Before protesters in America and Europe began painting over statues, or toppling them, or hanging them from trees, or rolling them into the nearest river, the historian Paul Farber noticed that people were putting masks on them. In the early days of the pandemic, from Wuhan to New York, Valencia, and Limerick, anonymous people placed COVID-19 coverings over the faces of local monuments. There was something tender, even a little funny, about these gestures, the kind of thing done for Instagram: a photo of a masked Patience and Fortitude, the two lions that sit outside the main branch of the New York Public Library, went viral. Whether monuments take the form of a statue, building, or pillar, they present themselves as universal and timeless, expressing something essential about all of us—at least in a way that flatters the powers that be. Putting a mask on these inanimate objects shifted them to a new context: the present, rather than the historical past. The act suggested a kind of solidarity, a symbol that we are all in this pandemic together. Yet Farber, who is the artistic director and senior curator of Monument Lab, a public art initiative that creates new monuments, saw the masked statues as an accusation, a reminder of how official systems had failed us.
Farber and the artist and scholar Ken Lum started Monument Lab in 2012, shortly after they each began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. Farber is a native of Philadelphia, where Lum had just arrived from Vancouver, Canada, a city with comparatively few historical markers. They shared a fascination with Philadelphia’s rich monumental landscape, from the Liberty Bell and Robert Indiana’s “Love” sculpture to the famed “Rocky” steps. But they were curious about what stories these monuments weren’t telling. Lum lived near Billie Holiday’s childhood home, where only a small marker indicated its history. “I would see these white guys on pedestals who I’d never heard of,” he said. “I was really interested in this unevenness.”
In 2015, Farber and Lum set up a makeshift office in a shipping container in the courtyard of City Hall and asked visitors: “What is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia?” They shared their answers with a team of artists, which included locals, such as the poet Ursula Rucker and the video artist and animator Kara Crombie, and others who shared Monument Lab’s fascination with the politics of public space, such as Mel Chin, a conceptual artist interested in the ecological imagination, and Tyree Guyton, who is famed for the decades-long Heidelberg Project, in which he turned a block in his native Detroit into a kind of living sculpture. Working with these artists, the Monument Lab installed prototype monuments throughout the city. One of the most striking pieces, a twelve-foot-high Black Power Afro pick, by the artist Hank Willis Thomas, was recently acquired by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
In March, Farber and Lum had just welcomed a new class of international fellows when COVID-19 forced everyone indoors. Suddenly, conversations about public space seemed a tease. But in the wake of George Floyd’s death, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in protest, and they congregated in familiar spaces—near statues and monuments, in the shadows of yesterday’s supposed heroes. Soon thereafter, statues across the country started coming down—removed by crowds or by city officials trying to get ahead of a controversy. President Trump signed a series of executive orders to protect monuments from defacement, which provided the rationale for a violent crackdown on protesters in Portland, in July.
When I spoke to Farber earlier this summer, he was excited, likening the statue-toppling to the celebrations that took place along the Berlin Wall in the dying days of Communism. Indeed, the scenes we were seeing throughout America felt like reënactments of news footage celebrating upheaval somewhere far away—the long-subjugated people, inspired by the democratic West, toppling a despot’s statue. We were still in the “dancing on the wall” phase, he joked. “We still don’t know if East Germany will be dismantled.”
What isn’t a monument? The term is used to describe an incredibly wide range of structures, from ancient burial mounds, stones arranged with some kind of intention, and the pyramids, to concrete archways, magnificent palaces, columns, and statues of obscure local merchants. Monuments connect us to the furthest reaches of history, though why we value these things later on may have little relation to why someone was inspired to alter the landscape in the first place. The Great Wall remains a symbol of Chinese manpower, as well as a willingness to reject foreign influence; in contrast, the ornate façades of antiquity no longer communicate civilization’s greatness so much as warnings about imperial hubris. In the case of Stonehenge—designated a “scheduled ancient monument” by the U.K. government—the mystery surrounding its origins and use contribute to its aura.
When we speak of monuments in America, we’re often talking about structures such as statues, obelisks, and memorials that celebrate a relatively narrow band of our history: the Civil War, the First and Second World Wars, the civil-rights era. Our monumental landscape preserves a sense that we are an exceptional, upstart nation. (American civilization may not boast standing stones that date back to the prehistoric era, but we do have Carhenge.) The relative youth of our monuments also speaks to the enthusiasm with which previous generations simply erased the histories of those who came before. Mount Rushmore, for example, was carved onto a mountain that was of great significance to the Lakota Sioux, who had previously been promised the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming.
In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, there were not many monuments to the Confederacy, beyond memorials placed in cemeteries for soldiers who had died. Today, there are over seven hundred Confederate monuments, situated in far more than the eleven states that seceded from the Union in 1860. Many of these monuments went up in city squares or in front of official buildings between 1890 and 1950, coinciding with the Jim Crow era. As the historian Mark Elliott observes, groups like the Daughters of the Confederacy were interested in rehabilitating and glorifying the Southern cause. Monuments of this kind exist at the intersection of art and infrastructure, public memory and élite whim. They possess what Farber calls an “aura of permanence.” But they embody the struggle to interpret a shared past, and they contain a desire, he said, to “stop time, to hold on to power.”
For the past few years, Monument Lab has worked with fellows around the world to bring conversations about power and public space to new communities. Initially, Farber and Lum found it was often hard to convince local officials to act on problematic old statues and placards in their cities. A turning point in the broader public imagination came with the Unite the Right rally in August of 2017, when white-nationalist groups went to Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the removal of Confederate statues and memorials. The protests turned violent, resulting in the death of a counter-protester, Heather Heyer. Monument Lab is now invited to assist forward-thinking local governments and historical commissions.
