(background chatter) (bright music) - [Woman] Welcome, everyone, to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

(audience applauds) - Welcome to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

My name's Chrisstina Hamilton, the series director.

And today we are thrilled to finally present curator, historian, and director of Monument Lab, Paul Farber.

He was supposed to be here back in March when we were trying to get back into the theater, so we're thrilled to have him here today.

Oh, light!

Excellent, excellent.

I wanna thank our partners for their support of this event today.

The wonderful partner to the series, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, or UMMA, and the UM Arts Initiative.

And of course, our series partners, Detroit Public Television, PBS Books, and Michigan Radio, 91.7 FM.

In UMMA News, tomorrow is another edition of Feel Good Friday.

Actually, I think they're calling it, what was it I saw?

Feel Good Frybread.

Tomorrow they'll have frybread for you to eat at the museum.

They'll be featuring globally recognized dancer and activist Notorious Cree, Heron Hill Designs, an indigenous authors book pop up with Ariel Ojibway, and frybread, tomorrow 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm at the museum, so don't miss it.

Now today, as we are focusing on monuments, and public space and participation, I have just one little tidbit of local trivia that I thought I should share with you.

A number of years ago, I think I moved to Ann Arbor two decades ago, I noted that Ann Arbor, unlike other cities of its size, and as a county seat, no less, is remarkable in that it has no monuments to speak of, not even the typical war monuments to local fallen soldiers typical in Midwestern town squares.

Well, this bothered me when I first moved here.

I couldn't believe it to be true.

And it's a longer story, and if you do research, you'll find out other things, but the tidbit I must share with you today is that at the time when I researched it, I found out we do indeed have a monument in Ann Arbor: The Rock.

Yes, the oft-painted rock at the corner of Washtenaw and Hill Street that occupies the triangular traffic island, which was formerly known as George Washington Park.

It's indeed a monument in the classical sense.

This chunk of stone deposited by glaciers was moved to this location in 1932 by Eli Gallup, yes, Gallup of Gallup Park, then Ann Arbor Park Superintendent.

This is a memorial honoring George Washington on his 200th birthday.

Buried somewhere beneath all the layers of that paint, which, talking about participation, that rock is quite the participatory monument, there is a copper plaque and tribute to President Washington.

So now you know.

We will have a Q&A today.

There are microphones up here at the ends of these two aisles.

So when we get to that moment, Paul will invite folks up to ask questions.

Line up at either microphone.

And now to introduce our speaker to you, please welcome the director of the University of Michigan Museum of Art and Co-Chair of the Arts Initiative, Tina Olsen.

(audience applauds) - Thank you, Chrisstina.

Good evening.

I'm so glad to be here with you tonight.

I didn't know any of that about the Rock, and I would just second Chrisstina's big invitation for all of you to come to the museum tomorrow night.

It's gonna be a fabulous program.

But tonight, I am incredibly honored to introduce Michigan alum and good friend Paul Farber, who is co-founder of the powerhouse Philadelphia-based organization.

Monument Lab.

Monument Lab works with artists, and students, and educators, and activists, and municipal agencies, and cultural organizations to facilitate and craft conversations, exhibitions, and programs about the past, present, and future of monuments.

But it is also visionary in its deep and thoughtful approach to public engagement and participation, and to thinking in complex ways about collective memory.

What we mean when we say collective memory, who we mean when we say it.

I'm sure Paul will talk much more about all that.

I am a huge admirer of Monument Lab, and of Paul of course, because of the work they do that I was just describing, but also because, as a museum director, they're so incredibly hybrid.

So they operate in public space mostly; They're not inside a building.

They have a foot in the academy, kind of, but really they're centered on the broadest public in Philadelphia and elsewhere.

And they don't only work in Philadelphia.

They use the materials and the strategies of the museum, so they're making exhibitions and installations, but absolutely with their focus on the built environment all around us.

UMMA and Monument Lab are currently in the midst of a rich collaboration that's centered on the intersection of Michigan history, public art, and monuments.

The project will culminate in an artist commission for fall '23, so in about a year, that explores the history of UMMA's Alumni Memorial Hall as a monument.

So, Chrisstina wasn't totally right when she said there were no monuments in Ann Arbor.

Paul also serves as the first curator in residence for the University of Michigan's Arts Initiative.

In that capacity, he's leading and supporting a group of fellows, staff, faculty, curators, others, who are together thinking deeply about public art and monuments and teaching and classroom learning.

Paul and the team at Monument Lab were the inaugural grantees of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Monuments Project, a $250 million initiative to transform the way our country's histories are told in public spaces.

That project included a National Monument Audit that they conducted, Monument Lab did, and the opening of research field offices throughout the United States.

I'm sure Paul will tell us more about it in his remarks.

Paul has co-curated Monument Lab projects, including its original Philadelphia City Hall Discovery exhibition in 2015, a citywide public art and history exhibition in 2017, the exhibition Call to Peace in Newark's Military Park in 2019, Public Iconographies at the Pulitzer Foundation from 2019 to '20, and finally, Staying Power at the Village of Arts and Humanities in 2021.

He's the author of "A Wall of Our Own: "An American History of the Berlin Wall," from 2020, and co-editor with Ken Lum of "Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia," from 2019, which was a kind of public art and history handbook designed to generate new critical ways of thinking about and building monuments.

And now, I am excited and happy to welcome Paul Farber to the stage.

(audience applauds) - Good evening.

- Good evening.

- Hi!

- Hey.

(audience laughs) It's really a beautiful moment to be here, to come back home to Ann Arbor, to be here with all of you.

I think one of the last times I was in this theater, I saw Janelle Monae, and she crowd surfed right through here.

I'm gonna stay on the stage, but just channeling this really amazing space with lots of friends, and colleagues, and teachers, and students.

I really wanna thank Tina and Chrisstina for their kind introductions, and just the ongoing partnership.

Being here as a grad student, I did my PhD in American culture.

And coming back to be able to closely collaborate with UMMA, with the arts initiative, with STAMPS, and with many other folks at the university is really special.

And I'm here, in many ways to talk about, there we go, talk about the work of Monument Lab, talk about public art, and public space, and really kind of explore how the questions that I was asking and being asked as a grad student here at the University of Michigan, hey Larry, I see ya there, is one of the kinda main impetuses that carried forward Monument Lab.

Also though, in this moment, I like to practice a gratitude attitude, and I'm thinking a lot about my time here, and thinking about professors, and colleagues, and the students I got to work with, folks, of course, in American culture at the Spectrum Center, the Center for World Performance Studies, DASS, and so many other places.

So just appreciating that, and there's nothing like being able to call back to old friends and kind of encounter a younger version of yourself, and see the path that you've been on.

So speaking of that, I was thinking back to being a grad student here.

And I came here, I think, in the fall of 2007.

And there's lots of ways to historicize that.

But one of the ways for me, it was very common, if you wanna search Google Books, you go on your phone, you go on your computer.

When I came here to be a grad student, I wanted to read.

I wanted to learn how to teach, how to write, and how to do the work of social change.

And I found curating as the way to combine all those three.

But that was one of the first years that Google Books, in part operating here in Ann Arbor, was going through our graduate library and taking full shelves of books off the shelves to go scan somewhere else.

