AC Discussion | Here Before: Monuments, Memory, and Place
On May 9th, Karin Campbell, Phil Willson Curator of Contemporary Art at Joslyn Art Museum; Minnesota-based artist Inkpa Mani; Brooklyn-based artist Moko Fukuyama; and Amplify’s 2022 Indigenous American Artist Support Grant recipient and Alternate Currents Working Group member, Nathaniel Ruleaux met on Zoom to discuss the porous connections between monuments, memory, and place and how misrepresentations of our collective histories in public spaces shape cultural norms and values.
Watch the full conversation, or read through the transcript below to find links to additional resources, and share your thoughts in the comments section.
Title of Discussion: Here Before: Monuments, Memory, and Place
Panelist 1: Karin Campbell, Phil Wilson Curator of Contemporary Art, Josly Art Museum
Panelist 2: Moko Fukuyama, Artist
Panelist 3: Inkpa Mani, Artist and Educator
Moderator: Nathaniel Ruleaux, Artist and Organizer
Date of Discussion: May 9th, 2022
List of Acronyms: [KC] = Karin Campbell; [MF] = Moko Fukuyama; [IM] = Inkpa Mani; [NR] = Nathaniel Ruleaux; [PF] = Peter Fankhauser
Transcript
[PF] Welcome everybody. I think we’re going to go ahead and get started. It’s great to have you all here for tonight’s Alternate Currents panel discussion, Here Before: Monuments, Memory and Place. Alternate Currents is a three-prong program with a discussion series, dedicated blog, and a working group of ten artists whose practices are rooted in racial, economic, and ecological justice that help guide the program and move it forward.
My name is Peter. I’m the program director here at Amplify Arts and for tonight’s discussion, we’re taking a cue from the National Monument Audit published by an arts org out of Philadelphia called Monument Lab. If you’re not familiar with their work, please check out their website. I’ll drop a link in the chat. The audit found that of the top 50 most commonly represented figures in US monuments, only 5% were Black or Indigenous. Zero percent were AAPI, Latinx, or LGBTQ2S+. The vast majority were male and landowners. We thought that was worth talking about.
So, we have an incredible panel of artists and thinkers with us tonight to help us unpack what it means to monumentalize misrepresentations of our collective histories in public spaces. A big thank you to Karin Campbell, Moko Fukuyama, Inkpa Mani, and Nathaniel Ruluex, who is a member of our 2022 AC Working Group and who will also be asking questions and guiding the discussion for agreeing to share their time and experiences with us. Thank you to the Sherwood Foundation as well. Their support makes programs like this possible.
Panelists will be in conversation with each other for 40 or 45 minutes before we open the floor to questions, but the Q&A and chat functions will be active throughout so please feel free to share thoughts or questions anytime.
I’ll also mention quickly that a video and transcript of tonight’s discussion with links to additional articles and more resources will be posted to the Alternate Currents Blog in a couple weeks so you can revisit it there, leave your thoughts in the comments section and help us keep this conversation going. You can find the blog on our website at amplifyarts.org.
Thank you all again for being here. We really appreciate your support and participation in critical discussions like this and with that, I will pass it over to Nate!
[NR] Thanks, Peter.
[Nathaniel introduces himself in Lakota.]
Hello my relatives. Thank you all for joining us tonight. Thank you to Amplify Arts for hosting. And thank you to our terrific panelists for joining this conversation.
I started with the greeting and introduction Lakota saying I’m Nathaniel Ruleaux and greeting you all with a good heart. My pronouns are he/him. I’m a partner, father, and member of the Oglala Lakota Nation. I’m also an artist and member of the Alternate Currents Working Group.
I’m excited to get into this discussion on monuments and memory. It's important to come to discussions like this with a good heart and to understand that it's impossible for us to discuss this topic in its entirety in an hour. So, come in knowing a sense of incompleteness may be present at the end. Also, if anyone here tonight has additional discussion needs, feel free to comment in the chat and we'll try to address those needs. We'll also have time for Q&A at the end, but if you have anything before then, just drop it in the chat and we'll try to get to it.
Before we begin, I wanted to connect some dots around this topic. I’ve enjoyed watching the AC panels and I’m very honored to be part of this conversation and to facilitate it. In previous discussions, the pros and cons of land acknowledgements have been discussed several times. Today, I open acknowledging that I’m calling in from colonized Omaha, Nebraska--land that will always be the homelands of the Umóⁿhoⁿ, Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, Ponca, Pawnee, Otoe, Missouria, and Ioway people. In our state capital, the city of Lincoln, the city's mayor, in a display of the harms that landing acknowledgements can hold, listed a similar group of native tribes and nations in public a statement where she signed off on the development of sacred lands in a disturbing deal between the city, the Catholic Church, and developers to destroy an area of Wilderness Park. This development deal will directly impact the local indigenous community and their spiritual practices. It’s a land acknowledgement and land theft in one breath.
In tonight's land acknowledgement, I ask those viewing this discussion to take additional steps and help make a difference for the original stewards of this land by following, supporting, and donating to Niskíthe Prayer Camp where land defenders are currently fighting to protect another piece of our planet from yet another monument to colonial capitalism. I’m going to drop some links in the chat and hop off my soapbox now.
While I'm dropping those links, I’d like to invite our panelists to hop in with a quick bio and background. Once you've shared a bit about yourselves, and what you do, just pass it over to the next speaker. Thank you so much. Whoever would like to go first can hop in.
[KC] I’ll go first. Hello, everyone! My name is Karin Campbell. I’m the Phil Wilson curator of contemporary art at Joslyn Art Museum here in Omaha. Thank you, Amplify for hosting this evening. Nate thank you for agreeing to MC. I will listen to you on your soapbox any and all the time.
I've been in Omaha for 10 years now. I curate the contemporary collection at Joslyn. In addition to curating exhibitions, working with living artists, and doing programming in my capacity as a curator in the city, I’m also involved with a number of public art initiatives. I sit on the Public Art Commission, and I have been on a number of juries and selection committees over the last 10 years to select artists and objects for various public and municipal art projects.
[MF] I’ll go next. Thank you, Amplify Arts, for having me on the panel. My name is Moko Fukuyama. I’m an artist who lives and works in New York City. My work is multidisciplinary and multifaceted and ranges widely in medium, tone, and subject. I explore the socio-economic realities and psychology of everyday life through art. I’m mainly fascinated by the lives of others and the chain of consequences that lead us into now, and how we flourish and survive.
I came to the United States to pursue a college education in art and decided to immigrate here instead of going back home my home country of Japan. I’m now a proud New Yorker, but previously, I lived in Ames, Iowa; Memphis, Tennessee; and Boston, Massachusetts. My artwork is really informed by my immersion into American culture. I have lived exactly half of my life in Japan and other half in the United States and I still struggle to understand whether I am an outsider looking in or inside or looking out. Storytelling through art has really become a means for me to interpret and contend with social and political issues that impinge on my life and the American way of life. Hopefully, I can give an insider, as well as an outsider, perspective on today's topic.
[IM] Hello, everybody. My name is Inkpa Mani. I currently live in Wheaton, Minnesota and I’m a multi-multidisciplinary artist. I graduated in 2019 from the University of South Dakota and I’m a stone sculptor, wood carver, painter. I do a lot of drawing and I also do public artwork. Most of my public artwork focuses on the community and stories that people want to share. It's very community engaged and community based where people share their stories and their experiences. That's what a lot of my work looks at--sharing stories that people feel are important to share and for others to learn. I’m working on a project right now in Sisseton, South Dakota, which is a 30-ton stone sculpture. I'm also working with the city of on a project on next to the Mississippi river. I have other projects scattered throughout the United States too that I’ve been working on for the last couple years.
[NR] Awesome. Thank you all for sharing. This is going to be such a cool conversation. To start us off, what do monuments mean to you? What truths, falsehoods, misconceptions, or memories do they hold? This can be both a big question and a small question.
[MF] So, I guess I may be the only foreigner on the panel so I might have a different perspective when it comes to monuments. I grew up in Japan. The country is very, very old. Every milestone, event, or character in the history books have monuments to them somewhere in the form of architectural structures, such as temples or shrines, or in the form of statues, whether they're good guys or bad guys. A lot of times you may be stepping into a beautiful, glorious shrine without really knowing it was built by a military dictator who conquered the region.
I always felt that a lot of falsehoods or troubled histories are forgiven in the name of spirituality or the decorative aspect of those structures. Japanese people take a lot of pride in craftsmanship and a lot of those centuries old monuments are there to stay forever, regardless of purpose or who built them. It's like a statute of limitation or something. It's like a pyramid in Egypt--the older it gets the harder it is to get rid of or reconsider. They become artifacts. I deeply hope that adults are teaching their children about the motives behind creating those structures. I'm hopeful, in a way, for the United States because problematic statues here of Christopher Columbus or confederate generals, for example, are relatively new. I see a great hope for decolonization or changing the impulse to historicize.
[KC} I’d like to piggyback off that, Moko. Your point about how everything being older in Japan resonated with me because I was thinking about how short our history really is. I’m glad you came out of the other side of that with some hope. My perspective is a little bleaker. You look at all these monuments and realize how recently they were constructed and how recently people were trying to write and rewrite history from a very specific set of perspectives. I’m interested in the tension between those two understandings of the possibilities of monuments moving forward. I don't think there's no hope, but I think monuments are a reminder that history is always in someone's interpretation of events. Whether you're looking at art, or listening to music, or reading an account in a textbook, it's always someone's idea about what history was and how we should think about what happened in the past.
[IM] When I think of monuments, I think of two very different branches of a tree. I think of pre-colonization of the Americas. What did monuments look like and then? What do monuments look like after colonization? With that, I think of dominion and national pride and nationalism. When thinking of monuments and through an indigenous lens, I think about prayer and an acknowledgement of events. Typically, those events are natural events--something in nature happened that was so unusual in a lifetime to happen. The other part is prayer or an acknowledgement to the universe, or to the energies, that you want something to happen in a positive way. A lot of these pre-contact monuments, through agriculture and city building, have been destroyed or overlooked. Something that maybe my ancestors would have seen as an important stone, another culture would have considered an obstacle. Those are the two avenues I think about when it comes to monuments.
Looking at my work, I’m always trying to think about the former route and continue that chain of monument making.
[NR] Thank you all for sharing. That's where my mind has been too, but for me, Mount Rushmore is the thing that pops into my head right away. and like the desecration of Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe, this place of creation; this place the US government made the property of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ in the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868). It's a monument created by an associate, if not a member, of the Ku Klux Klan and features presidents with sordid pasts and histories, from human enslavement to the largest mass execution in US history--the killing of the Dakota 38. It sees more 2 million visitors a year and Native people have been fighting against it for a long time trying to get the true history of that place out there with AIM’s (American Indian Movement) occupation in ’71, or the land defenders with NDN Collective when 45 had his global pandemic fourth of July bash out there. In my mind, it's almost like a big boss at the end of a messed up, really bad video game or something. A lot of my dislike of that monument comes from a deep hurt from the lies it perpetuates.
Visiting as a child, I had a sense of awe and this feeling of being tricked into associating it with patriotism; tricked it by a monument that goes against values I believe in and values I hope the nation believes in. The same negativity that's there is attached to most monuments I come across. The ones that I find myself caring about anymore are natural monuments like the Scott’s Bluff National Monument in town where I was born. It’s a natural structure but even that comes with a bad history of land theft and murder and a land acquisition system in our National Parks that's not dissimilar to what Indigenous people were subjected to. So, it's cool to hear that we all have connections but from these very different backgrounds.
Before we get into the dissecting our feelings about the National Monument Audit, Moko, you have a video share.
[MF] Yeah, so this video is specifically about monuments in Memphis, Tennessee. In 2020-2021, I started this journey called American Recordings and it's about different regions in different cities, different people in the United States. This work is called American Frequency and hones in on the city of Memphis where I attended college and what I consider one of my homes. In this work, I follow one of one individual over the course of seven years. This is a performance and a film at the same time. It serves as a larger examination of systematic racism and the slow pace of change in this historically and culturally significant Southern city. I would like to play opening segment where we encounter different monuments throughout the city.
