker on the Rose Kennedy Greenway and the Freedom Trail that really disrupts the narrative of patriotism or what has been considered patriotism or heroism, the narrative that the other monuments around Boston and New England portray. Can you tell us about your project and about Sephora Potter at Kits? Certainly Maria, thank you. When we discuss monuments and public spaces, we are rarely talking about women, particularly black women, so that when one uncovers information about a black woman in Puritan Boston and we're talking about someone who made a purchase of a house and land in 1670. Now the city of Boston itself was founded in 1630. So 40 years later, this woman stands up and she does what few women were able to do. Married women were not able to buy property at all. She was able to buy it because she was at that time a widow. She kept the house for nearly 30 years. Incidentally, it is located on Salem Street in the North End or it was located there. She kept the house for nearly 30 years and when she sold it, she signed the deed with her emissions. Again, we're talking about a very unusual action because few women owned property and few people were able to write. There were a number who could read, but writing was separate and it was distinctive and it was considered a state assembly. So as a result, we have someone who is extraordinary in all of these ways. And I felt that she should be remembered, she should be honored, and I was able to join with a group of which I'm a member of the Heritage Guild, a group of black women who started in 1975 placing markers around Boston in memory of those who are little known, black people who have accomplished much. So a few years ago, Governor DeVall Patrick joined us in unveiling a marker at the site of Sephora Patterson House and Land on Salem Street in the North End and there is now a granite marker that I hope you will visit. La Merchie Frazier and the Museum of African American History also joined us in this project and it is a project to honor, it is a project of memory, it is a project of the use of public space in ways that are extraordinarily unusual. Sephora was the first woman of African descent to buy property in Boston, right? That's correct, that's correct. And so she's someone that we don't know about until really your research brought shine a light on her history. What does that say about what we deem Merritt's public remembrance and what doesn't in Boston and New England? Well, public remembrance is usually about power and the power is often related to efforts in war, in battle, and therefore women are rarely included in that even in the discussion of what will become monumental. She is probably in the lowest status of anyone in the Puritan society because women were low status and blacks were even lower status and therefore a black woman is extraordinarily unusual in standing up for herself, standing up inside herself and accomplishing what she accomplished. It is an extraordinary achievement and we need to honor those kinds of achievements which inspire us across race, across gender, and across states. Kenny, I wanna segue into your research. I wonder if you can talk to us about this idea that space is where power is enacted, right? It's the way we many times mark power. So I wonder, what do monuments in public spaces have to do with spatial justice? I think when we talk about monuments, particularly in the framework of talking about space and power, what we're asking, what we're really talking about is space and presence and space and sight and space and memory. And I think one of the questions we have to sort of ask ourselves when we look at or when we behold monuments is whose presence is being evoked and by virtue of the evocation of a presence, whose presence is being erased or whose presence is absent. And so then when you sort of follow that logic, you just have to see, particularly in a city like Boston, who gets lifted up? And so I think the question, well, some of the questions or some of the concerns we have when we sort of invoke this idea of spatial justice has to do with the distribution of body moving in space and who feels that they have rights of our claims over space and how those claims get sort of shaped and structured by invisible forces like culture and who belongs and who doesn't and by structural forces like the police and policies and how those two things come together to make people socially, not just as individuals, but socially feel like they belong or don't belong or can't go or can't come in space. And a lot of I think what we're talking about and looking at sort of monumentality is one way into looking at Boston and one way into looking at what does Boston, what do our monuments symbolize about who this space belongs to, who it doesn't belong to, who gets to come, gets to go. And I think another way I would like for us to think about monuments or monumentality is the way in which forms of monumentality get played out in everyday life in popular culture. So if we sort of, as we think about things in terms of space and spatial justice, and spatial justice is just a term that means that social justice is also grounded in concrete lived realities and our day-to-day lives in the places and spaces where we come from. So how long it takes for you to get back and forth from a place may differ based on your class data. So if you have a car and these kinds of things we don't typically sort of put inside of a larger framework of justice. And the framework we like to use around this idea is who has the right to be, who has the right to thrive, who has the right to express, and who has the right to connect in a given space and whether the barriers are obstacles for certain people to do those things. And then you can take that framework and sort of operationalize in lots of different ways. Women don't necessarily have the same spatial rights or spatial claims as men to walk in space freely and be. And that's it for us. So that would be like a concrete example of spatial injustice. And when you look at the cops in space and black people, do they have the right to be and express and connect in space right now in the sort of carceral state in the carceral city? No. So these would be aspects of spatial injustice. When we take that and we overlay this idea of memorialization or monumentality, we have to, one, look at what are the things that get, what are the things that are monumentalized in everyday life? And how do those things then shape who has rights or claims over space in Boston and in New England? And what things don't? Who gets to circulate in space freely? And whose access in space is blocked? So for me, I would wanna put this question about monumentality and this question around memory in a larger conversation around sort of aesthetic presence in space and who has the right to parade? Who has the right to move about? Who has the right to, and by who, I mean this larger, who's not small, who's like as individuals, but groups of people