Monument Lab presents “Augmenting Memory: Justice and Monuments in New Media,” a virtual panel that addresses pressing questions around the role of new media in monument-making and memorialization in public space.
Join expert panelists Glenn Cantave (Movers and Shakers), Cheyenne Concepcion (New Monuments Task Force), and Marisa Williamson (Sweet Chariot) as they share their own projects and experiences of activating public spaces and building coalitions through new media technologies. The panel will discuss how digital tools can serve broader publics, create new kinds of memorials, and challenge our inherited monument landscapes. Other topics of conversation include questions around accessibility, resources, and process with regard to working with digital and virtual technologies. The conversation will be moderated by Patricia Eunji Kim, Monument Lab’s Associate Director of Public Programs. Augmenting Memory is part of a suite of public programs that mark the launch of Monument Lab’s OverTime, a free downloadable augmented reality app that offers self-guided tours of a public space through an imagined outdoor art and history museum.
This event and the OverTime app are both supported by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Glenn Cantave is the Founder/CEO of Movers & Shakers NYC, a nonprofit that uses augmented reality to write black and brown history in American curricula. They are developing a catalog of augmented reality monuments and culturally responsive pedagogy for middle school students. Glenn is an activist, performance artist, and social entrepreneur. Past pieces include running the New York City Marathon in Chains, a slave auction pop/up AR exhibit, and a fast for the duration of Black History Month 2020 calling for a more equitable blueprint of New York City. Glenn was recently named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for education entrepreneurs. His TED Talk on ‘How Augmented Reality is Changing Activism’ was featured on the homepage of TED.com in July 2019.
Cheyenne Concepcion is a multi-disciplinary artist and designer based in San Francisco. She creates work that examines the politics of place, using installation, speculation, social practice, photography and sculpture. Drawing on her interest and research in urban planning, and utilizing her training as a designer, Concepcion’s work is site-specific and focuses on land development, cultural memory, migration and often has a public component. In 2020, she founded New Monuments Taskforce, a conceptual art project guised as a fantastical municipal agency. Through this platform, she convened a group of Bay Area artists, cultural workers and organizers to form a task force, or advisory committee, to create public facing initiatives which engage the dialogue, design and development of New Monuments in the Bay Area. Initiatives range from publications to exhibitions to collaborating with local organizations to workshops, including a recent workshop in partnership with Zero1 and artist Camila Magrane, centered on Augmented Reality in the Public Realm called Marble & Media Lab.
Marisa Williamson is a project-based artist who works in video, image-making, installation and performance around themes of history, race, feminism, and technology. She has produced site-specific works at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (2013), and by commission from Storm King Art Center (2016), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2016), Monument Lab Philadelphia (2017), the University of Virginia (2018), SPACES Cleveland (2019), the National Park Service (2019), and the University of Washington (2020). Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) in Berlin, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (NYC), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), Human Resources (LA), Centro Pecci in Prato and Stefania Miscetti gallery in Rome, Italy. Williamson holds a BA from Harvard and an MFA from CalArts. She lives and works in New Jersey and Connecticut, serving as an assistant professor of media arts at the University of Hartford.
About Monument Lab
Monument Lab is a public art and history studio based in Philadelphia. Monument Lab works with artists, students, educators, activists, municipal agencies, and cultural institutions on participatory approaches to public engagement and collective memory. Founded by Paul Farber and Ken Lum in 2012, Monument Lab cultivates and facilitates critical conversations around the past, present, and future of monuments.
As a studio and curatorial team, we collaborate to make generational change in the ways art and history live in public. Our approaches include producing citywide art exhibitions, site-specific commissions, and participatory research initiatives. We aim to inform the processes of public art, as well as the permanent collections of cities, museums, libraries, and open data repositories. Through exhibitions, research programs, editorial platforms, and fellowships, we have connected with hundreds of thousands of people in person and millions online. Monument Lab critically engages our inherited symbols in order to unearth the next generation of monuments that elevate stories of resistance and hope.
About the Center for Public Art & Space
The Center for Public Art and Space is a platform for artistic research and civic engagement at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. The Center supports Penn faculty, staff, and students in incubating public art projects and securing grant-based funding, advances the work of exceptional MFA students as artists in residence, and partners on critical initiatives that bridge the campus and the public realm in Philadelphia and beyond. The Center also serves as the Penn hub for Monument Lab, an independent public art and history studio based in Philadelphia. Initiated by the Department of Fine Arts at the Weitzman School in 2019, the Center is led by Ken Lum (Faculty Director), Paul Farber (Senior Research Scholar), and Kristen Giannantonio (Operations).