[NR] While Moko's getting that pulled up, we're about to dive into talking about the National Monument Audit by Monument Lab. The top 50 represented individuals in that data set include 11 US presidents and 12 US generals. Half of the top 50 enslaved people. More than a third, 40%, percent were born into family wealth. A large majority, 76%, owned land and only five of the top 50 figures were Black or Indigenous. Martin Luther King Jr. was ranked fourth, Harriet Tubman ranked 24th, Tecumseh ranked 25th, Sacagawea ranked 28th, and Frederick Douglass rates 29th. There are no US born Latinx, Asian Pacific Islander or self-identified LGBTQ+ people in the top 50. That's what we're going to dive into after Moko's video.
[MF] Right. Here we go. [A video excerpt of American Frequency by Moko Fukuyama plays].
[NR] Thank you so much for sharing that. It really took me back. I’ve only been a tourist in Memphis a couple times and those are the things that are still in my brain.
[KC] I don't know Memphis at all. I’ve been to the airport and that's about it, but I’m fascinated by the idea that the city itself is a living, breathing monument. I have to be honest, I walk away from that video thinking it's a really bizarre place. Like to your point, Nate, these are the things that stick in your memory. I think it paints a portrait of American history that is conflicted and confused and unsure of itself.
[MF] Absolutely. As I talked about in the film a little bit, I was really disturbed or confused by it at the beginning. You see this statue of KKK founder, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and nobody seems to do anything about it. I was like, “Oh, that's just the way it is.” It finally came down last year.
[KC] I kept coming back to this question as I was preparing for the panel of who monuments are really for. I think the video does a good job of laying the groundwork for this. Who do these various monuments speak to? Who’s seeing their stories reflected back to them? There's great power in that, right? That got the question churning in my head. Who are monuments built and for?
[IM] One of the thoughts I had while watching your video was that in the United States there exists two types of monuments. Monuments to people, but also monuments to ideas. Memphis, and multiple cities across the United States, are monuments to the auto industry and all of the people who benefit from the auto industry. How hard is it is to walk from place to place in a city versus in a rural area? They're not made for pedestrians necessarily. They're made for cars. That, in itself, is the American ideal to have a vehicle and to drive these open roads--this “unclaimed land.”
There are multiple layers of monuments in the United States, and we're used to this one structural somebody on a pedestal lifted up. When you mentioned that empty pedestal, it reminded me of a conversation I had with some of my peers about why there are so many sculptures of men on pedestals. It really got down to the idea of if they're not on pedestals, if they're at eye-level, we start to see their faults and all their human flaws. They have to prop themselves up to get a head start, a couple steps ahead in the race. Otherwise, they risk people seeing them on the same level. They literally tower over us as a reminder that their achievements are greater than, or so they think.
[NR] There’s definitely a separation and otherworldliness given to the people depicted in monuments. It even gets to a point, for me, where I stop seeing the messaging or purpose behind it and it becomes all about the persona and a glorification of Hollywood glitz that gets sprinkled on top.
Talking about the Monument Audit, and specifically traditional statuary, can you talk about the interdependencies between monuments, collective memory, and our perception of place? How do those all come together?
[KC] This dovetails nicely into Inkpa's comments in that there's a real blurring of boundaries in monuments between fact and what resides in the collective imagination. I think that, in the same way history can be rewritten and reinterpreted, memories can be written fresh and we can be told what to remember. Earlier, Nathaniel, when you were talking about your interpretation of Mount Rushmore as a kid and how, in your mind, it was fact. You didn’t agree with it, but you were seduced by the scale, the artistry, all the people around you in awe of this thing. You start to look around and think, “Well, if they're in awe, maybe this is a thing I should respect and celebrate and memorialize.”
[IM] That’s the thesis of one of the projects I’m working on right now. How do we remember structures in our community and how do we have that conversation? So, the project I’m working looks at the multi-generational impact that Dakota women have had on the Sisseton Wahpeton community. One of the things I’m thinking about is how we build collective memory together. How do you build a community together and say, “What is our memory of this place and what do we bring forth to the next generation?” I think that's what monuments kind of try to do. There's a fear that future generations won't appreciate this narrative that you're trying to project into the future, whether you agree with the monument or you don't. With that, I’m striving with this project in Sisseton to ask community what memories and what symbols are important and asking them to leave their own hand, leave their own imprint. I think about what stories we tell ourselves and our kids and the people around us about people or objects or spaces. That sense of memory ties so much into a lot of our issues today as far as understanding how we've gotten to this point and going piece by piece. It's almost like each one of those monuments get in the way of that until we can find ways to make our own monuments in different ways.