have rights to perform their lives and sort of sonically, spatially, in all the different senses in space in Boston. Listening to you really makes me think of the way women, particularly women of color were so conditioned to take up less space, right? To sort of like shrink ourselves and I think about how that affects every part of our life and how, listen, how would we feel to like fully occupy the space that we're in and be present in it? So, Lamertier, I wanted to ask you about the monumental you. And we know that monuments shape public memory and they carry stories into the future. So what can we do now to carry stories that perhaps would not be told into the future? I'd like to also respond to the first part of your assertion about women shrinking our identities and respond to that as something that I have learned through this residency. I'm not from the Northeast, I'm from the South and the ever important assertion as a woman has always been on my shoulders from my grandmother, my great grandmother, all of that has been accountable for our survival. So I relate to that in a different way and perceive it as being one that is it is important to stand up as a woman and being challenged in classes where there may be two or three girls in an educational setting, but not ever being shy of holding your hand up and answering the questions. And so that being an important part of my upbringing, I tend to look at where is the foundational rest of female gender in the narrative. And as a result of that, one of the respondents to a haiku workshop that I did during this residency, uttered all spaces are ancient. And so looking at that and the trajectory that we have from Nubia to now and ancient Egypt, we know that there were in the findings of George Reissner who went to the Sudan to look at ancient relics and archeological findings, he reported that there were 55 pyramids of women and only 20 of men that he found. And so this idea of monumentality, I don't know if you can get bigger than a pyramid, but in thinking about that in presence, there have been women rulers who were people of the ancient world and of color who asserted themselves certainly to have had a burial space of that size. And so if that is our beginnings of a tradition, resting in that is our investment in being powerful and not shrinking away. And so as we cross the Sahara Desert and get into the West African portion of what becomes the almost an erasure of what happens through the Middle Passage, but somehow we survived, there's an attributed force to that same power being existing. And so to contemporize this and arc those centuries and the arrows and all that we pass over at space, space occupied has its own resonance. And what monuments bring to that is this physical manifestation of fabrication of this idea of power. And I think women more than not now are revisiting and rebirthing that idea of being big and being important and being essential. So I would like to think that more women as we continue this century will become a part of that space that is public, they will become a part of the shapers of what we remember, what we forge as territory. So this idea of occupation of space it becomes this investment and as Kenny was so aptly saying like who makes those decisions of who gets to be powerful. Will depend on our voices. And that was one of the reasons why this residency for me was extremely important in raising the voice of community and neighborhoods. And if I was a grandmother and I'm taking my child through my neighborhood, my grandchild through my neighborhood what would I like her to see? Is it men of war or is it places of peace? Is it contemplative space? Is it an everyday item like a comb like they raised in Philadelphia in a new monuments project they raised an afro pick that's 30 feet in the air. I'm just so happy to date that. So Hank Willis Thomas was the creator of that particular thing but it sparked so much of what was ancient in the combs of the weaving that crossed the middle passage that became a movement for black power in the black power area in the 60s it has so much embodied in its story. So with that, I would like to say that I meet more and more women who have been very important stories to tell and I'm very hopeful that this will increase the conversation in our American landscape and globally. Steve, I wonder if you can tell us what you think we're currently yearning for monuments that we don't experience. Oh, that's a great question. Can you hear me? I think that because, and it's so great to be here with Vivian because her work is so, it's geological. I keep thinking about when Viola Davis won the Oscar and somebody asked her what kind of work she wanted to do. She said go to the graveyard and exhume those bodies, those stories that were never told. And this is the thing about, I firmly believe that to be like a black person in America, to be the descendant of slaves is to be haunted. That's just the way it is, to like icy ghosts everywhere. And so when I walked through this city, a city that I moved to, I grew up in a city that, I grew up in a black city, which is very, very different than Boston. Detroit is very, very different. The segregation here, the places where people feel like they cannot go is a very real and present thing. And I, as an outsider, wandered through it for years. I just blundered, went to South Boston, went to Charlestown to the hand. I heard the seafood is really good. Like I'm just going, you know. I said different, I went to Amorites, man. It was like, you went to Amorites? That's in South Boston. I was like, yeah, it was great. Lobster macaroni and cheese, it was great, you know? So like I, like blundering through the city, I did not know where I was not supposed to be. And like most descendants of slaves, a lot of my family lives in the South. And that understanding that there are places that you are not supposed to be is ingrained in us. But I was a stranger in a strange place. Now 30 years later, I've lived here, Boston is a very, very different in some ways and some ways it's not. The things that we like to talk about in Boston, the things that we like to acknowledge are the sort of tourist things. The freedom trail, the legacy of public discourse, the history of abolition, like all that sort of stuff. Those are things that we like to talk about. The things that we don't like to talk about are the things that I've always been interested in as an artist, right? And I'm interested in the space that we navigate that was navigated before us. Before we put up all of our monuments all over the place, I'm sure there were other monuments here that didn't matter to us. So we got rid of them. So we put it near the, and I say them and I say we because I'm an American, I'm implicated in this. Like just because I'm black doesn't mean that I'm somehow not part of the American colonial project. I am part of that. That is part of my legacy. There is no George Washington without black slaves. There is no