 I'd like to introduce our speaker, Marissa Angel Brown is the Assistant Director for Programs at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University where she teaches a graduate seminar titled Critical Approaches to Preservation and Cultural Heritage. She is the author of Preservation's Expanded Field in the recently published volume Doing Public Humanities and of numerous articles, reviews, and exhibitions on American Visual Culture, Urban History, Architecture, and Historic Preservation. She serves on the Executive Committee of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies and on the State Review Board for the Rhode Island State Historic Preservation Office. Her new project, a book tentatively titled Inheritance Dispatches from the Heritage Wars, explores conflicts over American history and identity that are playing out in battles over public art and preservation across the country. Marissa, welcome. We're so delighted to have you with us. Thank you. Thanks so much, Erica. It's really great to be here. I also wanted to thank Jorge for inviting me last spring. I think I was scheduled to come in April before everything hit the fan, I think March 13th, but it's really nice to be with everyone now. I wanted to thank Meredith for doing so much of the organization behind the scenes. I was sorry to not do this in person because I really would love to hear more about what the students are working on and the kinds of projects that are happening here, but maybe those things will come up in the kind of Q&A time afterwards. So it's especially terrific to be here because I really think about this program as the crucible of creative and critical thinking about preservation. I teach a course at Brown called Critical Approaches to Preservation and Cultural Heritage, as Erica said, and I can't tell you how important Jorge's work is and Erica of Rami's is to this course. I was just telling Erica in the moments before you all joined that the book she edited and put together issues in preservation policy is always at my fingertips and we're reading, I think, eight of the many essays in this book in this class. It fills a huge gap in the literature on where the field is now and I especially love, and the students have loved, the interviews that Erica did with practitioners in the field. So I think of your department as really setting the pace for the field and setting the research agenda in a lot of ways, so it's a great pleasure to be with you in community tonight. The work I'm going to share tonight, actually hold on, let me let me share my screen now, just give me a second. Okay, the work I'll share tonight comes from research and a series of in-depth interviews I'm doing with preservationists, artists, and activists across the country about conflicts over American history and identity that are playing out in battles over public art and preservation. This project was started before the spring, when Confederate monuments really started to dominate the news cycle. It interweaves reporting of what I have come to think of as these heritage wars with a revisionist family history of my own family, of some of the figures on my father's side going back to the 1630s through the 1800s who were centrally involved in the colonization and settlement of the country and in Native American enslavement, displacement, and depatriation. It's a project that is about coming to terms with hidden truths about American history and identity in our public art and preserved architecture and in our own family histories. It's about the role that the preservation and public art are playing in these conflicts, and it's about the question of what our moral responsibility is for the actions of the past. It's also about how we take something that is both so real and yet so diffuse as the story of America and rewrite it through actions that are both big and small, institutional and personal. Part of revolution is remaking of the landscape. Memorials of the previous guard are taken down and new ones are put up. This process happens at all registers from official buildings and public squares to the art that is hung in people's living rooms. Part of what I'm outlining in this presentation, material which I'm still collecting and very much still thinking through, is the argument that we are in the early stages of this process. This revolution, if it comes to pass, may be unique in that it may involve a transfer of power, a remaking of our cultural landscape, and a redefinition of American history and identity without an overthrow of our political structure or principles. For those who think about preservation, this emerging cultural revolution points to challenges for the future of this field. Revolution and preservation are usually not thought of as allies. The personal part of this story begins on August 14th, 1676. On that day, 23 Englishmen who had settled on Narragansett land in the 1630s sold into slavery, 36 men, women and children from the tribes that lived and still live in the region around Providence. They were sold for money, for bushels of corn, for sheep and for wood. The profit was split among the 23, with most getting a full share and some getting a half share of the profits. We don't know where the enslaved Native Americans ended up, but during this period, many were sent to Caribbean plantations from ships leaving Newport. So we can imagine that they were conveyed to Newport on ox carts or on foot and transferred to ships there. We can only imagine what the journey was like for these 36 men, women and children, and who was in charge of organizing the auction, collecting payment, transporting the enslaved, and getting them to the Newport wharves, because no record of this exists except for a few lines in the Providence town records. But this is not the part of the story that 19th century depictions of Providence show. The story that we memorialize is the landing of some of these settlers on the shores of Narragansett occupied land 40 years earlier. This is a painting on the left titled, The Landing of Roger Williams in 1636, painted by Alonzo Chappelle in 1857, now in the collection of the RISD Museum in Providence. And the print on the right is a 19th century engraving. This story of the landing is even what is in the seal of the city of Providence, which I'm showing you here, which is still actually the city seal. My first ancestor to come to North America was Thomas Angel, who left England in 1630. He is one of the men in this boat. He and both of his two sons, named John and James, were three of the 23 settlers who calculated the price of each Native American they sold, calculated their share in the profits, planned and publicized the sale on August 14, 1676, and returned home that day richer than they had been when the day started. But that is not the story that we celebrate. Three generations later, Thomas Angel, named for his great, great grandfather, leaves New England for Western New York around the time of the Revolutionary War as part of a generational exodus from the early colonies. Families were big, and by this time it was becoming increasingly difficult to find enough land to put together a large farm. So this generation pushed westward into New York and Pennsylvania in the hunt for more land. In a few decades, the Iroquois tribes which had occupied this land lost 99% of it as speculators, land companies, and the state and federal government purchased or stole it, mostly from the Oneida and Seneca tribes. Thomas Angel and tens of thousands of others who bought plots, built log cabins, and planted apple orchards on this land were integral parts of this strategic system of Indian dispossession and displacement. They were the cogs in the machine, they powered the machine. About, oops, sorry, about 100 years later, my great-great grandmother and great-great grandfather were stationed at military posts in Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, and California in the years after the Civil War in what was called Indian service. My great-great grandfather, the picture there is on the left, was Colonel James Biddle. His charge was to enforce Indian dispossession by ensuring that tribes remained on their reservations and to protect construction