And so sometimes you'd be like, all right, I gotta find this book.

And you'd go to the library and it's like, oo, nope, this floor is closed.

We've cleared out all the books.

And then every once in a while you'd go online.

And there's this amazing site, The Art of Google Books.

And I just looked at ones that were scanned here at the University of Michigan.

And every once in a while you catch a hand, you catch something that's not supposed to be there in this notion of objective knowledge.

And I think for me, I think about that moment, I think about what it meant to find the text, the artworks, the people that would make the journey of doing this work possible.

But I also think about it as an experience of being lost.

I mean, you really are trying to find your way.

You don't always have access to the text you need, to the conversation you have.

You really rely on relationships.

You rely on people around you, and you find a way through.

And when there are gaps, 'cause believe me, there are gaps, you find a way to fill them.

I was thinking about one of my professors, Sara Blair, who also ran the Visual Culture Colloquium.

And she said to me once, she said, "Tell me your dream project."

And I was like, okay, I'm gonna write about an artist, and I'm gonna find their archive, and I'm gonna find every book about them.

And she said, "All right, I want you to construct "an aspirational bibliography or archive.

"I want you to make a list "of all the things you wanna find out.

"And I want you to recognize that you may not find them."

'Cause for every archive that's intact, that's protected, that is well stewarded, think the Labadie here, think Bentley, she said there's other places where there are going to be gaps.

And your work as a scholar, as a critic, as an artist, is to work with presence and absence together.

And I was thinking back; These are some of the texts that, I'm gonna not say it in the passive, I encountered, but texts that were really handed to me that I didn't realize were kind of the floating driftwood as you're grabbing onto something in the kind of flood of learning.

That includes Ruth Behar's "Ethnography and the Book That Was Lost."

Includes Michel-Rolph Trouillot's "Silencing the Past."

Includes Svetlana Boym's "The Future of Nostalgia," and Rebecca Solnit's "A Field Guide to Getting Lost."

Because truly, this whole experience, even when you find your way for moments, it's amidst a longer process of figuring it out.

And I think in retrospect, sometimes you can look back and see a trail that you've walked through, and you get to be an amazing place like here at Michigan Theater with all of you.

But I also wanna demystify that.

There were many moments and still are moments of doubt, of vulnerability, of struggle.

And over time I've tried to learn, well, you just go back to the things that have gotten you here.

And you ask questions that move you through space and time.

And I think one of the biggest things that I got from here is this idea, not just that there is some kind of pure knowledge to be obtained, like knowledge capital letters delivered from on high.

Knowledge is relational.

I think many ways I feel the same way about art and about beauty.

We all know the saying beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I'm in conversations constantly with municipal art officers, with people at foundations, with scholars, with people who have art practices outside and out in the streets.

And something that can be beautiful is when we understand, even coming with different approaches and value systems, that that's powerful.

But that truly, there is no such thing as something that's inherently beautiful, inherently knowledgeable.

It is about the relationships that we have.

And I came up in American culture, so it's like a combination of history, literature, and art.

And thinking a lot, not just about what happened, but what is said to have happened.

What happened in the past that was carried forward, that was saved.

Whether that was rendered in bronze, in paper, or in the stories and artworks of a people.

And really to look at not just what history was, but how history works, how it operates.

And in the notion of of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who are its producers, its narrators.

And how in every moment that you have some kind of narrative, you also have silences.

And how to listen and sense for those.

So one of the things I wanna talk tonight about as I'm talking about public art, the power and participation behind it, is to also hold together presence and absence.

And these are themes I'll talk about throughout this evening, and it's something all of us may have our own holds on.

And you think about whenever you see a monument, a site of memory, something out that is speaking to you about the past, present, and future, what is present, who is present, but always ask yourself who's absent.

What stories aren't there?

Or what stories are there hiding in plain sight but haven't had the spotlight, the resources to lift them to their proper place of esteem?

These kind of questions of presence and absence, and I go back, things that I tried to bring into projects that I did.

And I was here in Ann Arbor for about two weeks my first year.

And I thought, there's something I wanna figure out.

I wanna leave the country.

So I'm gonna find a way to get a grant to go to Berlin.

Being a grad student is both a very privileged and impoverishing experience.

You make under the poverty line; Shout out to the grad student union and the lecturers union here.

(audience cheers) Yeah.

And then you can find a grant to go to Berlin to find yourself.

And you think that you're really original.

You're like, I'm gonna go find myself, I'm gonna leave America.

Well first of all, everyone else is finding themselves.

You hear all the people in the cafes, the English majors, the anthropology majors.

Historians like finding themselves too.

But I didn't realize that leaving the US would actually put me in a space to encounter all of the people and stories that I wanted to kinda figure out in my own dissertation about American culture.

That included stories of US global power, about the fallout and afterlife of Jewish trauma, of Afro diasporic identity.

In Berlin, one of the most haunted places in history, is also a profound place of transformation.

And so thinking of presence and absence about the Berlin Wall, I ended up writing my dissertation kinda prompted by a question, which is, where is the Berlin Wall?

Because yes, historically it's a little bit of a strange question, but as I was writing my dissertation, I kept bumping into pieces of the wall, quite literally, in places around the US.

I had a office in DC.

There were five pieces within walking distance.

Chicago and the brown line, underneath the Space Needle, next to a teriyaki and fudge shop.

And I realized that my project about American culture, I had to approach this notion about history through presence and absence.

And one of the best ways to do that was to study the work of artists.

I have to admit, I've taught art history, I've given keynotes in art history context; I have never taken an art history class.

But I've learned history through the work of artists, through the work of artists' archives, monographs, exhibitions, and conversations with them.

Similarly, one of the first book projects I got to work on was a photo essay with Getty Publications by the artist Leonard Freed on the March on Washington.

And I thought back to my first and second grade teacher, the late Carol Corcan, who's a white Quaker woman who told us about her time as a teenager at the March on Washington.

And that early age was really impressed upon me, the most important work that's lifelong, when it comes to justice and gathering and work of belonging.

And so this idea of presence and absence, even in these images, we of course were looking for what was iconic, but what was far more interesting in this set of images was the way that people from across the country, many of whom were Black and Brown, including also white allies and accomplices, filled the grand space of the mall and truly brought it to life in ways that bronze, marble, and stone could not.

And we can't think about the mall without thinking about the waves of people who fill it.

In other projects that have come up, I am a book nerd.

I love making books, I love making projects.

Each of these is a profound web of collaborations with archivists, with grad students, with my parents, with my family, my husband.

My dog even gets a shout out in a few of these books.

But just thinking about how in those moments of when you find your way, it's really great to have a book.

But a book is really just a product of lots of conversations and relationships.

It's really special also to keep growing and learning.

I have to give a shout out, one of my favorite parts of being here at Michigan was of course learning at the institution, but also a big appreciation to Jennifer Guerra Short, who's a good friend of mine, and when she was at Michigan Radio, allowed me to be her intern for one semester.

It was my recovery plan for my qualifying exams, because in those academic ones, you read 300 books in a year, and you have to talk with lots of, what do they say, $5 words, $10 words.

And Jen's rule for me was you have to have one thought per sentence.

Like, no sneaking in your commas and your M dashes.