modernism without black people. Black people are, there is no America without black people. When you go to Great Barrington and you go to W.E.B. DuVois's birthplace, there's a sign that says, what would America be without her black people? There would be no culture. There would be no America without black people. No one could have gone to fight the revolution without black people at home managing their farms and great tobacco and cotton and all that sort of stuff. So this notion that these things are for white people and these other things are not, that's crazy because black people pay for all that stuff that they're laboring their lives. So the Boston Common belongs to me. Paid for it. My family paid for it. All that sort of stuff. That story, no one wants to hear. People don't wanna have this conversation about the role of extermination, black people who were brought here and worked to death. No one wants to have that conversation. And like I see that conversation everywhere. Fango Hall was a slave market. So like when you look through that place and you don't see a single marker of anything that talks about that, that's a problem to me. There are four monuments to women in Boston. Four. Two of them you can't even reach because they're on the Statehouse grounds. You can't even get to them. One of them is Harriet Tubman out in the South End. And then there's the Women's Monument on the Commonwealth Mall where three women have to be in the same place for some reason. Each woman can't have her own monument. These three women have to share, right? And it's the only monument where we're talking about giving the figure off the pedestal. No, put the woman on the pedestal. Put her on the pedestal. She earned her place up there. You can put a statue of Mary anywhere you want in this town. But a statue of a historically important woman, you can't do it. And to me, that's a problem. Like I'm not a woman, but I know what sexism is. I don't have to be a woman to understand sexism. I don't have to be an immigrant to understand anti-immigrant feeling. I don't have to be white to understand like racism. I understand these things. This isn't my issue. This isn't like someone else's issue. This is our issue. Like we talk about, but we have to stop talking about black people as if they were enslaved by magic, right? Someone enslaved them. Like let's have that conversation. And like, yeah, we can talk about abolition. We can talk about all the other wonderful stuff that has happened here that Boston is the cradle of freedom. We can talk about the fact that Frederick Douglass spoke here, that Lucy Parsons, Phyllis Wheatley, all that sort of stuff. We can talk about all that sort of stuff, but let's also get on the same page in terms of our shared history. And once we do that, that's the only way we can move forward. There's no truth. There's no justice without truth. So I wonder if we can talk about which spaces get edified in our society and celebrated and which spaces get policed. Right. And how we determine how we determine as a society which spaces we police and which spaces we celebrate. And I'll open that up for anybody who wants to take it. I just wanted to also bring up the point with your question as to who we assume is responsible for erecting monuments. And I say that because Vivian Johnson and I are right now in a project to mark at Boston's Wharf, the arrival of Africans. Right. And it's called, excuse me, the Middle Passage Marker. If you are familiar with the monuments, not the monuments, but the markers that cascade 10 of them from the state house to the wharf, they're called Walk to the Sea. The last marker that is to be in that series is one that will be right at the end of the wharf, excuse me, number 19, that will mark the presence of Africans coming in from the sea as opposed to walking to the sea. So the narrative on that marker is something that we have been writing and Dr. Johnson's research has been the informative piece of what will be the visit by, excuse me, anyone who can read who is a visitor to Boston, anyone who lives here who goes to those markers. So included with that, the narrative are maps that show present State Street, which then was called King Street, strayed down to the wharf, where auctions and other things took place as Africans were disembarked from the ships that crossed the Middle Passage. This has been for us and Dr. Johnson can chime in here. This has been for us extraordinarily difficult to put on a marker, knowing that it will be seen by many people, and especially like a fifth grade child who may be devastated by the story and not really understand it, but at least have a notion of something that has been swept under the carpet more or less that will pose some questions. It has been an exercise in how to deliver that story because these are difficult stories. And so it's been an honor to be in this exercise, but it is also attributable to a hidden past or a narrative that does not consider that George Washington and Phyllis Wheatley were here at the same time in the same space and that a Christmas addicts and a Paul Revere are in the same space at the same time. The shared history that Stephen was talking about has been not represented very well at all. And so it's incumbent upon us to do that. Looking at the idea that there were formerly enslaved people in Beacon Hill community like Lewis Hayden, who was from Kentucky originally, but he was here in Boston as an abolitionist living at 66 Phillips Street now, who was courageous in his efforts to help protect those who were enslaved who were coming to Boston as a destination, and he also at the end of some of his sojourn in like 1857 called for the erection of a monument to honor Christmas addicts. It was he who posed that question. It was he who fought for 30 years for the manifestation of that monument. In the same vein, Joshua Bowden, another black man and abolitionist, called for the erection, raised some of the money to get it started of the Shaw Memorial at the end of the Civil War. We assumed that this was done by someone else. We don't assume that public space and monuments are possibly the work of black people. And I think, I just wanted to make sure that that got into our conversation to think about those who are seen as marginalized in their power, but in times of absolute passion have exerted extraordinary measures to get things in place. So I wanted to say that. And with respect to your question about policing, I don't know how many of you were in the Boston Common when there were responses to not only the monument question in Charlottesville, but the recognition and resistance to immigration and some of the other pieces. Well, I was visiting in the park and joined those protests and looked at the cross section and intersectionality of people who were present for the protest. And the most stirring moment for me was looking across the park and seeing young white men with punk kind of hairstyles in kilts, in boots. And when