of the Trans-Pacific Railroad from Native American incursion. Without at first thousands and then by the 19th century, hundreds of thousands of families like mine to enslave, kill, dispossess, and displace Native Americans across the continent, this massive transfer of land and wealth could not have happened. Now the way I've just related this story is not, of course, the way I grew up hearing this story, as you can imagine. The story I heard didn't mention Native Americans, they were invisible. If anyone here has not seen the artist Titus K. Farr's TED talk, I highly recommend it. In this talk, K. Farr paints this painting titled Shifting the Gaze. As he paints, he talks about the ways in which our art wipes out Black existence. You don't know at the start of the talk where this is headed and when he takes the brush dipped in white paint and starts brushing over the white figures in it, it's an incredibly shocking gesture. And then he slowly proceeds to paint out the white figures. And as he does, you realize that you hadn't even seen this little black boy in the painting who slowly becomes the protagonist, the central figure. And then you see him clearly for the first time, even though he had been there from the start. This is how my own rethinking of my family history feels to me. This is a process that's happening right now at all registers, as I said, from our own personal histories and our own individual thinking and actions around questions of social justice to our culture at large. We are in the middle of a paradigm shift, a recognition that America has acted as an imperial power and has produced the kinds of paintings, memorials, public art, and buildings that empires produce. What we choose to do with this inheritance is a question that feels to me like one that cannot be avoided with lots of tough and uncomfortable decisions ahead of us. Before we get to preservation, and we will get there, let's think together about our context. In August of 2017, riots started by far right white supremacist groups in Charlottesville to protect a statue of a Confederate general that was slated for removal, ended with the death of one progressive protester and the injury of 19 others. After the death of George Floyd this past May, Confederate monuments across the country became the focus of Black Lives Matter protests calling for racial justice. Over the last few years, with momentum picking up this summer, over 100 of them have been removed from small towns and big cities across the country. Many that remain like this statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia have become the locus for protest actions, for celebrations of racial unity, and for public art. Just last week, the Mellon Foundation announced a new $250 million initiative to fund the creation of new monuments and the relocation or reinterpretation of existing monuments. We're at the beginning of what I think and hope will be a dramatic project to remake our public and official space. If this project achieves its ends, and what's so interesting about it, is that it's so organic. There's really no institutional organization that is leading this effort. It's really happening statue by statue, community by community. We will wipe out or maybe more realistically, we will at least greatly diminish the ideology of white supremacy in public space. And we will hopefully add sites that reveal truths that have been suppressed from these spaces. School curricula are changing too, not as visibly as our landscape of monuments, but they are changing. And again, it's happening school by school and district by district. One new program that may be quite impactful is Knowledge 360. It's a very recent program developed by the Smithsonian's Museum of the American Indian to help teachers expand their curriculum around Native American history. The program was established to counter data that shows that nearly 90% of content that is taught about Native American history in schools stops at 1900. And more than half of state history teaching standards do not include the mention of a single Native American. Knowledge 360 offers lesson plans and teaching materials, professional development for teachers, and a summer program that brings about 30 teachers to Washington D.C. for four-day learning institute. One of the most powerful new developments to emerge are the testimonies of fiction writers such as Colson Whitehead and C. Pam Zhang, who are reimagining the story of America by shifting our gaze, as Titus Kefart does, away from the white experience. When there are such sizable gaps in the archive, when the historical record in other words does not exist for so many marginalized people throughout our history, reimagining history through fiction and art making has become a powerful way to reconstruct our national story. A similar project is emerging in contemporary art as artists like Titus Kefart, Kehinde Wiley, and Kent Monkman subvert narratives of white supremacy and black and native invisibility in the artwork of the past by restaging these scenes, adding black and native figures, shifting our gaze. Kefart calls this a process of quote amendment that is similar to the process of amending and updating the Constitution. Kefart says, I strongly believe that if we don't amend history by making new images we will always exclude the historically marginalized in our society as well as in our art. Here I'm showing you a painting he made in 2014 on the left titled Beyond the Myth of Benevolence, which refers to the myth of the benevolent slave owner. This is Thomas Jefferson pictured here and on the right Monkman's Welcoming the Newcomers, which was installed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art earlier in 2019 and which they actually just announced last week that they were purchasing. Monkman's painting flips the kind of contact scenes, first contact scenes I showed at the start of the presentation portraying indigenous people as strong, joyful, vital, and a generous community and the arriving white settlers as desperate and vulnerable. Similarly, Kehinde Wiley's Rumors of War installed in 2019 outside of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond counters and undermines the nearby statue of the confederate general J. E. B. Stewart on Monument Avenue with a grand equestrian statue of a young black man on horseback wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and Nike sneakers. This is a new monument that changes the narrative in one of the most fraught sites in America. Keep in mind that the VMFA the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts where Rumors of War is installed is less than a mile from the Robert E. Lee Monument I showed you earlier at the bottom right. The Stewart Monument at the top right is only a few blocks further. So all of these monuments are really in conversation with each other and really Richmond what has become really I think a defining kind of location in America right now in terms of rethinking American history and American identity. This paradigm shift represents a real challenge to the field of historic preservation. Why? Well for the most part preservation has been on the side of power. It has often been a tool that has been used by those in power to achieve ends that have little to do with the preservation of historic structures and spaces and more to do with supporting and extending national or elite identities and with the monetization of space. In the class on preservation that I teach at Brown we look at preservation as a series of actions that take place within several different and sometimes discrete systems. Each system uses preservation to achieve ends that are not wholly related to preservation if that makes sense. It's a tactical move that is incredibly effective as it cloaks or camouflages goals that might be divisive with a more benign cover. We see this in sites at all scales. A few examples. The National Park Service was created in 1916 and is the largest federal agency involved with preservation managing 419 parks with over 12,000 employees but the parks have a longer history stretching back to the creation of Yosemite National Park in 1864 and Yellowstone National Park in 1872. This is a painting by