In the midst of the United States’ monumental reckoning and reimagining, Monument Lab compiled the first-ever National Monument Audit, a panoramic study of the commemorative landscape, released September 29, 2021, in partnership with the Mellon Foundation. Five years after its release, the Audit continues to generate new common knowledge about who and what America commemorates—and what our monument landscape leaves out.
Reframing Monuments: Redress as a Path Toward Re:Generation explores how monuments can move beyond symbols of the past to address present-day needs. Drawing on Re:Generation projects, Dani R. Merriman and Tsione Wolde-Michael highlight redress as a community-centered approach that prioritizes healing, accountability, and the visions of historically harmed communities.
What does it mean to re-chart the landscape of collective memory? In this essay, Sue Mobley offers a new way of navigating history through Re:Generation —one rooted in community, place, and the power of shared stories. Across ten projects and nearly eighty collaborators, artists and communities challenge inherited narratives of erasure and imagine new ways to remember, gather, and build toward a more pluralistic future.
Monument Lab: Re:Generation presents case studies that travel across America, highlighting local commemorative campaigns dedicated to advancing public memory. Featuring articles and artwork from the country’s leading monument makers, each project includes a framing essay that provides insights into the varied contexts of location, culture, form, and subject matter.
Blending history, personal reflection, and cultural memory, Can I Grow a Witness? reimagines trees as living monuments to Black memory, resilience, and ancestry. Weaving together the histories of Monticello, Robert Hemmings, and the Declaration House project with personal reflection, this essay explores how memory takes root across generations.
During the drafting of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Thomas Jefferson and enslaved valet Robert Hemmings spent several months at 700 Market Street in Philadelphia. The editors and contributors to Declaration House reflect on the history of this site and illuminate the entangled legacy of freedom and enslavement at the core of our nation’s founding.