two of them turned around, they had on Bob Marley jackets. And I said, you know, what does that say about our 21st century audience for resistance? And I just like to leave it there. But if there is any reaction to that the police were gonna stop us that day, they were adamant about that not happening as they gathered there to join the rest of us. So I just want to say that it is for those of us who claim power. Dr. Johnson, I wonder if you'd like to step in here and talk a little bit about the difference between memorials and monuments and how that can be an example of what gets policed and what gets celebrated. Well, monuments are in fact ways of memorializing. And there are other ways of memorializing as well. And as we said at the outset of this discussion, that is always attendant on power. There is never any memorial without some powerful people. And as La Merchie just pointed out, those are sometimes black people who because of their passionate belief, because of their concern, are willing to step out and up inside themselves. And they make things happen. So I think that it is important for us to think about how memorials become reality. Are raised and what they represent in terms of the discourse that preceded the actual use of public space. That's a very important part of our memorializing. Was there a good deal of pushback on that memorial? Was this a memorial that was very accepted in this particular area? Or were there powerful people who said, we should memorialize? Those are issues that seem to me to always attend any discourse on memorials. And that is why those without power are so rarely involved in that discourse. If we can bring it to a current day example. You know, there are sometimes impromptu memorials roadside memorials, but they're often policed. I wonder if you can elaborate on that. I guess I have a few thoughts that some were in response to what you guys were just talking about in terms of what one thought I just had was, one thing that memorials can do that maybe we want them to do that they don't do is they function as a kind of, they could function, they have the capacity to function as a kind of marker for moral agreement, which could also be an anchor backwards and forwards. In the sense that we could have agreement that this thing happened, this thing shouldn't have happened and therefore we should begin to proceed as if we don't want that thing to happen again. Which would then in a way start to create some sort of social orientation. And then people would then have to say, these are ways, if this marks an action we did that we don't want to do, that we didn't want, then we have to act in ways that don't confer to that. And power doesn't want that. Because power is actually interested in smooth space. It's actually interested in always having the ahistorical moment where nothing is actually grounded or tethered. Power is interested in that not being the north. Because if there's an orientation and we can actually have some kind of social agreement that there's a way forward and a way backwards, then we have to stick to that. Then we can actually start to build agreements and have some form of justice. So I think some of what we're talking about with this way of thinking about memorializing is really about trying to build the public's capacity to orient and agree and move in a direction that actually benefits multiple people. And that goes against power. Because the point of power is to keep people manipulatable and not necessarily have a space of privilege to agree. To your question around this, this idea of sort of impromptu memorials or memorials that are sort of created in the grassroots, I feel like most of the time those kind of memorials and memorials to the dead and those memorials get policed or dealt with in space commensurate to the racing class and status of the people who occupy them. If they're students, they're not. And private schools, they're gonna be fine. But if they're young black and brown people in Roxbury or Dorchester, they're gonna be called dirty and taken down as garbage. And I think we'll just see that those things will just reflect sort of classic standards of racing class and power in the city. And I guess I wanted to pose a couple of other questions around this idea of memory and memorialization and monumentality is what is Boston a monument to? And how does Boston then sell its own monumentality as a city? And what does that then mean for the kind of city that we're trying to actually make happen? I just wanna offer one thing. Power, after, I think about Michel Foucault in France and teaching us that power is dispersive. So the minute you say that someone has power and you create this other group that doesn't have power, immediately that powerless group can organize itself into a set of power, right? So you have these people that they used to call pedarasts, right, and deny them access to rights and those people organize themselves as homosexuals. Then you have these people who are in the sultans family who aren't male, right? And they organize themselves into a harem. And the most powerful person in the sultans palace is the sultan's mother. So this notion that like power is somehow, some people have it and some people don't, power is dispersive and it shifts in different ways given where you are, who the people are and where they are and how they relate to each other. Power isn't just this thing in a vacuum, right? Fascism on the other hand is something different. And fascism I think that when you were describing how power has organized itself around like eliminating North, everything is true at the same time. If everything is true, then nothing is true. I love everyone. Well, if I love everybody, I love nobody, right? So like that's what fascism does. And it shows you your own destruction as this thing that you would enjoy. They show people getting beaten up at a Trump rally as it's entertainment, right? So you're watching the whole fabric of the society breakdown, but you're watching it as a clip in the news and then there's a commercial for like a new Ford, right? So like it's completely flattening everything, right? So that's different than power, right? I put a monument to a man murdered by the police on the side of a museum, right? That is me collaborating with the power structure of the museum, a museum that is in Roxbury, that faces Roxbury, a museum that is thought of as a quote unquote white institution that decided it wanted to have a conversation with the people in the neighborhood in which it is housed, right? I brought children from the Hamilton Garret Choir to that museum to sing a requiem for a young man who was murdered by the police. So you have all these black children singing songs from the popular song book. They sang Baltimore by Randy Newman. They sang Trouble of the World. They sang What Becomes of the Brokenhearted. And then they sang Young Gifted in Black, right? So that space, even if you're calling it a white space, it's not