the artist Thomas Moran who accompanied a group of surveyors to Wyoming in 1871 a trip that led to the conservation of Yellowstone. You'll notice that the painting shows the land to be uninhabited. In fact the area was well except for some of the kind of explorers that you see in the corner. In fact the area was occupied by the Shoshone and throughout the 1860s in the decade that preceded this painting there were violent clashes between white settlers and the Shoshone culminating in the Bear River massacre in 1863 where US forces killed over 400 Shoshone men, women and children. In dispossessing the wilderness, Indian removal and the making of the national parks, Mark David Spence links the creation of the national park system with Indian dispossession. Conservation in this case camouflaged the forcible relocation of Native Americans off of their land by redefining the land and redefining our relationship to it. As many know usage rules that are enforced by the park service today continue to prohibit indigenous communities from using the land as they had been using it for generations previously. We can also look at the example of Mount Vernon the home plantation and enslaved labor camp that belonged to George Washington which was preserved and open to the public as a museum in 1860 by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association. In my class Mount Vernon is usually our first case study. We examine it after we thought critically about the symbiotic relationship between preservation, nationalism and national origin stories. The site is more complicated than it first appears. It's a shrine to Washington a place that is intended to inspire feelings of patriotism and pride in Americans that visit it. Washington in particular plays a critical role in the story that has been told about America only partially because of his role in the revolution and the fact that he served as the first president. The part of his story that seems to have real valence is the fact that he resigned his commission in 1783 and returned home to Mount Vernon right at the height of his power. A move that for a long time has been sentimentalized and used to reinforce myths about the moral purity and the simple agrarian nature of the country's founding oops sorry and American identity. Preserving Mount Vernon is a powerful way of telling this story to the one million visitors who come each year. It was also constructed to be a powerful and hopeful symbol of unity in 1860 when it was first established as the country was on its way to civil war. And it was also thought of at the time really as a pastoral and nostalgic scene of the century past right at a time when or industry and urbanization had begun to rapidly remake the American landscape. Today Mount Vernon also monetizes this story with a brisk business in weddings and helps to and it helps to inflate real estate prices for properties in the surrounding area. Sorry this headline was I think it was only just last week that this came out or two weeks ago and I think it was about a week after we had been talking about Mount Vernon in class so I thought that was sort of a relevant and amusing headline. In this it Mount Vernon participates in a preservation economy in which historic districts are preserved by white elites in neighborhoods like Georgetown the Charleston Historic District and here Beacon Hill in Boston and the Garden District in New Orleans on the right. In these places history is monetized and converted into higher prices per square foot in a process that is sort of a super charging of the monetization of space. For those who know how to use preservation it can be an effective tool for shifting and reallocating power and resources but all systems are not unitary and preservation is no different. I've talked about preservation in relationship to nationalism and to monetization but preservation policy is a slightly different animal because many of these policies were actually designed to counterbalance power. In this country two of the pillars of preservation policy are the National Register of Historic Places and the section 106 review process. Both of them were created with passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966. To understand them it's important to understand the context that gave rise to this legislation which was the context of urban renewal. The big urban renewal projects many of them infrastructure projects like highway construction which tore through and demolished whole chunks of cities dramatically reshaped the American landscape in only a decade. By the 1960s preservationists and history-minded organizations and citizens were organized and began to coalesce into a movement of sorts. One turning point was the demolition of Penn Station in New York in 1963. The National Register and the section 106 review process were designed as a response to urban renewal and with a powerful bully in mind the federal government and its growing number of agencies, departments, advisory councils and staff. This is the era of the bureaucratization of Washington. The National Register as likely many of you already know created a list of historically significant sites across the country. Between 1966 and today over a million sites have been added to this list through a process that involves the drafting of nomination packages that require extensive research GIS mapping and mastery of the local process that vets and approves nominations. The main criteria for listing have been a building's connection to a known architect or architectural style or its connection to an historically significant person. Nomination packages require professional competencies so they're mostly done by local staff of the state's historic preservation office or by paid consultants. In other words this is not a process that is easily open to citizens working on their own or certainly people living in marginalized communities who would like to participate in it. Section 106 is a review process that kicks in when projects that are funded by, permitted by or approved by a federal agency have a project in mind. The process requires that the agency involved study and assess any impacts on historic properties that are on or eligible for the national register before the project can move ahead. Basically section 106 creates a process that require federal agencies or companies that need federal permits think about mining and other fossil fuel companies for example. It requires a process where they consider preservation to hear from preservationists and communities interested in protecting historic places and to at least seem to take these into account. So the week we cover this material my class is probably the most boring and this is probably the hopefully I think the least interesting slide of the presentation but it's really important material. For those of us who think of ourselves as preservation activists it's really crucial to understand the policies and processes that govern the government's involvement in the field. You need to look closely at what is listed on the national register, how the listing process works, who the preservation staff are that write and approve nominations, who participates in the section 106 process and what its legacy has been to understand how this program has succeeded and how it has failed and what the loopholes are for activism today. Looking back on this legacy there have been a lot of successes but also as we increasingly recognize a lot of failures and a lot of blindness about what constitutes a significant building or space. From our perspective today it's crystal clear that these policies and the people who have enforced them have essentially protected structures associated with white elites and disregarded everything else. You all know why these things have been acknowledged widely in the field the focus on integrity, on well-known architects, on a very narrow sense of who counts as an historical figure. The whiteness of preservation staff has blinded the field to a lot of these failures for a very long time. So although the processes and procedures were intended to be a bulwark against the destructive power of the federal government they were designed within a cultural context