Making History in Public Space

Our nation’s broader monument landscape continues to evolve, as artists, educators, and activists critically engage our inherited symbols in order to unearth the next generation of monuments. Although our study set of nearly 50,000 monuments comprised conventional monuments that were sanctioned and recorded by institutions, organizations, and governmental agencies, people across diverse communities and regions have different ideas about what monuments could and should be. Our nation’s monument data has not yet caught up with the transformation of the monument landscape, especially as more locally led artist and grassroots coalitions confront toxic legacies and open up new processes for representing a fuller history in public spaces.

We can move forward by embracing the idea that monuments must change. It is not enough to attempt to “complete” the monument landscape without responding to long-standing distortions in that landscape and the histories they uphold. We can envision a landscape that reflects a plurality of stories and histories, where monuments serve as waystations along a bending arc of justice. Monuments can be reimagined as places where we encounter the past, present, and future together.

WE CAN REPAIR AND REIMAGINE HOW HISTORY LIVES WITH US EVERYDAY.

We also can encourage our monument makers and stewards to work with communities to contend with the sites and symbols they have inherited in meaningful and intentional ways; work with municipalities and crowd-sourced platforms to add thoughtful layers of interpretation and map emergent sites of memory; simultaneously push and advocate with local public art and history offices for greater forms of support; and work with artists to envision monuments that move beyond “permanence” and “timelessness” to meet the demands and aspirations of our time.

Through new forms of monumental affirmation, creativity, and resistance, we can repair and reimagine how history lives with us every day.