white while I'm in it. Like it's awful black now, right? And so that, like the notion that those spaces can be occupied by different kinds of bodies, that's how you disrupt power. And when people say like that space is not for me, I say you get to claim that space. People have been, black people have been claiming space at the cost of their lives in this country, right? Black people have tried to claim space and it has cost them their lives. And so I understand like the risk inherent in having a black body moving through spaces that are organized by racism. Not organized by prejudice, because I don't care about prejudice. I really don't care if white people don't like me. I don't care. I said I don't care, right? I do care if they pass laws to kill me. Like that's different. I don't care about your prejudices. I care about racism, right? And so when we're navigating spaces, I can deal with people's prejudice because prejudices respond to education. Like I was, this is amazing. I was on the bus to New York and there was this woman who was telling me about her job and she's a surgeon and she's from Egypt. And she's telling me about like surgery and I was like, girl, I dissected the frog and I passed out in fourth grade. So you're doing, you're like, she's flying from Egypt. No, from Saudi Arabia, I'm sorry. She's flying to Saudi Arabia, two Massachusetts to teach people how to do surgery, right? And this adorable white couple was on the bus with us. And the woman said to this woman from Saudi Arabia, is your country safe? I was like, is your country safe? Like it's crazy. Like it's crazy, but like this notion that you're different, you're from outside. So where you come from must be a dangerous place. That's fascism. The other is different. The other is dangerous. The other is terrifying. But then the four of us are sitting on this bus, this woman from Saudi Arabia, this black man who lives in Boston and this white couple from like the North Shore. The four of us have this moment where she learned, these people learned something about the world. I learned something about surgery, which is fascinating, absolutely, right? And this woman like learned something about art because I'm talking to her about art, right? And so those sites, when we move our bodies into those spaces, that's when those possibilities happen. What we have to do is we have to support and protect people as they move their bodies through those spaces. And the last thing I want to say about what you were saying about contemporary memorials and policing. Brian Stephenson in Alabama was working to put up monuments to people who had been lynched. People kept taking them down. And Equal Justice Initiative kept putting them back up. And that day-to-day maintenance became part of memorialization. Immatils, there's a sign marking the spot where Immatil was tossed into the Tallahatchie River. Racists shoot that sign up every month. And every month they replace it. So this notion of the temporary, like that's about sustaining the monumentality. In Israel, when there's a terrorist attack, when something gets blown up, they rebuild that thing the next day. We say, we will not stop. We will, Immatil was murdered here and we will not let you forget that. And so those kinds of things, those kinds of community-based actions where someone puts a marker somewhere and the people in the neighborhood decide to defend it. When someone is killed in a traffic accident or a bike accident and people like maintain these memorials by the side of the road, that's one thing, right? To monumentalize those things becomes another thing. And so the memorial action, it's in us as human, right? Everybody gets a tombstone ostensibly, right? But the notion of monumentality, that is something that we're talking about as a people that we need to remember. As a people, we need to never forget this. And in the South, when they were building monuments to racism, they became sites for people to organize. This is why after Nuremberg, when they killed Nazis, they didn't bury them anywhere because they didn't want people building shrines to these people. Because that's what happens when you bury a Nazi, more Nazis grow, right? That's why you burn them, you throw them in the water, you don't leave any place where anyone can organize, you don't build an object so people can organize themselves around it. After Albert Speer, no, after, what's his name? Rudolf Hess was released from Spandau. They tore it down. The last three Nazis were in a prison. When the last one was died or left the prison, they tore the prison down because we don't want that object to become a site for people to organize themselves around. So the question becomes, if we're interested in justice, we have to build objects. We have to build sites for people to organize themselves around justice. And sometimes we can build new ones and also we can use existing ones that we can talk about a way to reorganize our thinking around what these, what quote unquote, statuary does in public spaces. Like the way people have started to organize themselves around the Shaw Memorial. That becomes a really interesting site where immigration protest is organized around the Shaw Memorial. I'd like to, if I may, respond. I'm in agreement with both Kenny and Steve here in terms of this issue of power. In an everyday walk of and ride through my own neighborhood, there are many memorials that are raised to young people, including ghost bikes and other candlelit corners that speak to the loss of a member of the community. And the voices of young people are usually invested there. There is a former judge, I don't know if you all know him, Charles Walker, who shared with us an experience he had on Talbot Avenue in Dorchester. As he was riding, there was a little boy who had been killed on his bike from a speeding motorist. And there was an erected shrine with a ghost bike. There was a candle-villain, how do you say that? Vigil. Vigil, sorry. You're doing all right, girl. Okay, sorry, I need some help from my people here. Okay, but the candlelight vigil that was being conducted was led by young people. There were no adults around. And it was being done very beautifully and ritualistically. And he decided, Charles Walker, he decided to get out of the car that he was riding in and ask them what was going on. And they told him. And so he lit a candle too. And he commended them for what they were doing. As a way of lifting up, not only the memory of this young boy and his family, but the actions to take power in their hands to remember their fallen comrade, if you will. And so I think it's these kinds of moments that we can get to support each other that will then have some bearing and impact on the power of those who have the police saying, when they see that this man is involved in the law, he was involved in adjudication of some of the young people that may have come before him who might have fallen or who might have been in these circumstances to lift up one. For