in the 1960s of white bureaucracy. This is an important point. These tools were not designed to be used by communities outside of these agencies and they were not designed either to provide a platform for interpreting sites of significance for the general public. Now we want different things from the field of preservation. We want the entire process to not only be open to community involvement but truly shaped by community priorities and values. We're leaning towards wanting more interpretation. We want preservation work to be more like the work of public history and public humanities. The changes that we are seeing in school history, curricula, in fiction, in art, and in our landscape of monuments these are all taking place because these fields have more flexibility. So there's room for change. There's room for individual voices and small communities to make an impact. Preservation is less open and less flexible. As a set of policies the system is quite calcified. Within the state and federal agencies that handle preservation there's a very strong pull to simply follow procedures, check the boxes without asking questions about issues of social justice, equity, and responsibility. At the same time the national register process and criteria make it very difficult for non-specialists to participate in this process. This is especially the case in marginalized and transient communities that have high population turnover. Then there's the issue of preservation's relationship to wealth extraction. Community-based preservation organizations have an uncomfortable relationship with big money. On the one hand these organizations will take on developer led projects to try to protect historic neighborhoods or structures. But on the other hand they often will only do this with the support and financial backing of wealthy board members and allies. Who then may turn around after this fight has been won and push these organizations to focus their time and energy on their own neighborhoods at the expense of communities of color. This is the double-edged sword of doing preservation work in America in a vacuum of public financial support which causes dependence on fundraising and financial support from the wealthy. Museums are on the front lines right now in grappling with issues that are referred to as falling under the umbrella of decolonization including diversifying executive staff and boards collecting and exhibiting more artists of color and for history museums repatriating objects to Native American and previously colonized communities. So where does preservation fit into this movement in this moment? Not comfortably and possibly not at all. A fundamental problem is that the urgent need to radically remake the built and interpreted environment to tell a more accurate and just story of our past is in conflict with the mission of preserving many of our historic sites. That is we can have preservation or we can have spatial justice but it may be that we cannot have both. We see this coming to a head in a few places. Here I'm showing you a mural that shows the lynching of a shirtless Native American man that was commissioned for the Ada County Courthouse in Boise, Idaho in the 1930s. The painting hung without incident until 2008 when the building became an annex of the state capital due to construction on the original capital and legislators began holding hearings and meetings there. Its location meant that anyone entering the House or Senate chambers would need to walk past it. A group of Native American tribal leaders met with state leaders to express concern and a small interpretive plaque was put up the following year but a year later in 2010 the University of Idaho leased that building for its law and justice learning center and that's when conflicts over the mural really heated up. The University felt that it could not display this in good conscience especially given the mission of its center but local preservation organizations came together to protest their decision to cover the mural. Arthur Hart the former state historian of Idaho said but the whole point is they've got to be conserved there's no building in Idaho with even close to this number of murals and certainly not with their historical significance. Meanwhile the dean of the law program said just a public display of these on a daily basis does not provide any context and actually goes against our educational mission of providing a welcoming and inclusive environment for our students faculty and staff. There's no final decision yet on what to do about the mural. What's important about this case is that it has pitted preservation against inclusion and equity. There are countless similar conflicts brewing in small towns and big cities across the country as public art that has hung for decades is being seen with new eyes. These are some of the cases that I'm researching now and doing interviews with people who are involved in them on both sides. Here I'm showing you some images of artwork that was also commissioned in the 1930s that hangs in post offices across the country many of them showing enslaved black laborers. Of all of the federal agencies it turns out the post office has actually some of the strictest preservation policies in place so despite sporadic or sometimes actually quite sustained community protest about some of these murals it is really rarely removed art and sort of sticks by its policy of never removing and and not really being willing to put up contemporary interpretation on site either. Interestingly I started actually looking at the post offices before before all of this happened. What I'm showing you here is scenes of some of these post offices where the artwork that's installed has been covered over with plastic. This just happened a couple of weeks ago when local journalists in some of these towns started to notice that the plastic was going up asked for comments. The post office so far has really put out one one statement but really refuses to speak further about what their plan is how they're making these decisions and what they're considering doing with some of these murals. So to those who study and think about preservation this moment feels very much like we are watching a car crash in slow motion as institutions grapple with the moral dilemmas posed by inheriting artwork or preserved sites that are racially insensitive or even racist. Think for a minute about the number of images and statues I'm sure many of you have seen them in your own you know in cities that you are from or places you've traveled to that fill our libraries, schools, post offices, state capitals, even the United States capitol which I'm writing about right now the artwork in the US capitol that were created within a context of western expansion and Indian displacement or as in the 1930s when many of these were made Jim Crow laws and the redlining of neighborhoods of color. A lot of this artwork not only reflects the racist policies of this time it also depending especially on where it's located plays an active role in participating in systemic racism. So a lot of big questions I think are on the table for people who are interested in preservation right now. What are our responsibilities? Can we be involved in historic preservation and work towards anti-racism at the same time? And if we can't, which endeavor takes priority? I truly don't know whether there's an answer to this question that I find satisfying but I can offer a few ideas about changes that need to be made for the possibility of at least bringing these two things a little more closely together in alignment. On the issue of policy, we desperately need to rewrite the policies and procedures to add pathways that enable or force decision makers to take into account community concerns and community desires both with regard to the national register and to the section 106 process. The section 106 process really should consider project impacts on historic structures and spaces as well as community impacts that relate to equity and inclusion. Good examples of how to do this and how to create pathways for community involvement on this issue are being developed by public art programs across the country. The Chicago Board of Education recently