So I'm really thrilled, I'm doing my first narrative podcast about the most famous Philadelphian who's never lived, Rocky Balboa, who has a statue that has 12 million people who come each year from around the world to edit.

Very likely has more visitors than the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.

You can find this anywhere you get podcasts.

And I think what I've been trying to ask myself in this is a lot of the same questions about presence and absence.

How is a statue to a Hollywood folk hero, which people do come from around the world, a really central part of Philadelphia's iconography?

I can go anywhere in the world, say Philadelphia, and my cab driver in Germany or somewhere else in the country, is like, Rocky.

And what is missing in Philadelphia's landscape, in a city that is majority Black and has one full figure monument to a person of color on city land.

There are three Ben Franklins alone on the north side of city hall.

So these are the kind of questions that I try to ask in my projects, and I really think about that as a full arc and an ongoing arc of lifelong learning, especially channeled through here.

So I wanna return back.

It's a beautiful gift to be able to come back to a place that you have come through and try to see it both with a deep sense of rootedness, and also to try to see things new.

I study monuments for a living, and I will be very blunt with you that there are places where I've lived, where I've walked or traversed hundreds if not thousands of times, and I will walk by a monument or a piece of public art and be like, that was there the whole time?

There's a way in which for every monument that's under the spotlight, there's like a thousand if not more others that kind of languish in the background.

There have been many people who have said the best way to hide something is put it on a pedestal.

But I'm thinking a lot about if you go through the notion of, first of all, thinking of monument, we'll talk a little bit more about this, as not just a statue on high, but as, according to Monument Lab, a statement of power and presence in public, you start to see lots of ways that time is kept through public art and public history and public installation.

The Cube.

Anyone here ever spin this?

Yeah, it's very amazing that there's this, first of all, the balance here.

I like the hand up here in front.

The balance here.

But every time you go by it, the temptation to like, as you go to it, you're like, there's no way this is gonna move.

You get this interaction with this structure, but also there's probably, for everyone who raised their hand here, there's someone else who's like, wait, where's that?

What's that?

Also think about the fact that, and appreciating my colleague, Ozio Duma, who pointed this out, that for everything that this cube does or doesn't represent, thinking about what surrounds it, thinking about the stories of the not just administration buildings that had been up there, but profound occupations by students and staff and faculty, especially to fight for ethnic studies programs, and Black studies programs, and ongoing kind of challenges.

Because where you find power, you find monuments and monumental expressions.

On this campus, though, and thank you Chrisstina for bringing this up, you find rocks.

You find lots of rocks.

And there's lotsa different kinds of rocks.

I wanna get back to this, but I wanna go here and just talk about this rock.

This is right outside of Angel Hall.

(sigh) Okay.

This rock and the elm beside it were placed here in 1869 as a memorial by the class of that year.

So lemme just say straight up, there is really, I don't believe, any elm tree there right now.

There's a great listing by campus information about the class of 1869 memorial rock and elm tree.

What I wanna invite all of us to think about tonight is presence and absence.

And not just in the terms of like, yep, there's a rock here.

There was a tree; There's no longer a tree.

But if we use monuments, and again, think about monument in a broad sense, as ways to mark time, as ways to mark power and presence, what does it mean for an early class of the University of Michigan, on the land brokered through a quote unquote gift from and with the Anishinaabe people, to move land forms from one place to another, move elements of the natural landscape, including trees, from one place to another and place them down.

And then to see over time the campus change and grow with that.

You ask yourself, when you move rock, when you speak with rock, when you try to carry a story through things that are heavy, whether they are stone, rock, bronze, architecture, what is the meta message?

What does it say about people and place and time?

Speaking of rocks, here Alumni Memorial Hall, the home of UMMA, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, or at least one half of it.

There's a new extension as well, a new wing.

This is a building that we've been thinking a lot about.

We've been thinking with the team at UMMA and the arts initiative, thinking with our team at Monument Lab, including our project manager, Aubree Penney, who's here with me tonight.

Jaylen Green, one of our interns.

And in the next few weeks, you're gonna hear a big announcement from us about a really exciting collaboration.

So hint hint, be on the lookout for that.

But this is a building we're thinking about, and the way we're thinking about this is asking a question.

This is what we like to do in Monument Lab projects.

A question that does not have one answer, but it could have a multitude of answers.

And the question here is, how do we remember on this campus?

Want you to think about that.

We're gonna be asking it throughout the rest of this year and into next year.

And yes, sometimes we remember in bronze plaques and big rocks that have been schlepped from one place to another.

Sometimes we remember in custom, in song, in clothing, in gathering.

What does it mean to look at a building, a neoclassical building, that might remind you of other places on campus, but might also remind you of other buildings, especially from a kind of Greco Roman tradition.

They're meant to look like temples, grand buildings, to have a deep rooted history.

They're in relationship to those big stones that are brought around campus and adorned with plaques or paint by the night.

All of it is about how you find your way to make your presence known.

There's fascinating things to say about this building.

Now it's part of the Museum of Art.

It was originally built as Alumni Memorial Hall imagined in the years after the Civil War, and then eventually built, at least a generation later, honoring Michigan alums who fought in wars, including the Civil War, the Spanish American War.

Of course at that time as well, we've concurrently wars against native peoples across this region and land.

And we have a building now, though it's called Alumni Memorial Hall and inscribed on top, it's not its function now.

There is a plaque that you can find by the elevator.

When you think about this idea that how sites of memory change, how much effort and time went into building this and what its life is now.

So we wanna use it as a prompt to think about memory on this campus.

And here is a great image, thank you to my colleague Laura de Becker for finding this in the Bentley Historical Library, of the laying of a cornerstone of this building in 1908 before the dedication two years later.

From this image, we can deduce a number of things.

We can of course deduce fanfare and the fact a lot of people wore hats back in the day.

We also see the name of the contractor and of the quarry from which it was taken.

Because to build a grand building that looks like it's been there forever, or in perpetuity, requires quarrying.

It requires taking stone, in this case from a quarry in Ohio, to build a building that stands and is meant to stand the test of time.

I think when we think about the laying of a cornerstone, when we think about the dedication of a grand civic place, or perhaps campus place, we're always talking about groundbreaking and change.

We're talking about the making of new places and displacement.

This image also reminds us that the building up of this country, of this campus, of almost any place I have set my foot, is also a story about extraction.

I think one of the goals of our project over the next year is to think about this image, but what precedes it, what's come after it, what will come after that, and also what could we not recover?

What's not at the Bentley?

What's not at the Labadie?

What's not available to us on Google Books that has been scanned from the library?

And hopefully all the books are back there now.

What's missing?

And how do we think about art, and how do we think about the work of our conversations together that are intergenerational, intersectional as a way to maybe we'll never fill that gap, but we'll be able to acknowledge what is there, who is there, and also who is not and what is not.

Think back to, again, these lessons here, and appreciating people like, I said Sara Blair, Kristin Haas, Michael Awkward, Penny Von Eschen, Tiya Miles, Larry La Fountain-Stokes, people like Grace Sanders Johnson, Tiana Harden, Matthew Blanton, Anna Mackenzie, Katie Leonard.

I like to name names, 'cause you bring their energy in here.

Another name is Toni Morrison, the late Nobel laureate.

