Podcast

This episode of Monument Lab features activist Patricia Okoumou, widely known as the woman who climbed the Statue of Liberty on July 4, 2018. Okoumou ascended the base of the statue as a direct action against the Trump Administration’s harsh and inhumane tactics of family separation at the US-Mexico border. 

In November 2018, a series of violent fires throttled California and its surrounding landscape. This episode of Monument Lab our guest is Photographer Stuart Palley, a photographer of the wildfires. Palley is creating a record of wildfires and climate change, tracing how hotter, drier conditions on the ground increase the risk of fire.

This episode features two brilliant scholar-artist-activists Salamishah Tillet and Grace Sanders Johnson. It was recorded live from the Free Library of Philadelphia as a part of the 2019 One Book One Philadelphia festival. Together, Paul Farber, Salamishah Tillet, and Grace Sanders Johnson spoke about how they approach memory in their works, what kind of archives and artworks haunt and/or inspire them, and how history lives in the present.

On November 10, 2018, a statue of Christopher Columbus was taken down in LA’s Grand Park, in part thanks to efforts from the Los Angeles’ City/County Native American Indian Commission. Vice Chair Chrissie Castro, shares insights behind the takedown, which was not isolated event, but a larger part of a decades long struggle for advocacy and representation among LA's diverse indigenous communities. She also reflects on her history as an organizer, her work with the city, and the next steps that may follow in response to the takedown.

Brentin Mock is a staff writer for CityLab who focuses on the role of justice and civil rights in the laws and policies that govern our lives, particularly in the urban environment. He has a long history of reporting on environmental justice, voting rights, and voter suppression. We speak to Mock about his recent piece for CityLab, “The Strangest Form of White Flight,” a feature within a larger series on the Cityhood movement in Georgia.

Stephanie Syjuco is an artist and professor from UC Berkeley. Syjuco is one of the four artists featured in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Disrupting Craft: Renwick Invitational opening this week across the street from the White House.  Syjuco works on monuments by scaling them to handheld objects, newly imagined commodities, and tools for protest.

Michelle Angela Ortiz, visual artist and muralist, has collaborated with mothers and their families at Berks, an immigrant family prison, several hours away from her hometown of Philadelphia. Ortiz has worked to bring the stories of these detained mothers and their families to prominent public spaces where powerbrokers may connect with stories of these mothers in new ways – including last year at Philadelphia's City Hall as a part of the Monument Lab 2017 exhibition. This week, Ortiz installed a new phase of her Familias Separadas project on the Pennsylvania State Capitol steps in Harrisburg and around the city.

The Museum of Capitalism was co-founded by Timothy Furstanau and Andrea Steves of FICTILIS, an artistic-curatorial team who the New Yorker has described as constructing “exhibitions and interventions animated by a playful interrogation of social institutions.” FICTILIS opened the first iteration of their Museum in a decade-old retail space that had never been occupied in Oakland’s Jack London district, garnering thousands of visitors and international attention. Currently, the Museum is open at the School of the Museum of Fine Art at Tufts University in the Boston area through October 25, 2018.

Paper Monuments from New Orleans — led by Bryan C. Lee Jr. and Sue Mobley – grew out of the takedown of four Confederate monuments in the city last year. Rather than look to replace the toppled figures and move on, Paper Monuments has gathered hundreds of under-told stories about the city’s history on posters designed by artists and storytellers, and wheat pasted them across New Orleans. They have been tapped by the city of New Orleans to help re-imagine public spaces around empty pedestals.

Art Historian Kirk Savage is one of the nation’s foremost experts on monuments. Savage is the author of several books including Monument Wars and Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth Century America, which was recently reprinted in an updated edition from Princeton University Press. Savage traces how so many confederate monuments were installed on public lands, who initially paid for them, and how they reinforced practices of white supremacy. In recent projects, he is collaborating with artists on permanent and temporary monument projects.

Artist Hank Willis Thomas is a leading thinker on monuments and one of the co-founders of For Freedoms, the largest public art campaign in the history of the United States. Thomas worked with Monument Lab last year in Philadelphia on the prototype monument All Power to All People, a monumental-sized afro pick installed across from City Hall. He also produced Raise Up on the grounds of the National Peace and Justice Memorial in Birmingham. In this episode, we are also joined by Evan Walsh, a photographer and For Freedoms Communications Coordinator.