revised its policy manual to put equity at the center of what they do. This is all material that literally just dates to, I think they released it in its final version just in February. So this is really a very recent project and rewrite. They have, so they set out to basically revise their policy manual, their procedures, the way that they operate because they wanted to put equity up to put equity right at the center of what they do. They committed, you can see number four at the bottom, they committed to an annual equity audit of their public art collection and they rewrote their mission statement to reflect a new attention to equity in their collections. Communities that have concerns about artwork in specific schools or education department buildings also now have a place to take these concerns as the manual sets up a review process and procedures for putting together a review committee. Incidentally, these changes were instituted as a result of a conflict that was really similar to the one that I told you a little about at the University of Idaho. This painting I'm showing you right here belongs to the Board of Education was for a long time in a building that was used by staff and then was a couple of years ago repurposed. When it was repurposed, the city's office that supports Native American youth programs moved in. And at the time, there just wasn't a thinking through of the fact that this mural was in the lobby of that space. And so when that office moved in, the people who were running it, but also the Native American youth and families who were really using that office felt that it was not appropriate to have this mural up in a place that was really there to kind of support Native American youth. So this painting is sort of what instigated their rethink about their policies and their procedures. They basically wanted to create a way for communities who had issues to make those issues clear, but then also for the Board of Ed to have a way to make decisions and deliberations in a way that felt like it was open to community members. Curriculum changes. The field I think is changing very quickly. It's becoming, in the field of preservation, I mean it's becoming more critical, more interpretive, more experimental, and more engaged with issues of social and racial justice and equity. And yet preservation curricula are only changing incrementally, not here at Columbia, which I think is very much a leader in this regard, but nearly everywhere else. It feels to me like there's a huge mismatch between what the field needs and requires at this moment and what departments are teaching. Of course, I come at preservation and critical heritage studies from a public humanities department. So I see a lot of value in the theories, the methods, and approaches of public history and the public humanities. The kinds of things they bring to the table are an elevation of community engagement and community allyship, an approach that is both critical and creative with room for exploration with artists and writers. The way we think about public humanities, it involves a focus on issues of social justice, equity, and inclusion. And of course a commitment to doing work that has relevance to the public. I think preservation curricula would benefit from the inclusion of required courses in the public humanities and public history, in informal learning and museum education, and in theories and approaches to community engagement. Preservation sometimes operates on a little bit of an island with some connections to architecture, archaeology, and urban planning, but with very little connectivity to museum practice and to direct service organizations in communities. This needs to change as well as the work of preservation becomes more closely linked to curation and to interpretive museum practice. Non-profits have a lot to do to address systemic racism in their own histories and practices. Like many universities are now doing, they should institute annual audits of their programs, policies, and staff with regard to diversity, equity, and inclusion. They should set aside a percentage of board seats for community members who are not going to be donors, but who can bring the concerns and outlook of their community into the heart of the organization. I have a lot of friends who work in and run these organizations, and change is not going to be easy. These organizations are so strapped for funding and so dependent on a handful of wealthy donors that it becomes very difficult for them to take these kinds of risks, not just for fear of taking on the difficult fight, but for lots of good reasons. Centering issues of equity, diversion, and inclusion represents a change of mission for these organizations, and this kind of change may lead to organizational shrinkage, the loss of staff jobs. So for directors who are responsible for their staff and for stewarding their organization's legacy, as well as its current actions, these kinds of change are really difficult and present, you know, sort of, I think a real challenge from what I hear from friends and colleagues who are faced with this right now. And I don't need to tell this audience this given the work that Jorge does, but another important change would be for preservationists to work more closely with artists. There's a gap in our archive, both our written archive and our built archive, which is really the way I think about, you know, what preservation does is create this built archive. And artists can help us reimagine the past, either at sites where little to nothing remains of what once was, or at sites that are well known. Over the last hundred years, the way we think about preservation has changed, evolving from what we thought was an objective science to what we now acknowledge is a highly subjective practice that reflects the present values of those who are at the table. It's now accepted that the practice is fundamentally interpretive. And as this shift has happened, we are starting to see more projects in which artists are invited to create art on the site of historic house museums and other sites. I think this is an exciting development that's going to unlock new possibilities, new ways of engaging with historic sites, and new ways of thinking critically about them. And a lot of ways preservation as we know it is a visual field of practice. So it makes sense that the work that visual artists do can be the strongest way of reinterpreting a site, stronger maybe than critical labels, for example, or new interpretation put on site, which can't adequately compete with or really subvert the immense sensory overload of a place, its look, its smell, its feel, what you hear with writing. Here I'm showing you at the left, Karen Olivier's installation that was commissioned by Creative Time on the site of Seneca Village, a 19th century black neighborhood that was demolished to make way for Central Park, and James Yaya Howe's paintings in the Eastern State Penitentiary on the right. James was incarcerated for a long time and is now active in the Philadelphia mural scene. And he's actually, he'll be a speaker with our program in the spring where he's going to talk about an artist residency that he just completed where he was an artist in residence with the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office. And Karen was actually a speaker who we had over the summer. She shared a mural she was commissioned to do at the University of Kentucky that her mural was a critical response to a 1930s mural there that showed enslaved laborers amid scenes of white recreation and industry. And the last is perhaps the hardest thing to do, which is that the culture of the field needs to change. Practitioners often get into the field because they love buildings or they love artifacts. They may not think of themselves as social justice activists or as community advocates, but I feel that the responsibilities and impacts of the field are too great for practitioners to continue to bury their heads in the sand when it comes to these issues. Choosing not to think about their work through this lens is itself a political and moral choice at this point. Truly today, there are no corners in which to hide and hope that Black Lives Matter passes