Her text, "The Site of Memory," is something I read early on in my graduate years, and I teach it every time I teach a class.

She talks about her methods.

She says it's kind of a literary archeology on the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork.

You journey to a site and see what remains were left behind to construct the world that these remains imply.

All of that past, present, and future perspective brings me to the work of Monument Lab, which started in a classroom, officially.

I was finishing up my dissertation, I returned back to Philadelphia where I grew up, and taught a class in my home undergrad department at Penn called Memory Monuments in Urban Space.

I was thinking a lot about pieces of the Berlin Wall.

I was thinking about all those pieces of the Berlin Wall that ended up in US public spaces and what was missing.

If for the past 25 plus years we'd been putting pieces of the Berlin Wall around the country, what weren't we building?

I met Ken Lum, who was new to Philadelphia, but kind of a kindred spirit.

And we were teaching classes about monuments.

We quickly kind of grew to this idea of pushing outside of our classrooms and creating a project in Philadelphia City Hall in 2015, a citywide exhibition in 2017, working with artists to build prototype monuments in public spaces.

I mean truly, every monument is a prototype in some sense, is always becoming and shifting and changing.

But we wanted to work with artists who were interested in balancing presence and absence.

Like this piece, a collaboration with the artist Tanya Bruguera, outside of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Monument to New Immigrants.

Part of this work was, though, to continue the work of learning.

We found that we wanted to do something that was pedagogical, discursive, and to not use those words in public, because they can be used like blunt instruments.

But to really think about how we would deconstruct the ideas that we had, again, in that notion of relational knowledge.

Not to water it down, but to actually make a lot of room for what people are bringing to the table.

We talked to people who would ask us the number one question, what's this?

They'd see a learning lab staffed by our students, a public historian, a social worker.

They might see a prototype monument.

And when you explain to them, all right, we're Monument Lab, we're doing kind of this work of public humanities, public scholarship, but we're more like feral academics.

We like one foot in, but we really like to go outside.

And people would say, okay, all right.

I have an idea for a monument.

No one's asked me; Can I tell it to you?

Or someone would say, ah, I get what you're doing, cool.

I don't want another typical monument, but lemme tell you what's happening in my neighborhood, in my block.

And so the word monument, this is 2015, 2017, it was a way to talk about the past, present, and future together.

And we know that the word monument has had profound colonial implications.

It's been used as a blunt instrument.

But we kept hearing from at least a generation of artists and activists who, when they didn't have the time, the money, or the official power, they had power nonetheless, they built their own monuments or they gathered around monuments that exist.

And that was the way they amplified their presence.

And so the premise of Monument Lab, in addition to building art and building prototype monuments, is to learn in public.

Theorize public space while in public space.

We have a bunch of data wonks, archive people.

I love the the acronym GLAM: Galleries, libraries, archives, museums.

It's like one of the best kept acronyms out there.

But a lot of the work that we try to do, no matter how it ends up in a data stream, we wanna lower the bar for entry.

Keep your threshold for integrity high and your barrier for access low.

So, we love a good clipboard, love a good Sharpie, love a good piece of paper that we can do the work of gathering and counting, and think about different forms of knowledge and how they are gathered.

And then finally, we're clearly in a monument moment.

Where we're reckoning and re-imagining.

And of course while there's certainly a kind of critical wave now, this has been brewing for many years.

This is a really profound piece we collaborated with the artist Hank Willis Thomas on in Philadelphia.

But I wanna be really clear that this moment of so-called controversy, controversy's a word I always pause at and say like, controversy to who?

The debate about monuments is as old as this country itself, if not older.

The first monument take down in this country, 1776, July, Bowling Green, the statue of George III was toppled, taken down, and partially melted into Revolutionary War bullets.

So, we have always had a kind of question about what are our symbols and our systems of democracy.

And monuments are not separate from that.

They are profoundly connected.

And again, if you have the time and the money and the official power, you have built something that's important to you if it reinforces your place.

But if you don't have that time and the money and the official power, you build your own or you gather around, and that's how you make your presence felt.

I am someone who, when I travel, I look for changes in the monument landscape.

And one of the best ways to do it in this moment now is the empty pedestals where monuments to the lost cause of confederacy, to colonial violence, sometimes to state violence, have been toppled.

And there's no doubt that these are powerful emblems of our time.

I am really interested in documenting them in this moment, because in some places, they've been bulldozed; In other places, they've been salvaged.

There is so much potential with these symbols and sites, we haven't needed official decree or official processes to fill them.

So while I'm drawn to them, and I know they're iconic of this moment, something in our work at Monument Lab has been incredibly eye opening.

And in part by doing this audit with co-directors Sue Mobley and Laurie Allen and the Mellon Foundation, which is that, in this moment of monument change that is profound, that is impacting communities across this country and well beyond, we found in our audit, which I'll tell you more about in a moment, that 99.4% of monuments were not toppled in the last two years.

I give talks across the country.

Do you know what percentage of questions I get about toppled monuments and empty pedestals?

99%, well no, not actually, but it's around that, right?

Because that's the fixation.

I wanna highlight that question of presence and absence, that it is profound to look at the way a single monument that's removed from a courthouse, from a town square is a profound gesture, whether it is toppled or removed from municipal decree, but what do we do with the other monuments we have inherited?

And actually, what have we inherited?

The goal of the National Monument Audit was to take a snapshot of the monument landscape, and to really kind of find a way to do something that felt really impossible.

It is impossible to count every single thing that could or could not be a monument in this country.

Just think about the introductions tonight.

We were debating what a monument is or isn't.

There is no one definition of a monument.

To some, monuments are statues and plaques in bronze or marble.

They are, for others, historical sites, archeological sites, ecological formations.

Have you ever heard the term unintentional monument to a closed factory or school?

And what about monumental statements?

Protest, poetry, music, sound.

So what we tried to do was figure out how to bring a level of research and creativity, rigor and reach to the work of the audit.

This was a project that was really one of the hardest that we have ever done.

It ended up being 40 pages.

But speaking of impact, it was just fascinating when it went out into the world of seeing how it was interpreted.

What kind of questions we got, what were the headlines.

And I think our goal was to change the conversation.

In academic spaces, sure, but people every day, wherever they are, making knowledge and thinking about monuments, or not thinking about monuments, but nonetheless living in their presence and their shadow.

And this was part of that dialogue, the reverberating of learning.

So, I know that it's tempting to kind of see a map like this and ask yourself, aha, okay, so I know he said it's not all the monuments, but this must be most of the monuments, right?

And you may be thinking something that's a common misconception, and it's not just you, me too, which is that there must, look at all these dots, there must be an agency out there that's in charge of all of our monuments.

That they've counted them, they know when they've been dedicated, who they were built to, who they honor, when they've changed.

And then we could go to that agency and say, we'd like to remove this monument, or we'd like to understand this.

Like Google books and the library here, that there must be like a Google Monuments, right?

I'm gonna tell you the opposite is the case.

Have you ever reached into a drawer to get your one cord that you know you need, and you end up pulling out every cord you've ever owned?

Yeah, so like, try this with monuments.

Monuments are a hodgepodge of symbols that have been inherited and stewarded, or at least found by federal, state, local, tribal, institutional, and unknown sources.

