Foreword

Moving through our public spaces—walking to school, meeting up with colleagues, picnicking or playing games in the park, traveling to other parts of the country, coming together in moments of national grief and joy—we are rarely aware of the monuments and memorials that shape them. We may not notice how just a few stories have been disproportionately commemorated in a country created by multitudes. We may not know which voices are missing, which contributions have been elided, or how much the monuments and memorials now standing misrepresent our collective history.

Monument Lab’s National Monument Audit gives us a way forward to capture this comprehensive knowledge and begin to build broader awareness of the commemorative landscape we move through every day. The audit’s substantive research and analysis provide a means to keep self-evaluating who we are as a nation in our public spaces. The work is a testament to the power of continual learning: learning about the monuments and memorials currently populating our built environment, learning how a few figures and themes came to overshadow the many different collective experiences that make up our past, learning why our commemorative landscape needs to change if we are to move towards a more just and equitable future.

Without the work that Monument Lab has undertaken with this audit, we at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation could not complete what we aim to achieve with our own Monuments Project. This $250 million initiative facilitates broader expressions of the multiplicity of American stories in our public spaces, so that our collective history will be more completely and accurately represented in them. By seeking, surveying, counting, and analyzing almost half a million historic records, Monument Lab has given us both the tools and the nuanced knowledge to better inform and fulfill the efforts of the Monuments Project itself.

Now that this surveying, analyzing, and learning has begun, we cannot turn back. We cannot unsee what we have seen. We cannot unknow what we now know. As we read through the remarkable findings of the National Monument Audit, we learn that permanence in our commemorative landscape is an illusion. We understand that the more durable monuments do not best represent American history, but are instead the result of the most abundant material resources and hegemony in its many forms: racial, ethnic, religious, gender-based. We see that the monuments standing on our streets or in our parks have not stood there for time immemorial. Our built environment is in motion; it always has been in motion. We know this now. We cannot unknow it.

The National Monument Audit calls us all to do our part to change our commemorative landscape and to better capture the multivocality of our country in our public spaces.

This work represents our opportunity to learn more, with all the bracing revelations that learning grants.

It is work that is just beginning.

—Elizabeth Alexander
     President, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation