From July 18-19 2024, the Monument Lab Summit in Philadelphia will bring together thought leaders influencing and innovating the monument landscape through groundbreaking forms of commemoration, acknowledgment, justice, and belonging around the theme of “Past is Presence.” Monument Lab will gather the monument changemaking community to elevate the power of coalitional public memory and art. At the Summit, we will convene artists, curators, grassroots organizers, federal officials, municipal and civic workers, educators, students, and more from around the country for keynotes, panels, workshops, and field trips. Major support for the Monument Lab Summit is provided by the Mellon Foundation.
Confirmed presenters include: Elizabeth Alexander (President, Mellon Foundation), Sonya Clark (Artist, Declaration House), Jeannine A. Cook (Founder, Harriett’s Bookshop), Andrew M. Davenport (Director, Getting Word African American Oral History Project at Monticello), Erica Armstrong Dunbar (Historian, Author of Never Caught), Paul Farber (Director, Monument Lab), Salamishah Tillet (Scholar, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for The New York Times), Gayle Jessup White (Public Relations and Community Engagement Officer at Monticello, author of Reclamation), and Yolanda Wisher (Senior Curator, Monument Lab).A full schedule of panels, workshops, and field trips will be announced in late April.
Advanced registration for the 2024 Monument Lab Summit can be found on our Eventbrite.
About the presenters:
Elizabeth Alexander, an acclaimed poet, scholar, and cultural advocate, is a nationally recognized thought leader on race, justice, the arts, and American society. As president of the Mellon Foundation, she leads a multi-billion-dollar philanthropy and the nation’s largest funder of the arts and humanities, supporting educational institutions and cultural organizations while envisioning and guiding new initiatives to build just communities across the United States. Prior to joining the Foundation, Dr. Alexander served as the director of Creativity and Free Expression at the Ford Foundation, shaping Ford’s grantmaking vision in arts and culture, journalism, and documentary film. During that time, she co-designed the Art for Justice Fund, an initiative that uses art and advocacy to address the crisis of mass incarceration. Dr. Alexander has held distinguished professorships at Smith College, Yale University — where she taught for over 15 years and helped rebuild and chaired the African American Studies Department — and Columbia University. An author or co-author of fifteen books, Dr. Alexander was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize: for poetry with American Sublime and for biography with her 2015 memoir, the New York Times best-seller The Light of the World. In 2009, she composed and delivered the poem "Praise Song for the Day" for President Barack Obama's inauguration. Her latest book, released in 2022, is The Trayvon Generation.Dr. Alexander holds a BA from Yale University, an MA from Boston University, and a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania. She serves on the boards of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, and the Pulitzer Prize, and is Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets. In 2019, she received the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University. Among her many other honors, she has been recognized as Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture and as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People.
Sonya Clark is Professor of Art at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Previously, she was a Distinguished Research Fellow in the School of the Arts and Commonwealth Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University where she served as chair of the Craft/Material Studies Department from 2006 until 2017. In 2016, she was awarded a university-wide VCU Distinguished Scholars Award. She earned an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and was honored with their Distinguished Alumni Award in 2011. She has a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her first college degree is a BA from Amherst College where she received an honorary doctorate in 2015. Her work has been exhibited in over 350 museum and galleries in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe and Australia. She is the recipient of a United States Artists Fellowship, a Pollock Krasner award, an 1858 Prize, an Art Prize Grand Jurors Award, and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Sonya Clark is the featured artist for Declaration House, a Monument Lab project opening this summer in Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park.
Jeannine A. Cook is the visionary founder of Our Sister Bookshops including—Harriett’s in Philadelphia, Ida’s in Collingswood, Josephine’s in Paris, and several literary installations and libraries including Toni’s, Marian’s, Zora’s, et. al where she curates cultural spaces that celebrate women authors, artists, and activists under the guiding light of historic heroines. With a passion for supporting human connection, Jeannine's bookshops and libraries serve as vibrant hubs for new, used, and rare books, music, dance, education, advocacy, and community engagement initiatives.
Andrew Davenport is the Director of African American History & The Getting Word Project at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (Monticello). He is a Ph.D. Candidate at Georgetown University studying slavery and its legacies in the United States. His articles have appeared in Ralph Ellison in Context (ed. Paul Devlin, Cambridge University Press, 2021), Mourning the Presidents (eds. Lindsay Chervinsky and Matthew Costello, UVA Press, 2023), and French Cultural Studies (March 2023).