The things that we often call monuments or have gotten protection by historical preservation offices and the kind of resources of institutions, they've been tracked by local, state, and federal stewards.

And so what our team did was say, let's audit all the data on monuments that we can find.

We scoured a half a million records.

None of them were for monuments, because there was no audit of monuments before.

There were things that included public sculpture, like the Smithsonian Save Outdoor Sculpture.

There was state historic property.

There were publicly sourced databases.

We worked with the data artist Brian Foo and our team of 30 people across the country in a year to make a single study set of nearly 50,000, 48,178 to be precise.

That would include conventional monuments from every US state, every US territory, numerous tribal communities.

With the idea of how can we get a big enough study set so we can see how the monument landscape has been shaped, not in one off place here, there, but across the country and across generations.

Just to give you a sense, I talked about that process like it took a big crew.

And just to give you a little bit of a kind of quick view, if you are a methodology person, you can go to our website, MonumentLab.com.

You can download a free copy.

You can also order a print copy if you're tactile.

So the first thing we did was to explore.

We had to see what data was out there.

We built a team of 30 people who never got to sit in the same room, 'cause this was 2020 to 2021.

We're waiting for our after party.

We then gathered.

The goal was to make different data sets speak to each other.

Because if you have sources from all over, how can you get them to speak to each other?

They don't always have the same fields.

But we wanted to be something categorical.

We worked with the Harvard Cyber Law Clinic to be able to figure out what data we were allowed to use, 'cause it had to be publicly accessible.

There's definitely audits in the future that will look different because they have access to different records.

But what we did was find the 42 strongest, most authoritative, and publicly accessible.

We then connected them.

We did work of de-duplicating, of looking for moments where there were data sets that could speak to each other.

And we also utilized that to kind of then start a process of analysis, asking questions of this data set.

We gathered a list of the top 50 individuals who have monuments in the United States to get a sense of demographics.

And then we worked with high school teachers, scholars at the university level, municipal art offices, and the Mellon Foundation to start asking questions before it went public.

And in September of 2021, this went public.

And you can still search the database, and also read essays from people whose monuments may not be represented on here but are part of the monument landscape.

I'm gonna review with you four of the findings.

And as I do this, I'm gonna do a deep dive into just a few as we go forward, but I want you to ask yourself how this compares to what you already know.

What your experience of the monument landscape is.

So our key findings, one, monuments have always changed.

Two, the monument landscape is overwhelmingly white and male.

Three, the most common feature of American monuments is war and conquest.

And then four, the story of the United States as told by our current monument landscape misrepresents our history.

I'm gonna deep dive into two of the points to just talk a bit about what we share in the audit.

The monument landscape is overwhelmingly white and male.

You all already knew that.

You did not need an audit to tell you that.

But this is the top 50 list.

You can read them on our site.

It includes people with monuments who have no known portraits or likenesses that are affirmed in their lifetime.

And when we look at this list, you see patterns across them.

So one is that there are 12 US presidents in the top 50.

There are 13 US generals.

If someone was a Confederate general and not a US general, we did not count them.

Confederate generals were not fighting for the US, fighting to dismantle it.

76% were land owners.

40% were born into wealth.

Of the top 50 list, half of the people on it owned other people.

And 44 out of the 50 would be considered, by our standards today, white men.

There are three women on the top 50 list.

Number one ranked, Joan of Arc.

Across America, Joan of Arc.

The other two in the top 50, Harriet Tubman and Sacagawea.

There are no US born Latinx, Asian Pacific Islander, or self-identified LGBTQ+ people in the top 50.

There are more confederates than Black Americans in the top 50.

We are talking about a monument landscape that's been made across generations, that has repeated itself.

And you think about the way monuments work; It's not just that a statue is up or a plaque next to it, it's often the boulevard, the high school, the scholarship.

That corresponds to how not just we learn about the past, but how the past is informing policy and practice today.

So part of our goal in this audit, in each of our key findings, we offered a call to action, was to support a profound shift to better acknowledge the complexity and multiplicity of this country's history.

Anywhere you are, when someone says there's a single story to a place, don't trust it.

There's always more to that.

There's a lot about the audit that, you know, we were learning along the way.

I have to say, the points from our team that came up here continue to blow me away.

So, in this study set of Civil War monuments, 1% mention slavery.

So when I say mention slavery, I mean the word slavery is in the title of the monument, the plaque, or in the metadata.

Like someone keeping records wrote something about it.

The Civil War was fought over slavery, full stop.

We're not talking about necessarily monuments that are really speaking out the stories of self emancipated Black folks who fought for their freedom.

Not about the legacy of slavery and how it's compounded over time.

We're just talking about the word.

3% of monuments with the word confederate also have the word defeat.

I've seen the word patriot, statesmen, but the word defeat?

Hard to find it.

One of the most eye opening kind of clusters of knowledge out of the audit that we found is that when you see the word pioneer in monuments, that 15% of pioneer monuments mention Native American, Indigenous, or Indian.

That is not including pejorative terms.

We know that over half of pioneer monuments went in after 1930, which is after the period of armed dispossession, and theft, and broken treaties of native lands.

And right around the time that the notion of the Hollywood Wild West and frontier is being codified and put into our mindsets and our childhood games.

It can be profound, surely, when we build a new monument or we dismantle one that's been toxic and harmful.

But if we don't respond to the erasures, lies, incomplete stories, we're truly missing out.

So our call here is engaging in a holistic reckoning with monumental erasures and lies, and move toward a monument landscape that acknowledges a fuller history of this country.

You often will hear this note like, well, we can't remove a monument because it will remove our history.

I wanna ask you the last time you tried to figure out a history that you went to a monument to go find your way through.

What'd you do?

You went to the library, whether or not the books were on the shelves.

You Googled, you asked a friend, a loved one, a teacher, a classmate.

It's not to say that the monument is not part of it, but there are lots of places where the history lives.

I want you to ask yourself, if you're gonna ask yourself that question of like, well, what about our history?

I want you to ask yourself that about neighborhoods that have been erased in our cities, about freeways that have displaced residents, about broken treaties.

If we're talking about history, history does not just live like facts on a pedestal.

You know where history lives?

With us, between us.

And yes, it can live in stone and marble and mighty buildings and archives.

We also know that loss is part of the story.

Grief is part of the story.

So how we find ways to carry through together to bridge past, present, and future is profound.

Out of this audit, our team came up with a vision statement that we have on the wall of our office: Monuments must change.

We first had monuments change, and then someone looked at us and they were like, you know that phrase, stuff happens?

Sounds like it just happens on its own.

I'm doing a little edit there; You can do the rest in your mind.

This work is heavy, this work is intense, this work is timely and long overdue.

And still at the root of it, it's joyful.

Do you know how freeing it is that you can let go of the thing that you've been holding on?

No, we can't tell the story.

We can't do it.

It's freeing not just to individuals and communities, but in that act of building coalition, when you have room and growth for stories that live across.

One of the outcomes of the work of the audit, and I'll be closing in a few moments, is this work of a project called Re:Generation.

Talk about the monuments that existed in the audit, that we've inherited.

What about the monuments that are emerging?

And if you ask yourself like, all right, well, what are the monuments that are possible?