me, that was a moment of the manifestation of power that can be committed and dedicated by community to understand this big idea of honoring each other. And so I just wanted to say that the memorials can, in some instances, I've heard people express that they're annoying. How many are we gonna put up? But the idea- I'm gonna put up all of them, yeah. Yes. The idea that we can take an opportunity to honor a life is very important and it becomes a monumental big idea. So I think we're ready to take audience questions. I don't know if Dr. Johnson, if you had something to say before we take audience questions. No, I would very much like to hear the questions from the audience. I see questions, but I don't know what's so amazing. Oh. Great. Thank you all, this is stunning. I started to think about the third category, there are memorials and there are monuments, the third category being acknowledgments, specifically in the context of immigrants. And specifically in the context of acknowledging that immigrants have stories. And this was, I guess in my mind, precipitated by an event that was at the BCA called Seeking Sanctuary. It was a combination of music and then participation by music from China from Cape Bird and from Ireland. And individuals representing each of those talking about their stories. And hearing some of the same language. And some of the, not only the same phrases, but some of the same actual language regardless. And thinking about other immigrant communities and how those can be surfaced and creating a platform for those that continuously can be added to. So it's not a memorial, it's not a monument. It just is giving, I guess, voice or giving honor to people who are hidden, if you will. Some friends of mine are doing work to make that more of a policy at museum school of art. In terms of acknowledgement of indigenous land rights for any time anybody would teach a class or do any sort of event that they would acknowledge the indigenous land that. And I would definitely say that that's part of this larger set of strategies of acknowledging or recognizing things we've done wrong that we should do right that then should orient us. And not wanting that sort of orientation in the public consciousness. Liberation? I just wanted to respond that the idea that as Kenny has before that these anchor moments that allow us to acknowledge people and run having said that about acknowledgement. And maybe something that we do right takes me to the idea of petitions and the force and power of petitions and the right to petition that's in the Bill of Rights. In searching and researching petitions I have found petitions of indigenous people who may have been looking for a loved one, a lost girl who they feared would fall into slavery in the 1800s or the 1700s. And that viable instrument, if you will, of the petition being something that crosses and are centuries. And to acknowledge what Steven's campaign about, if I can call it that, about Farnor Hall and the use of that still sane instrument as a petition to awake and bring to consciousness and to raise the notion of rights for me that petition becomes a looming, very large piece of action, a call to action. An idea that hasn't died or had been done away with and that we can find people's histories hidden in petitions from long ago and causes being edified by these petitions make me think that there is not only the force of acknowledgement, but there is this force of monumentality within that idea. My only thing, Ron, is I think we do a lot of celebrating. I really do, and I think we do, I think we need to start to cry. I think there's a lot of tears that have never been shed, that need to be shed. And I think that acknowledgement is only, I make objects that accuse people, like that's what my work does. It accuses people and it says this is what you did. This is who you did it to, this is when it happened. And so that sort of thing is it's a moral position and I don't absolve myself in taking that moral position. I'm implicating myself in that moral position. But I think that there's a, in Boston in particular, we love to acknowledge all the wonderful things. We really do get a kick out of that. And I think that like the quote unquote successful immigrant stories or the tales that have come over there's a place for that in our understanding of what it means to be a quote unquote diverse society. And I think that those things are important. I think that when we're talking about acknowledgement as separate from talking about memorialization, memorialization in my mind now usually has something to do with loss. Cause the notion of memory is you're remembering something that is no longer present. And so I think that those sorts of poles have to, for me, have to remain separate. Because I think that there's a lot, there's always a rush to memorialize things now. Like the minute something happens, we have to build a monument. Instead of waiting until everybody is dead to memorialize it, right? I think I've said to you before, like the Oklahoma City bombing, they put that memorial up very fast. And so the notion that there were people who were still alive who survived that were still alive in the building of that. And that is really, really new, right? With Maya Lin and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, we were very much removed from that war. We were still arguing about that war. And her client for that object was not the United States. Her client for that object were the veterans. And there's something super interesting about that because she said, everyone said, was talking about how people would respond to it. And there's a wonderful film about Maya Lin called The Strong Clear Vision, I don't know if you've ever seen it, where she says, I knew a returning veteran would cry. Like, can you imagine? You're like 19 years old and you know what your object is going to do before it is built, right? That's the sort of vision that is required to start to think about memorialization. Because you're thinking not about the living, right? You're thinking really about the dead. And you're thinking about the unacknowledged. That's who you're thinking about when you're building memorial structures like that. But I think what's so successful, one of the things that's so successful about that memorial. About Maya Lin. About Maya Lin is how you descend into the earth. And you are reflected in the surface of the memorial, that black surface. So it becomes a conversation. You really are engaged and you're not just looking at it. That's what happens for me. Now, let's imagine for a second that I was in the last part of Vietnam War, right? Where there are hundreds of people killed on the same day. What if I was there on that day? So when I look at it, I see that day. And I see my face. And I see the names of the men in my platoon. Like, she has that understanding of what that's going to do. And that's the difference between building a memorial for a committee, right? Building a