by so one can go back to the old way of working. I'm seeing this sink in with colleagues in the fields. To be honest, whether those in positions of power accept this and make change or not, change is coming as the next generation will bring it. So preservation is a sort of a funny field. When I tell people what I teach, I know it sounds pretty disconnected from regular life. When I've surveyed my students about what they think of the field when our course begins, they say things like they think of it as the elite wing of public history or as the pursuit of wealthy ladies will launch. But I don't see it that way. What keeps me interested in the field is a sense that preservation practice is inextricably linked with questions of power and identity and that the choices we make about what to preserve and what to demolish are fundamentally moral choices. They reveal the way we think about history, who matters and who doesn't. And these choices have impacts on the way we all see ourselves and our own place in history. So it's impossible to practice it without running headlong into issues of social and spatial justice. One thing it took me a very long time to understand and truly absorb as an architectural historian is the fact that our cities and landscapes lie. They don't give us an accurate picture of the past, but a highly selective one that usually tells a story about wealth and power. The buildings and landscapes that we have tell us who had wealth and power and the ones that we have lost can no longer testify to the communities that had less of it. This is where preservation comes in. It's the process of selection, the way we winnow out the things that we keep from those that we discard. By making these selections, by editing what we have inherited, we create a story about the past that's everywhere. We internalize this story more than we know. It shapes our sense of history and it shapes our place in the world. At this point, I think the field needs to, we in the field really need to break our obsession with the object and the building. Preservationists need to start thinking of themselves as people who assist communities in preserving sites, stories, traditions that are important to that community, not as guardians of objects or buildings. I began this presentation with some thoughts about the tension between preservation and revolution and the need for us to shift our gaze as we rethink what we thought we knew about the past. I've talked about preservation activism, the tension between preservation and anti-racism, and the challenges to the field that I really believe present an existential crisis. At this moment, only a few weeks away from another election here, I find myself preoccupied with the role preservation plays in helping to tell the American story. For the most part, I have felt critical about the lies and the omissions in this story and the ways in which historic art and buildings prop up these lies and omissions and write them into our landscape. This is something I'm thinking about in my work and also as I showed you at the start of the presentation in my thinking about my own role and responsibility in this. But for the first time, I'm starting to feel energized and hopeful about the possibility for change. I'm thinking not just about the problems with the culture and landscape we have inherited but about the creation of new stories about the past and the present. I'm really inspired in particular by examples that artists like Titus Kfar and Kent Monkman have given us of what it means to critique and to create at the same time. The photograph on the left shows only a few of the 10,000 miners on Blair Mountain, West Virginia who fought for the right to unionize in 1921 in a month-long armed battle against local law enforcement and ultimately the National Guard, which was pulled in to break this protest. Shockingly, it is the largest labor uprising in our history and it was the largest armed uprising since the Civil War when it happened. Blair Mountain was put on the National Register in 2018 despite tough and at times illegal and violent opposition from the mining companies that own land on Blair Mountain. The photograph on the right shows some of the work of the Commonwealth planning project in Chicago, which got funding from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund just this year to restore and transform historic structures on 10 blocks on the south side of Chicago with community housing, urban agricultural, and cultural space. Finally, the Colonial Project in America has been underway for about 400 years. In that time settlers displaced, dispossessed, and killed tens of millions of Native Americans, enslaved millions of Africans and African Americans, and into the last century built and enforced racist systems that were designed to strengthen white supremacy. In the process, or rather as part of this process, public art, preserved and conserved sites, and museum collecting and display practices have often worked in tandem with these efforts, extending economic, political, and social systems of inequity into public and civic space. If we are going to change the story, there's a lot to do, but for the first time I'm starting to feel that it might be possible. Thanks, that's what I prepared and I'm happy to take questions and have some conversation. Marissa, thank you so much for that insightful commentary and call to action. I opened up the chat, so I encourage those of you who are with us to start typing questions into the chat, but I'm going to start us off. And thank you so much for mentioning policy. There are times when I feel like I'm the only person in the room talking about policy and similarly boring my students a little too much, but I think you raised a really critical point that I tend to sort of hammer on in mentioning both the Native American curricula that have been developed as well as the Confederate monuments coming down. You talked about that happening kind of community by community. And one of the challenges of creating systemic change, particularly systemic policy change, is that that doesn't necessarily happen site by site or place by place, right? You have to get into the institutions. And so I want to ask what you think might be some of the ways in which the preservation field can help to underpin that. And the example that comes to mind is that while absolutely each community is taking a different approach to Confederate monuments, and we're seeing, you know, some fascinating debates play out, one could point to the work that was done by the Southern Poverty Law Center, as well as the Equal Justice Initiative, and really documenting the pervasiveness of these kinds of monuments across the country, as well as the work of architectural historians like Del Upton and really getting to the kind of underpinnings and the origin stories of those monuments. And so do you see other ways or similar ways in which the preservation community can help to create the sort of evidence or basis for really helping to support activism at the site or community level? Yeah. You know, it's interesting. Well, in our class, we actually invited a friend of mine and a colleague who's the director of a small preservation organization to share with us some of his own challenges and kind of share with us the inside view on the things he wants to do and the things versus the things he feels like he doesn't quite have buy-in from his board and from his membership to do. And I think what was really interesting about that conversation is that he really acknowledged that that his organization had been very successful at preserving historic buildings in, you know, sort of the nicest part of town at the expense of communities of color who had occupied a lot of that neighborhood before preservation efforts began. And, you know, I think he saw it as a problem for sure, but not enough of a problem to make him stop and say, you know, we may need to rethink the mission of this organization. We may need to be trying to do both things at once. I mean, I'm really inspired but the reason I talked about that Chicago Board of Education sort of rewrite of their policy manual is that I think that, you know, that sort of provides a really