We've learned from a group of 10 teams curated through an open call of over 200 applications of teams across this country doing work rooted in their city, town, watershed, or region.

Re:Generation.

And the project's first cycle is just closing now.

And the teams have been doing remarkable work.

Here are two examples recently covered in the press.

The More Up campus in Montgomery, Alabama; Land Under The Plinth in LA.

These are two of the eight teams of collectives of people who are building new monuments, re-imagining monuments, reclaiming land, thinking about, from different perspectives, what does it mean to ask this question of whose stories belong in public, and to imagine ways on and off the pedestal for that to be possible.

This is a group of people that we think of as like our dream delegation.

Sometimes it feels like, like I said, there's no agency in charge of monuments, that we're kind of like ad hoc global ambassadors.

We had visitors from Germany this week, people from around the world and around the country.

But these are the folks we want you to think about.

People like Michelle Browder from Montgomery, Alabama, who, in her moment of sharing her work with the National Park Service, and the Trust of the National Mall, and other federal and local agencies, when we went to the Lincoln Memorial, held up a penny to scale that monument to size.

Or the work of three team leaders representing three indigenous collectives from LA, from the area now we call Four Corners, which is Dinata and Rapid City looking outward.

But this last part really pushed me.

I mentioned one of my first book projects was about the March on Washington.

You can't think about the National Mall and the Lincoln Memorial without Marian Anderson in 1939, and Dr. King, and then the throngs of people who joined them.

We got to go under the Lincoln Memorial.

It was profound.

You have to climb down, and there's a dirt bottom.

And I asked the park ranger, now I think kinda foolishly, 'cause if you know anything about the land, I'm like, did they put the sand down here a hundred years ago?

He said, "No, that's what the Potomac riverbank used to be."

'Cause to make our hallowed places of remembrance, including this classical temple, which is both a sacred place for American democracy and the place that we go to push for full democracy, and lasting democracy, and reinvest in our democracy.

Underneath it is space that used to be the river.

Used to be marsh.

There are stalactites and stalagmites forming down here, which says that in this major structure, that little bits of moisture get through.

Little bits.

And so we're going, and you can see one forming.

And we say, what's right above us that would make this drip?

Well right here, this is directly below the place where Marian Anderson sung in 1939 and where Dr. Martin Luther King spoke in 1963 for the I have a dream speech.

Inscribed into the marble are words honoring Dr. King.

If you ever go there on a day that had rained, you always see a little puddle.

And I always wondered why.

And now I understand.

People go to that site.

They stand, they look, they hold space.

And because of their weight, that monumental place has changed.

Slowly but surely, water is getting through.

We have the power to change monuments.

We have the power to build monuments, we have the power to learn from those that exist.

How we move through the world, how we move with our time, how we think about the past, present, and future together, and who is with us.

Which coalitions we're building, what relationships we're doing, and how we're learning, and the process defines us.

Think about this moment in the midst of the monuments we've inherited, the monuments that we have yet to imagine, and the ones that are emerging now.

And thinking about that statement at its core.

Monuments must change, monuments do change, and we are the ones to bring forward the next generation.

Thank you.

(audience applauds) So I know we got some people shuffling now.

We do have time for Q&A.

There are microphones up front.

If you're gonna leave, please do so a little bit quietly so people can ask their questions.

(background chatter) - Thank you.

- Thank you.

Hi, do you have a question?

- Yes, I have a question, but I need to precede it with the setting.

- [Paul] Okay.

- There is a monument of a traditional type, a bronze figure in Ann Arbor, that is very controversial.

- Can you gimme a mic?

Hang on folks, hang on with your question.

Folks that are exiting, please, please save your conversation 'til you're out the doors.

We actually have people up here trying to have a Q&A, and they're using microphones, and I can't hear them.

Thank you.

Please go ahead, sir.

- Should I repeat what I said?

- Yes, please.

- There is a controversy over a monument here in Ann Arbor.

I need to say a few words of background to clarify it.

The monument is to an iconic football coach which is important in Ann Arbor, to Bo Schembechler.

There's an analog which occurred at Penn State University about 20 years ago with Joe Paterno, who knew about but didn't call the whistle on a coach who was raping young boys in the shower.

They tore that nine foot tall, or removed it, from Penn State shortly thereafter.

A controversy arose here about Bo Schembechler, also a case of sexual malfeasance, which came to light about the time you were a student, but it didn't really come to a head here until about five years ago, when it was shown that Bo Schembechler, the iconic Michigan football coach, knew about but failed to report or stop the sexual molestation of some 800 young Michigan men, mainly athletes.

That case was resolved about six months ago through an extensive court finding that those 800 were awarded just under half a billion dollars for what they've suffered.

Unlike the Penn State case, there is a tall statue monument on campus in front of the athletic offices.

And the athletic building which it fronts is also called the Bo Schembechler Building.

There have been voices on both sides arguing for the removal and arguing for the preservation.

It has not yet been resolved, but I wonder what you think about that, and how does the community go about resolving this question?

- Yeah, thank you for your very thoughtful question in a clearly incredibly painful, longstanding story.

I will not have a quick fix to anything, but I will say that the process of truth and reconciliation, and especially of understanding the perspective of those who have been victimized and abused is incredibly important and a rare moment in our history.

All of the time that harms that have been perpetuated and the silences around them because someone was in the spotlight, I think the fact that before or alongside we get to what a statue is or what the name on the building is to actually listen to survivors and honor their stories.

I think this is one of the very difficult parts about naming and highlighting individuals, because no one is perfect, and yet there are responsibilities that come with leadership.

What we often will ask people is like, in this kinda situation, one, as I said, how is this connected to other forms of, let's say not just truth and reconciliation, but in this case, financial reparation.

But also for the university, the question is how does a university want to showcase leadership and be remembered?

This would be true of any place with a divisive statue, so to speak.

It probably was already divisive before it was called (chuckle) divisive, but in this case, this is not just actively being transacted, but it's really, for me, a question of university leadership to respond to those who have been pointing out this profound abuse of power and silence.

There is not going to be a moment, I think, that both sides, so to speak, come together, 'cause I don't know if there's just two sides.

There are people who probably don't care about the statue or the building, and others who say that is the most immediate and tangible way I can respond.

So what I would just say is to utilize this moment to really think about what are not just the values that were tarnished, but also what do you want to be known for now, and where do you put your energy?

And for anyone here, there's a lotta places to put your energy, but to understand where is the energy other people are putting to understand what different approaches there are.

There's a lot more to say, but I wanna just pause.

- Thank you.

I might add the interesting comment that the statue was sculpted by a U of M student who lives now and works in Grand Rapids.

And when confronted with this question, he said he could not give advice as to whether it should be removed or not.

Thank you.

- Thank you.

We'll switch sides each time.

Yes, hello.

- What's the difference between a monument and a memorial?

- Great question.

So, there are typical and kind of studied approaches that distinguish between the two, often around the idea of an intended memorial as a site of grief and loss, that may or may not be relegated to a cemetery, very well could be in a town square, maybe one that names names of those who are fallen.

And that a monument is meant to be something that is proclaiming virtue, value, moving into the future.

And what I would say is that in classrooms that I've taught in or been a part of, it's really interesting to look at how people define those terms.