[NR] That sounds like a really powerful project.
Conventional monuments also have a long history of commemorating violence and that comes from imperialist projects—conquest, war, etc. From this report, violence is the most dominant subject of commemoration across the nation. The ratio of records that refer to war and peace monuments is 13:1. The ratio of war to love 17:1. War to care is 59:1.
53 massacre monuments memorialized the killing of white settlers and soldiers by Indigenous tribes. Only 4 represent the killing of Native populations by white settlers. There are no results for memorials recognizing massacres of other people of color despite at least 34 documented massacres of Black Americans between 1865 and 1876 alone.
During widespread demonstrations across the country to protest racial inequality, monuments of confederate leaders, like we've been talking about, imperialist colonizers, Christopher Columbus, have been removed by municipal bodies and toppled by protesters whose actions are often characterized as “violent” erasures of collective history. So, how can we contextualize and differentiate between the violence of commemorating imperialist conquest and the “violence” of the of toppling a monument?
[KC] I want to reference an article that I think resonates with this topic. This is from May of 2020, an opinion piece in the New York Times by the columnist Charles M. Blow called, “The Destructive Power of Despair.” I would like to share a quote that says a lot. Mr. Blow says:
“Despair has an incredible power to initiate destruction. It is exceedingly dangerous to assume that oppression and pain can be inflicted without consequence, to believe that the victim will silently absorb the injury and the wound will fade. No, the injuries compound, particularly when there is no effort to alter the system doing the wounding, no avenue by which the aggrieved can seek justice. This all breeds despair, simmering below the surface, a building up in need of release, to be let out, to lash out, to explode.”
He then goes on to talk about the different kinds of violence and putting up with “quiet violence,” or the pervasive, constant, inescapable violence that accompanies colonial impulses and the practice of colonialism. Then, he talks about, and this, to me, is the most salient point perhaps, how America responds to violence. Violence that catches our attention far more than quiet acts of resistance. Violence catches our attention on TV and in print media and in real life. So, if violence is the language being spoken by these monuments, particularly those that honor oppressors and colonizers, why would you try to respond in a different language? Would you respond to someone speaking in Spanish to you in Swahili? No, probably not. It's not an “eye for an eye” situation, but it is certainly coming to someone's level and responding in a way that will catch the most attention. That to me is the difference.
[NR] That article really spoke to me too. Thank you.
[MF] I was reading parts of the article too that said during the Civil Rights Movement, protesters practiced non-violence, but they were regularly met with violence. That violence is desperate action and I think that is very true in the Black Lives Matter movement. I was at the protests constantly in New York City and I also spent spring of 2021 at Franconia Sculpture Park close to Minneapolis while the trial over George Floyd’s killing was happening. That sentence really resonated. It's true. I experienced the tension between the police officers and people who cannot help themselves from saying “all lives matter,” and protestors. The tension was really high but taking down those statues is necessary. It's liberating. I don't see that as an act of violence at all.
[IM] I’m part of a group in North Dakota that's looking at and examining a monument to a massacre of Dakota, Arikara, and Lakota people that happened in 1863. The estimates are pretty grim. It's a pretty bad massacre. It was a camp of about five thousand Dakota, Lakota and Arikara people. General Sully and an infantry group from Nebraska came in, and after they waved a flag of peace, a white flower sack, they started to shoot into the camp. In some estimates, they say that between 200 and 600 were massacred at that site. If you go there today, it's called the White Stone Hill Massacre. On top of the tallest hill in that part stands a 15-foot monument to the colonial soldiers. It's pretty audacious to think that the ones who commit the massacre are the ones who deserve acknowledgement of some sort. At the bottom of the hill on a little tiny plaque it says, “There were also some Indians who died.” That's the extent of the formal acknowledgement.