good example of how a really big and complicated bureaucracy like the Board of Ed in Chicago was actually able to take a look at their policies and procedures and rewrite this manual in a way that actually got buy-in from, you know, from everyone including the mayor's office down to teachers who are, you know, using these spaces and dealing one-on-one with parents and students who aren't happy with the art and buildings. So I sort of feel like, you know, there just needs to, that there need to be, that we need to start incorporating these, the mission language but also the processes of weighing these, you know, concerns about things like equity and inclusion in these spaces. We need to have both conversations at once and I think there, it's not going to be easy and I foresee a lot of decisions made to either take down artwork or, you know, change historic buildings or not to and leave them up that are going to have people on both sides feeling very unhappy. But I think that both things at this moment, it just feels like we really can't have the preservation conversation without having a way to also be talking about the other stuff. I agree. And so as a result, I mean, you know, do you see a lot of different kind of approaches playing out that in and of itself might undermine the ability to have centralized policy? Approach? Sorry, what do you mean? Can you say a little more? So like, you know, in, for example, in dealing with the murals, even within the post office construct, do you see that, that, you know, that more creative and more community-based approach means that we need to take a very conscientious step back from trying to have centralized approaches to heritage conservation to really, you know, kind of say that this, it's okay for it to happen differently in different places. Yeah, I mean, I think that what, you know, I think it's really just in some ways, it's very simple. I just think there needs to be sort of like a section 106 review process. There just, there needs to be a way to have this conversation. I mean, what's interesting, as I've been talking to people, is that, you know, opinions are very mixed about, say, some of the murals I showed. There's, there are a lot of people who are part of the local Native American community in New Hampshire, which has a mural like this. And, and the Native American communities are really divided. There are many members of the Native American communities who want murals like this to remain because they see it as accurately the way that they have been treated and represented by mainstream white culture. And they think that it's important to keep these in place and not take them down. Whereas there are other very vocal, you know, people who feel that these murals themselves sort of participate in the ongoing systemic racism. And so they need to come down. So it's not, it's not at all easy, I think that, but I think it's really more having, having a sort of set of mechanisms in place to gather people together to have these conversations and a decision making structure that feels like there is room for community input. Okay, terrific. I want to remind everyone that the chat is open. I could keep asking questions all evening and I don't want to hog the stage, but we do have a question coming up. Is that a that's a comment? So I'm not, I'm not going to do it. So I do have another question that I'm going to throw in there. Because I think when, you know, when we look at specifically monuments, statuary and public art, we are getting this very broad spectrum and range of creativity from additive approaches to subtractive approaches, you know, taking it down, covering it up to, you know, how do we augment this or reinterpret it or add to it? And, you know, one of the things that I challenge my students to consider is what happens when we kind of up the game and really talk about that as the built environment. Are we prepared to start having that same range or spectrum of choices when it comes to buildings? Would we take down a southern plantation, you know, because of what it represents and the, you know, the foundations upon which it was built and the dispossession and enslavement of peoples? So are we prepared? I mean, do you see that on the horizon, you know, kind of as we, as we scale up to inhabited places as opposed to just artwork or statuary? Yeah, that's such a good question. That's such a good question. I think, you know, in a lot of ways, I think what, what always interests me about preservation is, or we put it differently, I think, you know, people who are in preservation organizations are often anxious, quite anxious about the kinds of conversations and debates and real arguments that you would imagine might happen if, for example, someone proposed something like that, you know, demolishing a plantation, for example. I mean, I think one thing that I think about this field that is, is so interesting and so crucial in a way, is that it really provides a place and a reason to be having those kinds of conversations. So that's one thing that I think is, you know, really positive about a process like that. You know, whether this, you know, we're going to start seeing things coming down, I don't know. I mean, I guess it really only occurred to me a few weeks ago, as I've been following some of this and thinking it through, you know, sort of reminded me about the, you know, the French Revolution and sort of dialogue around monuments then. And it's really gotten me sort of wondering about this question about whether all of this is, it's really the start of something that is, well, will truly kind of impact our own identity and our reading of history. And I guess when that happens, yeah, some things do get demolished. You know, it, I think, I think, as long as, you know, it's kind of communities making those decisions, but I mean, community is a hard word to define, who's in a community who gets to, you know, be at the table. I don't know, but I think that, I think the, the debate and the conversation and all of the argument is, it's really important to have. So in some ways, I'm happy that these monuments and buildings give us a locus to really have these tough conversations and do a lot of this thinking. Yeah. If for those who don't feel comfortable typing, feel free to raise your hand and, you know, in the participant function. But speaking of tough conversations, I really, I commend you for, you know, talking about your own family history. And in, it's a, you know, it's a really compelling way to kind of consider how do we have these difficult conversations in, in, in communities that have such strong origin stories or that are much more reluctant to confront some of the dimensions of their pasts. Can you tell us a little bit about how kind of searching into your own personal history? You may have had insights into how we do this in a professional or more collective way. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's been interesting. I also, I serve on a nonprofit here called the Rhode Island State House Restoration Society. I think that's the name of it. It's very old fashioned. It was sort of like a group that was created the 1980s to advise on issues around preservation of the building and its, you know, and its interiors. And the group has never really taken on real interpretive projects. So that's one thing that I'm working on with some people there. But in the course of being in those meetings, I have been in that building, I've walked through it. I've never noticed what's on the walls. And I actually, you know, like I said in the, in the presentation, my side, my, on my father's side of the family, there's a connection to Rhode Island, but that side left after a few generations. And so in some ways I'm kind of new to Rhode Island. So what I discovered anyways, that hanging in the state house here in Rhode Island are a couple of tapestries that are very similar to the representations I showed at the start of the presentation. So I'm at the early stage of talking with this quite conservative group about the necessity of having a conversation that invites, you know, tribal leaders here and art historians and just citizens to think together about whether, what it means to have