From my perspective, just in how we encounter sites, which is often from 100 feet away or 500 feet away, I'm very interested in how monument and memorial blur.

Because there are places where something is called a monument but it is profoundly about grief, it's just not put in big letters.

Or memorials that are often about grief and loss, but are really aiming to bring forward something of virtue or lesson moving forward.

So this may not be the answer you're looking for, but what I'm trying to think about is, I would say this probably comes as no surprise, but I find that this country is, we're bursting at the seams with grief.

With loss from COVID, loss from conflict.

We're figuring out how to rethink commemoration.

So to me, the way that monument and memorial blur and entangle, there's something there to really find a path forward, which is not hiding from grief, not pushing it away, but really understanding how memorial is braided together into any civic program, the memorial impulse.

And that maybe our distinctions between monuments and memorials can lead us to other pathways on and off the pedestal.

Thank you.

Hello.

- Hi, my name is Simran Bri.

I am actually one of the stewards for Geo for STAMPS, so thanks for the (chuckle) shout out.

I know you're not gonna have a cut and dry answer to this question because it's a big question, but more just your thoughts.

So the findings of the Monument Lab study sort of outlined this structural problem in the history of monuments.

How do we think about enacting the calls to action when a lot of the underlying structures of racism, white supremacy, and colonialism still exist and are very much a part of the ways in which new monuments are created?

And not even thinking about monuments, but just sort of public art more broadly.

You see this a lot in mural festivals, where gentrification and developers are hand in hand with the production of public art.

And I could go on and on, but that's sort of my (laugh) general question.

- Yeah, I really appreciate your question, and clearly we got a lot to talk about one day.

I wanna appreciate it and kind of bring up something that I've encountered both as sometimes like a worry or precaution, and in other ways kind of a breakthrough, which is, look, our time is finite, our resources are finite.

What do we spend our time on?

Do we take on our symbols?

Do we take on our systems?

What I would say is you don't have to choose between, but they are so fundamentally connected.

And yes, there is work that you can do in any number of systems of representation, democracy of repression, that are profoundly worth it.

I'm most interested in the coalitions.

We often say that it's far easier to protest a statue than a statute.

Which is to say that the way that legal code is written and systematic structures, including those of state violence, and systemic racism, and systemic sexism, and classism, they're really built, even if they're social constructions, brick by brick.

It's really hard to take them on.

So if you're trying to call attention to what you do, you go to the place where they're located.

A monument doesn't just have to be something you look up to; It can actually quite literally be a platform for you.

If it's not a monument, I just think about, like, every time I'm here, something's going on in a Diag.

And that's not because it's a raised pedestal; It's kinda the people's pedestal of this place.

And yes, last time I was here, I did see a silent dance party.

Yes, I know that there's pounds of chalk that are used for acapella stuff.

But you know what?

I've also seen some of the most amazing protests happen in that space, that people use their selves and their coalitions.

So, I think the kind of thing that I really appreciate about your question, and I don't know if this is you were getting at, but one thing I take away is asking questions of power when we're talking about art.

And again, I'm here for art that is beautiful and meaningful, and I also wanna know how art helps us understand and deconstruct power.

So there is no such thing as clean money.

And the Mural Festival, brought to you by a developer, I'm just curious what the developer's track record is in the community with particular individuals and constituencies.

I wanna know not just what the statement on the website is gonna be of a culture organization, but what's hard for them?

What are they challenging themselves to?

None of us can be perfect.

I think it's too high of a bar.

But just asking the question.

This goes to that idea of like, there's no single story to a place.

I know that there are people out there that no matter what work we do, and what we explain ourselves and read our work, putting the word lab next to monument is like putting a question mark, and that's too much.

Don't do it.

You know?

(laugh) And I'm appreciating the question.

You can ask about power and ask about beauty.

You can appreciate change happening and also look to rectify and learn from.

And I think something we can always, like, if we are gonna be a country that labors to learn from our past and seek to be better, then we do have to ask these questions.

So, appreciate you for that.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

Hello.

- Hi.

- [Paul] Hi.

- I didn't really have a question.

I really wanted to come up here to say I think this is really amazing work.

Because when you have monuments and such, it doesn't feel like change can come.

They feel like a permanent thing, like Sharpie on a wall.

And so, I think it's inspiring to see a question mark being put to it, as you mentioned.

But I do wonder what some of the pushback is when you're trying to change these monuments.

I'm imagining it's from institutions or laws, but I wonder what are the secret hidden push back elements.

- First of all, I wanna thank you for coming up here and for your thoughts.

Appreciate it.

And also, no matter how excited and amped up, to make room for the like, yeah but what are the challenges, what are the learnings?

And I think depending on where you are in the country and where you're working, it's different.

Even just I'll say in the work of Monument Lab, I'm really grateful that we're now 10 years into our work, and we have a great team, we have the ability to pay our folks, whether they're students or workers.

But for most of the time we worked, we were like, there was no monument, there was no lab.

And we were always punching above our weight.

It was actually very useful to not be, what's the word, like fully legible.

It was kind of like the void left in the lack of monument leadership, we could just step in and say what we wanted to say.

But now when we work with the National Park Service or the University of Michigan, we have a different set of responsibilities.

I think of people who work in different parts of the country, sometimes depending on gun laws and the presence of very particular forms of militias and state violence who are also guarding monuments in certain cases.

Our colleagues in New Orleans have faced different things than our colleagues in New York City.

Increasingly, that's not a difference.

But I do think that it's important to honor, like, what is the particularity?

Of course there are folks who, again, the question mark is already too much.

I have found over time, I'm interested in the people who want to change, have either a little bit of agency or a lot of agency, and they struggle with how.

And it's not because they're necessarily bad people.

It's like the systems around them have a hard time adjusting.

For example, historic preservation.

I have a lot of friends in the field of historic preservation.

They're a field that is about like, the first thing you do if a monument is vandalized so to speak, or adorned, is to go scrub it off.

And sometimes that's appropriate, and sometimes it's more important to let that message be there.

So it's been really great to talk to conservationists, preservationists who are like, mm, you know what, I'm gonna have to figure out when I speak up.

So I think a lot of the challenges are like, of course to keep yourself to a high standard and work with a team of people to hold coalition so that people's different perspectives, especially those determined by region, race, age, class, tribal affiliation, you name it, that there is room for differences to be respected and there's coalition built.

And I think one of the biggest lessons I've gotten over the last 10 years since I was a student here is the work of change is fast and slow, it's big and small.

So every day, what's something that you can do, whether it's big or small, how do you care for yourself and care for the people around you to have the longevity?

'Cause we don't need burnout.

And what to do in this situation where, again, it's like the people wanna change.

They say it.

But how do you do it?

I haven't figured out all the answers to that, but trying to learn, and conversations like this power up, so much appreciation.

- Thank you, that's really interesting.

Thanks.

- Thank you.

I feel like I'm pacing back and forth here, but that's okay.

- Hi, thank you so much for coming.

I really enjoyed your talk.

- Thank you.

- And one of the things that you said, you said that a lot of things have been erased, like neighborhoods have been erased and the government built highways through Black neighborhoods, like in Detroit.

And I just wanted to say that it really touched me, 'cause my family actually in Tennessee, our land got taken away from us.