memorial for like everybody. And building a memorial for this group of people. And then it acts on the rest of us. And that she listed the names chronologically. It wasn't just alphabetically, that to have the effect that we would not. And she talks about that in the film and trying to say, like, what's going to be complicated? It should be alphabetical. She's like, no, this is about time. This is about time. In a way that you weren't talking about. And, you know, that it's related to the past. Right. So we have another audience question. In a city that's undergoing a lot of changes, where we're seeing communities being displaced, how do you see monuments and the idea of monumentalizing stories, changing the future of our city? How are we carrying stories into the future? Do you want to go or you want me to go? Dr. B, do you want to go? I was just trying to think about this in terms of what is the oldest monument in our city? How might that relate to what will become the next monument? Is there a great difference in what is being memorialized? I was just really trying to reflect on the nature of the monuments in Boston. Could someone help me with that? Does anyone know what is the oldest monument in Boston? The city's website. I know the answer to this question, Doc. I just can't remember because I taught all that. Did you bunker it? It might be. All right. It's either that or the customs house. It might be the customs house. It might be the oldest building. It's the oldest historical structure. But the oldest monument. It might be Faneuil Hall, which became a monument. We didn't start out as a monument. But I wonder, that is a good question. What was the first thing that people in Boston decided to memorialize? Exactly. I was going to try to connect that with the question that was raised because I think that's one way of looking at that question. Have we come a long way, or are we at essentially the same place in terms of what we memorialize in terms of what the monument is? And I think one way of thinking about that is to think about what the first one was and what is being proposed as the next one. The Boston Proposal. Maybe 20 years and looking at some of the stories that are probably not invested in the tourist attractions, if you will, but are truly significant stories that have been told by artists, creating a visual literacy around this idea of history and presence. And some of the people, like John Wilson, who created a very large head on the grounds of the Museum of the National Center of African-American Artists in Roxbury, called Eternal Presence. I was able to interview him. He took me into his studio where he had draw after draw after draw after draw of drawings that he had done for 10 years to do that particular sculpture that becomes a monument because, as he described it, it is to represent the rise of humankind as it is coming out of the mound of the earth and the head is androgynous, if you will. It does not necessarily represent a man or a woman. And the eyes are not eyes that you are able to see out of because they don't have a pupil in them. They're fashioned after what he said was the benign sculptures and how it represents this ongoing force of humanity. And looking at monuments like that that can forecast a future, that can be timeless are some of the ways that memorials and monuments are now being designed. And having looked at an interview for in Cunningham and in her quest of creating Harriet Tubman's Step On Board at Isla and Columbus Avenue, that woman that is in the forefront of a pursuit of safety for people as salvation, as rebuilding a new life, as stepping out on fate, as continuing a conversation for the safety of people is another example of moving forward with memorializing or monumentalizing an event or place or a person. And thinking about the investment of our youth, I'm not seeing many in this audience today. Most of us are headed toward gray hairs who are having these conversations. And I think that to pose the ideas of the future, we need more input and investment from our younger people to be present, to be invited to the table to talk about your question as you ask for that to be viable. I just want to offer that as more and more civic space gets privatized, this becomes a crucial issue. You start to have public art that is to decorate spaces and that doesn't usually relies on that there's anything wrong with minimalism. I'm a big fan. But it actually relies on tropes of geometric design abstraction that is neutral, quote unquote neutral, which we know nothing is neutral. Like minimalism is about power. Anna Chave wrote a wonderful essay about minimalism and the rhetoric of power, which is a hugely important text when you go past coming down the Fenway and there are all those new residences that are luxury housing that don't even have addresses anymore. They just have names. And there's decorative objects in front of them. And then you've got a legacy place, like I was saying earlier, and you're not allowed to take photographs. Because all of a sudden you're outside, but suddenly you're in private space. Or in the south end in the gallery district, that is now private space. And so there's a way in which you're walking down the street, you're walking down a thoroughfare. And people will say to you, what are you doing here? It's like, whoa, this is now private space. And I'm here to see contemporary art, but now I'm in privatized space. And so those become questions. When we start to talk about gentrification, we're not just talking about people being displaced. We're talking about ownership of the commons. We're talking about ownership of public space, which becomes privatized. And then it has this sort of plot art that is decorative objects that don't have any engagement with anything around them. And so that becomes the question as we lose more and more public space, as we defund post offices and defund libraries. The post office used to be the place. They used to have murals in the post office. Like artists used to be hired to paint murals in every post office. It was like a big deal. When I became an artist, you know what I wanted to do? I wanted to paint stamps. I wanted to be one of the artists at the Department of Pre-Engraving that made like the duck stamp. Like I still want to do that. But that notion that like the artist is an actor in civic space, that the artist is a person in your neighborhood, that the artist is someone you go to, just like, you know, and the artist has some knowledge, right? That the artist isn't just expressing herself. Like she's not just like exposing her feelings all over the place. That's not what artists do. Artists interpret and embody the culture through images and objects. That's what we do. So I'm not talking about me when I'm making my work. I'm talking about you, right? And that's the thing that, that's why people don't trust artists. That's why people want to kill them because they actually have this power to embody something