Erica Armstrong Dunbar is a historian, professor of history at Rutgers University, and main historical consultant and co-executive producer for HBO’s The Gilded Age, whose work shines a light on racial injustice, slavery, and gender inequality. She is the author of Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge, which was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction and received the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Award. Dunbar’s most recent book, She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman, is a lively, informative, and illustrated tribute to one of the most exceptional women in American history whose fearlessness and activism still resonate today. An accomplished scholar, Dunbar was named the National Director of the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH) in 2019, an organization dedicated to continuing the advancement for the study of black women’s history. In 2011, she also became the Inaugural Director of the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia, a position she held until 2018.
Paul Farber, as Director and Co-Founder of Monument Lab, is among the nation's thought leaders on monuments, memory, and public space. Farber is author and co-editor of several publications including A Wall of Our Own: An American History of the Berlin Wall (2020), Monument Lab: Creative Speculations on Philadelphia (2020), and the National Monument Audit (2021). His forthcoming book, After Permanence: The Future of Monuments, will be published with the University of North Carolina Press. Farber’s curatorial and collaborative work includes Beyond Granite: Pulling Together with Salamishah Tillet, the first curated multi-artist public art exhibition on the National Mall in Washington D.C. (2023), and Declaration House in Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park (2024) with Anna Arabindan-Kesson and Yolanda Wisher. Farber is the host and creator of The Statue, a podcast series from WHYY/NPR. Farber is Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Public Art & Space at the University of Pennsylvania and holds a PhD from the University of Michigan in American Culture. He currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Board of Directors of A Long Walk Home.
Salamishah Tillet, a scholar, writer, and activist, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2022 for her work as a contributing critic at large for The New York Times where she has been writing since 2015. She is the author of In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece (Abrams, 2021), and Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination (Duke University Press, 2012). She was the co-host and co-producer of “Because of Anita” podcast with Cindi Leive of The Meteor. In 2022, “Because of Anita” won Webby and Gracie awards. She was awarded the 2020 Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction fellowship for her cultural memoir, All The Rage: Mississippi Goddam and The World Nina Simone Made and was named a 2021 Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation of New York for her project, In Lieu of the Law: “Me Too” and The Politics of Justice, a cultural history of the world’s largest social media movement. She is the Henry Rutgers Professor of Creative Writing and African American and African Studies and the executive director of Express Newark, a center for socially engaged art and design at Rutgers University - Newark. Upon arriving at Rutgers, she founded New Arts Justice, an initiative for feminist approaches to public art in the City of Newark.
Gayle Jessup White is the Public Relations & Community Engagement Officer at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s historic estate. A former award-winning television reporter and anchor, Jessup White started her career at the New York Times. She’s written and spoken extensively about her work at Monticello. She is a direct Jefferson descendant, and is also related to two well-documented families enslaved at Monticello—the Hemingses and the Hubbards. She lives in Virginia.
Yolanda Wisher, Monument Lab Senior Curator, is a poet, musician, educator, and the author of Monk Eats an Afro (Hanging Loose Press, 2014). Wisher holds an M.A. in Creative Writing/Poetry from Temple University and a B.A. in English and Black Studies and an honorary doctorate from her alma mater Lafayette College. Wisher was named the inaugural Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania in 1999 and the third Poet Laureate of Philadelphia for 2016 and 2017. She currently serves as the chair of the Philadelphia Poet Laureate Governing Committee. A Pew and Cave Canem Fellow, Wisher received the Leeway Foundation's Transformation Award in 2019 for her commitment to art for social change and was named a Philadelphia Cultural Treasures Artist Fellow in 2022. Wisher performs a blend of poetry and song with her band Yolanda Wisher & The Afroeaters; their debut album Doublehanded Suite was released in 2022. Wisher taught high school English for a decade, co-founded the youth-led Germantown Poetry Festival, and served as Director of Art Education for Philadelphia Mural Arts. She is also the founder of the School of Guerrilla Poetics, a training ground for folks interested in nurturing and mobilizing communities through poetry. Along with Trapeta B. Mayson, Wisher leads ConsenSIS (consensisphl.com), an initiative that seeks to count, gather, and memorialize Black femme poets in the Philadelphia area.
Major support for the Monument Lab Summit is provided by the Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the Center for Public Art & Space at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. Support for Declaration House has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
