ARCH: Art Remediating Campus Histories Project

Bryn Mawr College’s ARCH Project (Art Remediating Campus Histories), in partnership with Monument Lab, is proud to announce the five finalists that have been selected by the project’s Artist Advisory Committee to commission a lasting campus monument. This vital work builds on previous and ongoing College-supported efforts by students, staff, alumni, 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.

The five finalists (which includes four artists and one artist team) have been selected from 110 applications from 22 states and nine countries and were chosen based on the quality of their artistry, their understanding of the ARCH project themes, and an interest in engaging with the Bryn Mawr community.

Names of 5 finalist artists

Nekisha Durrett (Photo by Sonnie B. Mason)

Nekisha Durrett 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).

Learn more about Nekisha Durrett’s work and follow her on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Amanda D. King, JD (Photo by Robert Banks)

Amanda D. King, JD is the creative director of Shooting Without Bullets, a nonprofit creative agency and production company. She is a conceptual artist, cultural strategist, and social justice advocate that uses arts and culture to envision possibilities for transforming individuals, communities, and society. King's multidisciplinary expertise in jurisprudence, art history, fashion, and culture inform her socially engaged practice, which uses visual communication & design, creative consulting, and arts education to mobilize her community and reciprocate grace. King lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where she manages her studio practice. She earned an A.B. in history of art at Bryn Mawr.

Learn more about Amanda D. King’s work and follow her on Instagram.

Risa Puno (Photo by Talisman Brolin)

Risa Puno is a New York City-based sculpture and installation artist who uses interactivity and play to understand how we relate to one another. She has exhibited with NYC Department of Parks and Recreation (New York, USA), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Connecticut, USA), El Museo del Barrio (New York, USA), The Bronx Museum of the Arts (New York, USA), MMX Open Art Venue (Berlin, Germany), and Science Gallery (Dublin, Ireland), among others. Puno’s work has been featured across radio and print, including The New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker, ProPublica, and The Boston Globe. She currently serves on the NYC DOT Art Advisory Committee.  

Learn more about Risa Puno through her work and follow her Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Jean Shin (Photo by Daniel Terna)

Jean Shin is a tenured adjunct professor at the Pratt Institute and is known for her work in public sculptures, transforming discarded objects into powerful monuments that interrogate our complex relationship between material consumption, collective identity, and community engagement. Her work has been widely exhibited and collected in over 150 major museums and cultural institutions, including solo exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art (New York, New, USA), Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, USA), Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington DC, USA), and Asian Art Museum (San Francisco, USA), where in 2020 she was the first Korean-American woman artist featured in a solo exhibition. Shin has received numerous awards, including the Frederic Church Award, for her contributions to American art and culture. 

Learn more about Jean Shin through her work and follow her on Instagram and Facebook

Sharon Hayes (Photo by Photo by Åsa Lundén/Moderna Museet) & Michelle Lopez (Photo by Project 61)

Sharon Hayes teaches at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. She is an artist who uses video, performance, sound, and public sculpture to expose intersections between history, politics and speech to unravel reductive historical narratives and to re-ignite dormant pathways through which counter-understandings of the contemporary political condition can be formed. Hayes has had numerous solo exhibitions, including at n.b.k. (Neue Berliner Kunstverein in Berlin, Germany), Moderna Museet (Stockholm, Sweden), and the Whitney Museum of American Art in (New York, USA). Hayes was awarded the US Artists Fellowship (2021), the Pew Fellowship (2016), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2014), among others. 

Learn more about Sharon Hayes through her work.

Michelle Lopez is Associate Professor in Fine Arts, Sculpture, at the University of Pennsylvania (Weitzman School of Design) and a multimedia artist known for her rigorous conceptual practice and boldly experimental approach to process and material. Lopez’s installations and sculptural works are grounded in research on the iconography of cultural phenomena that transcends material properties and investigates the way the viewer’s body interacts with architectural space to re-orient the possibility of empowerment for the disenfranchised. Her work has been exhibited at Fondazione Trussardi (Milan, Italy), LA><Art (Los Angeles, USA), Harvard Carpenter Center, PS1 MOMA, Simon Preston Gallery (New York, USA), Commonwealth & Council (Los Angeles, USA), among others. She has received a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Sculpture Fellowship (2011), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2019).

Learn more about Michelle Lopez through her work and follow her on Instagram.

What's Next?

On March 30th, 2023, the five finalists will be invited to share their final proposals with the Bryn Mawr College community in a public presentation (finalists are compensated $4,000 for their proposals.) Informed by community feedback, the Artist Advisory Committee will make recommendations that will be delivered to Bryn Mawr College’s President and Board of Trustees. The Board will make a final decision by May 2023.

The budget for the final selected project is $560,000 with an artist fee at $112,000.

Research

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

 

Credits

The ARCH Project Team

Co-Chairs
Ruth Lindborg, Chief of Staff and Secretary of the College, Bryn Mawr College & Class of 1980, Bryn Mawr College
Monique Scott, Associate Professor of History of Art and Director of Museum Studies, Bryn Mawr College

Artist Advisory Committee
Annalise Ashman (Class of 2024, Bryn Mawr College)
Millie Bond (Executive Director of Constituent Engagement, Alumni Relations, Bryn Mawr College)
Amy Goldrich (Art Attorney & Class of 1986, Bryn Mawr College)
Erika Guadalupe Nuñez (Executive Director, Juntos & Class of 2013, Bryn Mawr College)
Olivia Harkins-Finn (Class of 2023, Bryn Mawr College)
Justine Jentes (Class of 1988, Bryn Mawr College)
Tuajuanda Jordan (President, St. Mary’s College of Maryland & Member, Board of Trustees, Bryn Mawr College)
Homay King (Professor and Chair of History of Art on the Marie Neuberger Fund of the Study of the Arts, Bryn Mawr College)
Ruth Lindeborg (Chief of Staff and Secretary of the College, Bryn Mawr College & Class of 1980, Bryn Mawr College)
Lisa Saltzman (Professor of History of Art on the Emily Rauh Pulitzer '55 Professorship, Bryn Mawr College)
Monique Scott (Associate Professor of History of Art and Director of Museum Studies, Bryn Mawr College)
Sharon Ullman (Professor of History, Bryn Mawr College)
Elliot Waters-Fleming (Assistant Project Manager, Monument Lab & Class of 2022, Bryn Mawr College)

Student Researchers
Annalise Ashman, Class of 2024
Linda Chen, Class of 2023
Olivia L Harkins-Finn, Class of 2023
Aaliyah R. Joseph, Class of 2022
Faryal A. Khan, Class of 2022
Elliot Waters-Fleming, Class of 2022

Monument Lab Team
Paul Farber, Director
Nico Rodriguez, Associate Director of Projects
Sue Mobley, Director of Research
Gina Ciralli, Senior Projects Manager
Elliot Waters-Fleming, Assistant Project Manager
Patrice Worthy, Year 1 Engagement Curator 
Steph Garcia, Research Associate

Photography
Daniel Jackson 

Supported by
Bryn Mawr College