like possibility. That's the problem with art. And so when you actually have real art in public spaces, it doesn't, it's not decorative. They're actually, people look at it and then they look again and then they're like, wait a minute, what the, wow. What is that? I'm gonna go read the label now, right? And so that kind of engagement is what happens. And to have that in public space has to be supported by a public consciousness. So that means we have to have music in schools. That means we have to have visual art in schools. We have to allow people access to the sites of culture. We have to do those sorts of things. Not just one kind of culture or one kind of space. We have to make sure that people are able to access things in a way that is meaningful for them. I had this conversation with a museum director very recently. Wonderful person, white woman. See, we really wanna get more black people into the museum. How do we do that? How do we do that? I said, get in your car, go to Madison Park High School. Say, hi, I'm Ms. So-and-So. I run a museum. Would you like to come visit me? Here's the school bus. We're all gonna get on the school bus and we're gonna go to my museum. All right, meet you there. Have a kid show up. Hi, I'm Ms. So-and-So. I came to your classroom. This is my museum. Let me show you around. You know, you can come here anytime you want. We have free memberships for people your age. You can bring your family. There's even classes you can take. But that very simple thing, show up, go to their space, and invite them to your space. And then when they go back to their space, show up at their space again. It's like, so, did you enjoy coming to the museum? Would you like to come again? It's not that hard. It's really not that hard. The question is, will people do it? And they don't want to do it. And that's the question, because we have privatized spaces. The more spaces are privatized, the less the public has access to them. And we can talk about diversity all we want, but what we really need to talk about is justice. I don't care about diversity. I care about justice. We have one more audience question. Kenny's gonna read it. I couldn't recognize some of the words. Can monuments function as the symbol and the thing? And what would, I hope we're thinking of them in this way, help us shift in the larger city vis-a-vis spatial justice? I don't know. Can monuments exist as a what? Like symbolic of something and having an actual function. Like, oh, like when some, like a door represents an ability for certain people to get in and out, but the door is actually broken. So, you know, when something has these double meanings. And the thing is, most of the time when things have double meanings, you have to find them. You don't make them. Although there was a monument and that was built after the Balkan War around Bruce Lee, because regardless of where you fell on the ethnic war, everybody was like Bruce Lee. Yeah, it's a great monument. It's great. So it was like this thing to try to make a point to make this point and say, let's not go back there and go in this way, in a particular way. But I don't know if monuments can do that double meaning, but I do think that trying to explore the extent to which monuments can help us find more is interesting. Well, I think they can do those, that double work. And I think that the ones that I think of they do it usually are the memorial to the murder Jews of Europe, Philip Isamon in Berlin, which is the field of Stella that you have to navigate. So you can't understand Berlin without navigating the space. So everyone has to deal with that particular space, right? And the other one is Horst Hochheizel's the Ashcroft Fountain, which still functions as a fountain. It still works, but it's underground. So he took the fountain and turned it upside down because it was a fountain that was built by a Jewish family who was murdered by the Nazis. And so he rebuilt the fountain, but he put it underground so you can't access it. And you can hear the water rushing and you can stand on it, but you can't access it. And so my work is hugely influenced by Hochheizel, who did the Ashcroft Fountain because the anti-monument seems to be the way to talk about what we're talking about. The last one I would think of is Rachel Whitebreed in Vienna. The, she cast the interior of a library. So you come upon this structure that looks like a library, but you're actually in the cast space of where a library would have been. And so you see all the books and you know, Jews are the people of the book. And it is this manifestation of all the stories that can no longer be told. And so it does that sort of metaphorical thing. But I really think the way to get to what the questioner is asking is through metaphor. And I think that the hard thing is that we have so few metaphors in common anymore that it's hard to make something that people are gonna decode in a way that is gonna be a shared meaning. Right, yeah. It's like Amy Sherrill painting the quilt on Michelle Obama's dress. So black women look at that and they're like, bam. Like they see it immediately. And other people don't. And so that sort of coded sort of meaning comes across. Why do you think Germany is there in reality in terms of what had happened in the US when they were to do that? I think in Germany, there was so much documentation that it could not be denied. And we had a trial. Like there was like an international trial. And so like the whole notion of crime, like what happened in, what happened to West Africans in America is a crime. But it was also the economic engine of the country. You do not have a country without enslavement, right? In Germany because the extermination of the Jews was of, it was a political policy. And it wasn't merely an economic choice. Like no one really thought about enslaved people, the way that people thought about Jews. It wasn't personal. Enslavement was like, well, we need these people to work. We can't pick this cat and ourselves. But with Europe, and there's been a long disgusting streak of anti-Semitism in Europe that just boiled to a point in Germany that it became a policy. It became a government policy. And so the government had to be held accountable. I'd like to answer that, sir. I'd like to add to your question because I think the point is about power. They lost the war we did. Right. As the losers, they had to do something in them. Right. Thank you so much. Thank you, Marie. You're wonderful. It's so great to have you here and organize all four of us, even from space. You're wonderful. You can talk about this wonderful. Thank you so much. An hour and a half went by so fast. Thank you, audience. Have some snacks in the back. Continue the conversation with your neighbors. Participate in La Mirchie's installation in the back and fill out your first event survey. We'd really appreciate your feedback. Thank you so much for coming up this evening. I'm happy we actually got from you. We'll talk to you in one time.