University Press Week Blog Tour: How to build community

It’s University Press Week and the Blog Tour is back! This year’s theme is Read. Think. Act. Today’s theme is: How to build community

Paul Farber and Ken Lum, co-editors of our new book Monument Lab penned this entry on community building.

From coeditor Paul Farber:

When we started Monument Lab, it was not a fully-realized curatorial project or intervention—it was a classroom experiment. Ken and I were teaching in Fine Arts and Urban Studies, respectively, and were galvanized by our conversations with our students about representation, equity, and memory. We each spent time with scholarly texts and we also moved outside of our classes into public spaces as their own primary sources. We met one another, and connected with a circle of collaborators after that expanded what we could have ever dreamed of on our own. We iterated and took our questions outside to the courtyard of City Hall in 2015 for our first discovery phase exhibition. We eventually that moved to public squares and parks around the city for the citywide project with Mural Arts Philadelphia documented in the book, and now work in other cities with similar goals of critically engaging monuments we have inherited and unearthing the next generation of monuments.

We have been fortunate to work with a range of artists, writers, and organizers*. Some have artworks and essays represented in this book. Others put fingerprints and directed their own forms of expertise to the project to make this possible. We hope people will read the essays, but we hope people also tend to the captions, credits, and thank you’s, as they give insights into how monuments could be and are made, critiqued, and re-imagined. This was a profoundly collaborative effort and that is the point.

There is no single fix to our monumental landscape. There are ways of engaging the moment worth nodding to by many people representing previously exisiting and ongoing approaches. This includes antiracist, decolonial, feminist, queer, ecological, and other systems of social justice perspectives that take long first steps toward redress. These practitioners understand we live at once in the deep seated past, changing present, and unknowable future. The book and the work of Monument Lab is meant to document collective aspirations for art and justice and serve an active, living approach to history.

Enter Karyn Olivier, The Battle is Joined, Monument Lab 2017 (Steve Weinik/Mural Arts Philadelphia)

Sharon Hayes, If They Should Ask, Monument Lab 2017 (Steve Weinik/Mural Arts Philadelphia)

From editor Ken Lum

I just received Deborah Thomas’ book Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair. She is an esteemed colleague at Penn and we both co-taught a course in Kingston, Jamaica that looks at a major violent incursion that took place in the impoverished neighborhood of Tivoli Gardens in 2010. From this moment of eruption, there followed an uneven and halting pattern of attempts at recognition, redress and reconciliation for the many human lives affected, and continues to affect, by the incursion. Although a different context, as I started reading this book, it made me think about Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia, the new book from Temple University Press that Paul Farber and I edited. 

There are many sites all over the world, even sites within sites, such as neighborhoods within neighborhoods or streets within streets, whereby were they truly examined in a holistically democratic and critical sense, would reveal many of the same flailing patterns that stymies institutional and official initiatives that attempt to confront issues of human trauma and under-recognition. I started thinking about how Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia is not just a book but also a method of thinking about matters of address and redress that offers no presaged prescription or anticipated conclusion. What Monument Lab offers is a way of thinking about the world in as open a manner as possible. Monument Lab is a project of inclusion including the real inclusion of Philadelphia’s many unheard voices. Monument Lab recognizes the untapped wisdom of the unacknowledged peoples and the truths that they offer. Monument Lab is a means rather than an end, but one that produces hope in the coming together of voices. 

Monument Lab draws on visual art, oral histories, scholarship and subjugated knowledges—there is no one knowledge that takes precedence over another. It is this openness in both thinking and method that accounts for whatever success Monument Labhas been able to achieve.

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*Contributors: Alexander Alberro, Alliyah Allen, Laurie Allen, Andrew Friedman, Justin Geller, Kristen Giannantonio, Jane Golden, Aviva Kapust, Fariah Khan, Homay King, Stephanie Mach, Trapeta B. Mayson, Nathaniel Popkin, Ursula Rucker, Jodi Throckmorton, Salamishah Tillet, Jennifer Harford Vargas, Naomi Waltham-Smith, Bethany Wiggin, Mariam I. Williams, Leslie Willis-Lowry, and the editors 

Artists: Tania Bruguera, Mel Chin, Kara Crombie, Tyree Guyton, Hans Haacke, David Hartt, Sharon Hayes, King Britt and Joshua Mays, Klip Collective, Duane Linklater, Emeka Ogboh, Karyn Olivier, Michelle Angela Ortiz, Kaitlin Pomerantz, RAIR, Alexander Rosenberg, Jamel Shabazz, Hank Willis Thomas, Shira Walinsky and Southeast by Southeast, and Marisa Williamson