And it just made me think of my grandma's family and stuff.

So I realized how important this topic is.

And I have another question about Charlottesville.

So, why do you think that people cling so much to these monuments when they clearly stand for evil?

I'm pretty sure in Germany, they don't have any monuments or memorials to Hitler at all.

- And it's illegal.

- Yeah, so I just wanna know, first of all, why do you think that people cling to this so much?

Because you can love America and have southern pride without celebrating these people who are evil in society.

And why do you think that, they're so afraid of that being erased, but at the same time, there've been Indigenous peoples who, there's no trace of their civilization at all.

And especially on campus in Ann Arbor, they do the land acknowledgement, which I think is a good thing, but I haven't seen any memorial to them.

And I just wanna know why do you think that there's a double standard, and why do you think it's hard for people to understand that this history was bad, and they wanna preserve that history, but they also don't care to see the history that was here before we got here.

- First of all, I wanna thank you also for your comment, and it makes me put my hand to my heart.

And I've been thinking a lot about that, and just appreciating how sadly common the story is of displacement, and what our monument debate tells us or does not tell us about that fact.

Charlottesville, oo, okay.

So a few things, I just finished a book, reading a book that I highly recommend, called "My Monticello."

And it's a work of fiction, but it's dystopian too, so like, I know some folks here love their dystopian, other people are like, I can't take it right now.

Get past the election; Okay, we're past this, now I'll go back to it.

And it's a story about a mixed race group of folks, mostly Black folks, who are targeted at kind of like a dystopian, not so far off future in America and in Charlottesville.

Escape Charlottesville, and where do they hide out?

In Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home plantation, where 700 individuals were enslaved.

I'm saying that for a few reasons.

One is, I think that the story, that there's two sides.

There's a right and a left.

There's not.

There are so many different kind of factions.

And I think again, for me, the spirit of coalition is really important, because, yeah, you have to find the people who're on your team, who you get down with, but also what are the moments that you learn how to struggle together, and be together, and work across differences?

And maybe that shifts over time, but you get that, right?

So I wanna be really clear about that.

One segment I'm thinking about that you're bringing up, and you say the word evil, yeah.

If you fought to destroy this country, I do not believe you should be celebrated in public space, especially in public spaces like schools, courthouses, town squares.

I mean, there's a lot to say about the lost cause.

A few things come to mind as like, it's not some distant past.

Of course the majority of lost cause memorials were put in the 1920s, and then again in a sweep of 1960s that coincided with Black freedom struggles.

But we've had lost cause monuments put in this millennium.

During the Obama administration, a lost cause confederate memorial went up.

$40 million over the course of a decade, according to the Smithsonian Magazine, went to the upkeep of confederate sites.

I think that's a deep haunt and harm in our culture that's really perpetuated as, of course in one hand, about coping with grief, but also a failure of reconstruction, and the abandonment too quickly of reconstruction.

One of the things we found in our audit was, again, a high disproportionate nature of Civil War monuments as opposed to a seeming and large scale dearth of reconstruction sites.

It doesn't mean that there aren't any, it just means that they're very few and far between.

So that's a deep systematic thing that's not just put into our town squares, but into our court systems, into our legislatures, into holidays.

There's still places where Memorial Day can refer to Lee and Jackson Day.

And I think it's really important to respond to it as an ongoing harm.

I do think people are hungry to see themselves in public.

I think increasingly, it feels like there's a zero sum game, that there's only so much room.

And I would like to see more ways that we can build reconciliation but not try to brush the history under the rug.

I go back to Monticello for a reason.

And that is like, here is a place where the very democracy that I'm talking about that we're celebrating is in part imagined, and slavery is practiced.

In my hometown of Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, Thomas Jefferson and an enslaved valet, Robert Hemming, spent the summer in Philadelphia.

And in the course of writing the Declaration of Independence, a clause critiquing England for the practice of slavery was struck from the declaration.

Until we have capacity to understand the paradoxes of this place, we'll be doomed to repeat those.

So we can have capacity for understanding people's loss, more capacity for grief, more resources.

And we gotta call it what it is.

So your questions and your stories go to that.

I'm gonna stop talking because I appreciate it, but just thank you for that.

- Thank you so much.

- You have three minutes.

- Great.

All right, let's hear three questions and then wrap it up.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, come on, I wanna hear from everybody, thank you.

Rapid round.

- Hi, I'm from DC and grew up among these monuments that always felt very permanent feeling to me, growing up.

And I've noticed coming here that people seem to define DC as those monuments, which obviously don't represent the identity of the city or the diversity of its residents.

What would you say are some ways that we can become directly involved in the transformation and expansion of the monument landscape in our communities, and how can we sort of share that knowledge and understanding in our new communities?

- I love that.

I'm gonna answer it in a moment, but I'm gonna hear from this question, that question, and I'm gonna wrap it up so we can go home.

- My question's more a comment.

Your talk made me think about a couple of things, again, on campus here at the University of Michigan.

And maybe one of them may have even happened while you were a student here, I'm not sure.

But there was a sort of a renovation done to the Michigan football stadium, and I think Philadelphia Architects Venturi, Scott Brown were part of it.

And they put these little footballs and football helmets, and other almost like little icon things around the football stadium.

And people freaked out.

(Paul laughs) They thought it was too cartoony.

I mean, change happened super fast there.

(Paul laughs) And the other thing I was just thinking about was Jesse Owens, the great track star, there's a tiny plaque for him at Ferry Field where he set four world records in one day.

And the university has plans to raze Ferry Field and put in a parking lot.

So I just find that- - Thank you for those, wow.

- [Woman] Yeah, that was comment, not a question.

- But now I gotta put 'em back here.

Thank you.

- Hi, my question was about like what about taking out memorials like Silent Sam, that their meaning changed obviously.

He was representative of the students that left for the Confederate, for the Civil War.

But he's meaning change throughout time, 'cause he became important to the students on UNC's campus.

- Yeah okay, I will not do justice to these three questions, but I'm gonna answer in rapid fashion.

There are lots of different student takes on Silent Sam.

One of the ways, one that I would recommend is Take 'Em Down Chapel Hill and take a look at the kind of student organizing.

They also were Monument Lab fellows.

And take a look at the responses around the country that kind of cascaded out of the Silent Sam episode.

And especially the question of what to do with the monument that's come down, and how to learn from it.

I am not giving your question full shrift.

We talk after.

Appreciate the comments over here, those two examples.

Sport is life here.

I get it.

And sport is also where history and culture live, so I appreciate that.

And the last point, I love that idea to question, like, how do you impact the iconography, the symbolic nature of a place?

Right around the same time that we're working here at the university, we're doing a project on the National Mall as well, and hopefully we get to have some learning and dialogue across it.

Building prototype monuments with artists between these grand spaces, in a way to call up the history that's already been there.

Again, I go back to a comment I made that's like, the iconography, the symbolism, the stature of a place is made and remade over time.

And in a way, it's really hard to (chuckle) intervene.

But this is where I give just more love and more appreciation and gratitude to artists.

Artists with very few resources make big impact.

Artists work together and in place and across place.

And I think you think about how artists balance presence and absence, and build layers and chapters to stories, you can see that narrative shift and change.

Thank you, everybody.

(audience applauds)