Monument Lab announces its inaugural Changemaker Award recipient – Dr. Salamishah Tillet.

Dr. Tillet is an acclaimed Black Feminist critic, curator, scholar and activist based in Newark, NJ. She will be honored as a part of Monument Lab’s Fall Gathering on October 22 in Philadelphia.

“We are thrilled to honor Dr. Tillet with our first-ever Changemaker Award,” says Paul Farber, Director of Monument Lab. “Dr. Tillet has been a mainstay Monument Lab collaborator since 2015, when she spoke at Philadelphia’s City Hall in our discovery exhibition. She is a dear mentor, friend, and force of consciousness and vision. She has illuminated a path for engaged art, activism, and civic action.”

As part of the in-person Fall Gathering, Monument Lab will present its virtual pre-event program: Art, Activism, and Democracy: A Conversation with Salamishah Tillet and Paul Farber. Separate registration is required for this virtual offering.

Salamishah Tillet is the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American Studies & Creative Writing and director of Express Newark, a center for socially engaged art and design, at Rutgers University-Newark. She is a contributing critic-at-large for the New York Times, and the author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination and the recent book, In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of An American Masterpiece. She is currently working on a book on the civil rights icon, Nina Simone for which she received the Whiting Foundation Creative Non-Fiction grant in 2020, and a cultural history of the Me Too movement for which she was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2021. In 2003, she and Scheherazade Tillet founded A Long Walk Home, an organization that uses art to empower people to end violence against girls and women.