...Perhaps no one monument could be made to tell the whole truth of any subject which it might be designed to illustrate.
—Frederick Douglass
We, as a country, are in an intense struggle over our monuments. This moment of monumental reckoning and reimagining is profound but not new. The evolution of our monument landscape is as old as the nation itself. This phenomenon is not unique to the United States and should be contextualized within broader global movements, yet we are faced with complex dilemmas rooted in our particular history and landscape. These include the circumstances of our nation’s founding on stolen Indigenous lands, the building of much of our country’s foundations by enslaved laborers, and ongoing struggles toward full democracy. Our lack of full acknowledgment or accounting for the harms of our past merges into our present travails. Monuments serve as places to harness public memory and acknowledge collective forgetfulness as twin forces holding up this nation.
Despite the intense spotlight on monuments today, there is no single agreed upon definition of a monument in American culture—not in federal and municipal recordkeeping on statuary, not in legislative and judicial systems overseeing public spaces, not in numerous schools of thought, not in everyday understandings. When one calls attention to monuments, one could be referring to statues atop pedestals installed in public spaces with the authority of a government agency or civic institution; designated land formations, historical markers, or architectural sites serving as traces of the past; or transformative declarations rendered through art, poetry, projection, or protest that shift the ways we see our surroundings and ourselves. The unstable nature of the term monument is a reminder that the power to convey stories of the past cannot be expressed through any single art form, outlet, or voice.
The officials who document and care for our inherited monuments have no shared definition or central system for tracking, maintaining, or understanding them. This point cannot be overstated. The confusion over what a monument is spurs bureaucratic and social turmoil, as we scramble to remember locally and collectively with disparate tools and objectives. Because conventional monuments are often viewed as one-offs, solitary symbols in a given location, it can be difficult to consider them as a set of linked symbols, sites, and stories across jurisdictions. Generally, however, monuments across locations have been shaped by those with the time, money, and officially sanctioned power to craft and elevate the past in their own image.
MONUMENT LAB DEFINES A MONUMENT AS “A STATEMENT OF POWER AND PRESENCE IN PUBLIC.”
Monument Lab defines a monument as “a statement of power and presence in public.” We formed this definition through tens of thousands of conversations over the last decade in public spaces across the country.1 We heard how people think of monuments as statues in bronze and marble on pedestals, and how those conventional structures also misrepresent history and fail to do justice to our collective knowledge and experience. Through these conversations, we learned that monuments do more than just help us remember—they make our society’s values visible. They also can push us to recognize the ideas that could never be captured or rendered in stone. History does not live in statues. History lives between people. Monuments are not endpoints for history, but touchstones between generations. Throughout our work, we believe that by advancing greater understandings of the expansive role and ever-changing nature of monuments, we can yield fuller possibilities for civic power and public memory.
For the National Monument Audit, produced in partnership with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Monument Lab looked at a large-scale trove of this nation’s monument data to create a sprawling snapshot of the commemorative landscape. The audit is meant to inform Mellon’s landmark Monuments Project, a $250 million investment designed to “transform the way our country’s histories are told in public spaces and ensure that future generations inherit a commemorative landscape that venerates and reflects the vast, rich complexity of the American story.”
To produce the audit, our research team spent a year scouring almost half a million records of historic properties created and maintained by federal, state, local, tribal, institutional, and publicly assembled sources. We looked for those sites and structures we most conventionally think of as monuments – statues or monoliths constructed with stone or metal, installed or maintained in a public space with the authority of a government agency or institution. For our deepest investigations, we focused on a study set of approximately 50,000 conventional monuments representing data collected from every US state and territory. This study set allows us to better understand the dynamics and trends that have shaped our monument landscape, to pose questions regarding common knowledge about monuments, and to debunk falsehoods and misperceptions within public memory.
Our team dove into research about the life of monuments within and beyond this study set. We also examined monument data to assess what the records reveal and what they obscure, and what data and numbers can and cannot tell us about monuments today. This is not a record of every monument in the US—such an undertaking is impossible, as the debate over what constitutes a monument plays out daily in every corner of the country. This audit is a first of its kind study in scope, building on the work of many other researchers, to review a history of recordkeeping on monuments as a way to explore what we know and what we often fail to grasp about public memory. By viewing monuments as a collection of public assets, rather than as solitary and one-off symbols, we can gain new insights about how monuments function as platforms for civic power and shaping stories in public.
HISTORY DOES NOT LIVE IN STATUES.
HISTORY LIVES BETWEEN PEOPLE.
We invite you to carry forward the work of this audit by exploring our study set online and sharing your observations with us. You can find more about this audit throughout this publication, on our website (where you can search the study set and read essays about the data from members of the research team and invited contributors), and in public programs and dialogues over the next year. We hope this audit and its search interface provides a tool and launching point for further investigations, discoveries, and new approaches to record keeping. We look forward to this snapshot becoming outdated in the coming years, as more studies build on this research and other emerging initiatives in the field, and as we continue to evolve how we build, maintain, and envision monuments.
After conducting this study of monuments—as well as our ongoing research and interventions into the systems that have produced, maintained, and documented them—we are reminded of the power of public art and history to shape circumstances, challenges, and possibilities for transformation. If we seek a nation that lives up to its creed, learns from and labors to repair its past, and connects to its history in ways that are more truthful, complex, and vital, then our monuments must change.
—Paul M. Farber, Sue Mobley, and Laurie Allen
Co-Directors, National Monument Audit, Monument Lab
1. Monument Lab has engaged in participatory action and artistic research between 2015 and 2021 in the following cities: Austin, Chicago, Houston, New Orleans, New York City, Newark, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and St. Louis, as well as virtual workshops with Americans for the Arts and the Metropolitan Area Planning Council.