those representations of the landing of Roger Williams and have that really be the only representation of this relationship between the settlement of the state and the Narragansetts. So anyway, that's kind of the start of the process. I think the other thing too is, you know, as I'm doing this project, I am thinking about that. And then I think about my mother's actually from Korea. And so her side of the family has a very different relationship to colonization. Her family lived through the occupation by Japan and sort of made their own decisions about what they did during that occupation, which I'm sort of thinking about as well as I'm doing this project. So I don't know, I think we'll see. I'm kind of thinking that the project right now may weave together these two strands, sort of this retelling of this family history with some of these kind of, you know, following what's happening in the rest of the country right now and rethinking the American story. Yeah. And so for anyone who's here, I would also, I'd just love to hear people's own research or what people are working on. So if anyone doesn't feel too shy. Students especially, please chime in. Those of you who worked in Red Hook, maybe you want to talk about it? Oh, Emily's camera came on. Tag, you're it Emily. Hi. So I'm in a class on oral rights and oral rights, oral history and human rights. And we're talking a lot about this class about how to bring to the forefront and preserve stories that maybe don't come out into the archives at all or in traditional narratives. So have you come across any type of oral history work in your practice? Or is this something you think is viable within the preservation sector? Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, we did. We sort of were working on this project that is on pause because of COVID, but it's sort of the intention anyway is to do an exhibition on the highway that runs through Providence that was that like a lot of other cities you can imagine, you know, sort of cut right through the communities of color that were where those neighborhoods were located very close to downtown. So anyway, it's a project we just recently discovered the Department of Transportation in Rhode Island has a photograph of every single building and structure that was demolished to make way for the highway. And no one's ever really looked at this stuff. It's just sitting in the basement. And I have heard from other people at DOT that there's other information that people sort of scratched down when they did this process of archiving. So one project in mind that was going to be actually I think this class final project, but we'll do it at some point, is to go and look at that archive, that collection of materials to kind of try to recreate this community that was that was demolished and lost and put that alongside oral histories with people that we can track down who lived in those houses and ran those businesses before the highway went in in the 1950s. So yeah, I think there's so you know, we've also in other exhibitions I've done work on done some oral histories here and I just find I don't know how you're finding it in your class, but there you just there's so much that comes out of these interviews that you cannot find in newspaper accounts you can't find in you know, another kind of written accounts. So I think they're really incredibly important. No, I agree. And that sounds like a fascinating project as well. What I've found in my work with oral histories and through this class is you get gestures and expressions that don't come across in the written text and that adds a whole layer of emotion to the preservation process and narrative. Yeah, that's great. Are you still doing them even with COVID? You guys are able to do them? I'm preparing to do some on Zoom right now. So I have not started, but what happens? There's built-in recording technology though and Zoom has a transcription technology as well. Yeah, that's good. That saves some time. Yeah, so we will see. Oh, good. Thanks for sharing. We have a question from Beatrice. In America in general, from north to south, there's a recent negative view to Christopher Columbus and the celebration of Native American groups instead. What do you propose in a case like this in terms of how we rewrite that history? Yeah, that's a good question. There's a Christopher Columbus monument in Providence that has become a real issue right now. There's an entire commission that's been created to figure out what to do about it. It was also, it was cast by the Gorham Silver Company and so it has this whole history that is very much tied to not just craftsmanship, but local craftsmanship and local industry. And Providence and Rhode Island have a very strong Italian-American community and Portuguese community that do not want to see the statue taken down. So I have a friend who's on the commission who I had a conversation with about this a few weeks ago and we were just talking about it. What would you do if you could do anything? I was saying, if I could do anything, we would move the statue to, I said our department would be a fantastic place to move it to, a place where you could basically organize a series of public programs for at least three years maybe that use the statue to have these conversations about how people view Columbus, what Columbus means to them now, what it means to them to have or not have this statue in their neighborhoods, sort of to create even like contemporary artist responses to the statue, to sort of think it through before any decision is made and have time to kind of gather together and have these conversations really for several years before the city would decide to do anything. So that's sort of one way that I think about it. Here in New York, it becomes even more complicated with the intangible heritage of the Columbus Day Parade. And that's something that definitely is brought to bear in the conversation in New York and the way in which because of the status of Italian immigrants earlier in this century, the elevation of Columbus was really about being able to elevate their own status. And so I'm curious, how do we grapple with that? How do we begin to kind of recognize that oftentimes there are multiple oppressed groups, and while that's not in any way to diminish the oppression felt by Native Americans as a result of Christopher Columbus's entry to this hemisphere, but in what ways do we negotiate those kinds of trade-offs among different groups who are scribing value? Yeah. You know, yeah, I don't know, but I think what's really great in some ways and hard and really tough about the moment that we're in is that those two things are going to be said in the same place. And I think for a long time within this field, one thing was being said and one thing was being put forward. And so I think what's really, yeah, sort of exciting and really difficult is that's just not no longer the case, which is good but also I think tough on all these individual cases. Anyone else who wants to chime in or talk about their work and how it connects with Marissa's research? Yeah, I'd love to hear work. I'm also, I just want to say I'm very happy with my dog because she really wanted to be in here with me and she behaved perfectly and no crazy barking. Anyone else? It's late. Everyone's thinking, you know, this is the time where we'd be having this conversation or a glass of wine. Exactly. And a nice dinner. So we apologize. We're going to have to get you to New York where we actually, you know, wine and dine you and we'll try and invite folks to join us again. Yeah. Listen, Marissa, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure and, you know, just really, you know, not only informative but very provocative and we very much appreciate that as we try and kind of push the margins of the field and seek to really reimagine what preservation is and can be. Yeah. Well, like I said, you know, you guys are really kind of setting the pace, I think, in a lot of ways. So it's just, you know, it's such a great community that you have together that are working in these various ways. So yeah, so thanks for inviting me. Thank you. Okay. Everyone have a great evening. Yep. Have a good, have a nice night. Bye.