“I am thrilled beyond measure to be part of the internal work that the Bryn Mawr community has been carrying out under the stewardship of Monument Lab and the sustained, consistent and persistent efforts of the BIPOC student community across generations,” says Durrett. “I am so eager to get to the important work of mining the archives to illuminate those individuals who were worthy of witness and reverence.”  

Bryn Mawr College’s ARCH Project (Art Remediating Campus Histories), in partnership with Monument Lab, is proud to announce the selection of the commissioned artist, Nekisha Durrett, to create her proposed monument, Don’t Forget to Remember (Me) to address a legacy of exclusionary practices at the College and enabling the campus community to respond to the question, “What stories are missing from Bryn Mawr College?”

This vital work builds on previous and ongoing College-supported efforts by students, staff, alums, and faculty to reveal and repair harm, ensuring a reckoning with Bryn Mawr College’s history and a clear-sighted look at the way to a future of inclusion and reconciliation. 

Durrett was selected after a rigorous open call for artists that saw 110 applications from 22 states and nine countries. Following five finalist proposals that were presented to campus audiences earlier this spring, Durrett’s proposal was approved by the Artist Advisory Committee, Bryn mawr College’s President, and Board of Trustees. 

Nekisha Durrett (Born 1976 in Washington, DC; she/her/hers) is the 2022 Howard University Social Justice Consortium’s (SJC) Artist in Residence Fellow. From large freestanding sculptures to intimate gallery installations, her work uses unexpected materials to make historical connections and connotations that places and materials embody but are overlooked in our day-to-day lives. Whether reimagining pre-Colonial landscapes, bygone Black communities, or family lore, Durrett’s research-driven practice allows viewers to consider what is revealed or concealed when information is filtered across time. Her work is held in the permanent collections of The National Museum of African American History and Culture and The Phillips Collection (Washington, DC, USA).

Follow Nekisha Durrett on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter or visit her website to learn more about her work.

During the 2021-2022 academic year, Monument Lab posed a central research and engagement question to the campus to guide the project: What stories are missing from Bryn Mawr College? Rather than seeking a single “winning” response to guide the future commission, we sought to enact a broad collective and creative mapping of the campus across time. The central question aimed to serve the reckoning with, dismantling, and reimagining of narratives of campus history that may offer an artistic and reparative vision for its future.  

Bryn Mawr College hired a cohort of student researchers to work with Monument Lab to extend the research question to the campus community. During an Engagement Week in February 2022, the student research cohort facilitated on-campus events in which BMC’s students, staff, faculty, and alums were invited to respond to the research question through paper engagement forms that asked respondents to map the campus according to their own perspectives and experiences. Respondents could draw, sketch, and/or describe their maps. The prompt was intentionally open-ended. 

After the Engagement Week events, with the assistance of Bryn Mawr College’s Library and Monument Lab, the student research cohort digitally transcribed and coded the forms. We witnessed a composite mapping of the campus that highlights its layered multiplicity—places of trauma and transformation, erasure and memory-keeping, individuality and collectivity all exist simultaneously.  

While the engagement forms were Monument Lab’s primary mode of research collection, our findings were also informed by what the student team saw in the process of collecting research. 

As reflected in the central question at the heart of this study, while we gathered overview findings of how the campus was mapped, we were just as drawn to how missing stories, sites, and narratives were engaged. We sought to reveal and engage silences and gaps in the narrative. In analyzing this kind of collective knowledge—crowd-sourced, varied, personal, and reflective of individual experience we highlight the oft-unquestioned falsehood that data is neutral and without messiness. 

To learn more about this research phase, download the Artist Project Dossier

Bryn Mawr College Leadership: Monique Scott, Millicent Bond, Homay King, Ruth Lindeborg, Allison Mills
Student Researchers: Annalise Ashman, Elliot Waters-Fleming, Faryal A. Khan, Olivia L. Harkins-Finn, Aaliyah R. Joseph
Monument Lab Team: Paul Farber, Gina Ciralli, Isabel Oberlender, Nico Rodriguez, Elliot Waters-Fleming, Sue Mobley, Yolanda Wisher
Photography: Hannah Price and Steve Weinik
Supported by: Bryn Mawr College