This group who have been meeting, we have a horse ride that goes up there every year on September 3rd, when the massacre took place. The conversation that we keep going back to is that this is not our shame. This is not our shame to carry. It was their violence that they brought here. There was a question of whether we take this monument down. Do we replace it? What do we do with it? We arrived at a place in this conversation where we kept going back to the idea that this violence is not our shame. How do we, as people who have survived injustice, internalize that shame? How do you turn that finger around and say, “That's your shame now; you’re the one that has to deal with the consequences of that history and all of the people who have supported that history.”
One of the ideas that has been brought forward is how can you point that shame back. Do you make that monument, that outrageous monument to nationalism, so blatantly obvious that you can't ignore it? Do you coat it in a fuchsia paint? Do you get so public, so obnoxious that it's unavoidable because then you have to have that conversation? Within that, you have to be careful because these are traumas that people experience. These are things that people feel very viscerally within their bodies, whether they know the history or not. They can identify it within themselves but don't always have the words. That's what I think about violence. How do you how turn that finger around so that the shame isn't on the person, or inside of you, but it's pointed back towards where it came from.
[NR] Looking at monuments, especially in the Midwest, you know you drive down I-80 and anytime you stop at a rest area, you stumble across some monument. When you get close and you read the plaque, you start to find the historical inaccuracies. Moko, you talked about liberation and that's kind of what it is for me. There's a difference between violence that hurts people, hurts our relatives, hurts the earth, hurts living things, versus property. People versus property, right. Property is something that cannot feel these things.
So, I really appreciate your comments and I’d love to hear more from Moko and Karin, if you if you have thoughts on the reparative potential of memorializing restorative justice and peacemaking and acts of care instead of these memorials to violence.
[MF] You know, I don't know how artists can help. We try, but I don't know. I lived in the South and my partner is from the South and has family members who are really upset about the statutes coming down. This is a different form of violence, but there were aggressive, hateful messages and comments made about statue removal on Facebook. That is a form of violence too. At one point, I wrote a personal letter to those family members to why taking down those statutes is necessary and how the confederate statues cannot be detached from white supremacy and the pro-slavery doctrine of the confederacy. As a foreigner, I’m explaining a thing I thought people would know. It’s surprisingly that that's not what they were taught. I wrote them personally and started having conversations on a smaller scale.
That's in my artwork too. I traveled to Iowa during the 2020 presidential election season and interviewed multiple Iowans from different walks of life and different places on the political spectrum. I tried to hear what where their perspectives were coming from. I talked to republican farmers, democrat farmers, politicians, people on the streets and tried to map out and then organize their responses. What we can do artists, it's a big question.
[KC] Trying to patch together the thoughts of some people is the lord's work so, thank you. I was interested Moko, to hear you talk about the responses of some of your friends and family. I think that points directly back to what Inkpa was just talking about with regard to turning that shame around. That response is the public manifestation of their shame. They just don't know how to say, “I’m ashamed.” What you do when you're embarrassed, when you don't want to admit your role in a system, whether implicit or explicit, is you is you lash out. It's a different kind of violent response, in a way.
[NR] Thank you for those responses. It's all tying together very nicely here.
The concept of liberation we talked, breaking the of our minds and learning takes us to our next question. In an interview with Hyperallergic, scholar and curator Ariella Azoulay says that “unlearning is an unending process under the imperial condition.” So, if we accept that monuments do not exist in a state of benign neutrality, what comes next? What must we unlearn about our relationship with monuments in general?
[KC] I think it's a constant process of realizing that we can't take things at face value. History is always someone's version of the truth. Everything comes with a bias. I go back, Nathaniel, to your experience at Mount Rushmore before you had full critical thinking skills, you took that as as credo--that is the way things are. Some people, unfortunately, never unlearn that and never have the opportunity to flex the muscle of thinking on their own or refusing to take things at face value.
[IM] One of my uncles, when I was working on the sculpture in Sisseton, expressed that our people didn't make monuments. He stopped and then he really spoke and said, “our people made living monuments.” That's one of the things I keep going back to. What does it mean to have a living monument or a monument that evolves and changes with its surroundings? It's not idle. When it stays idle, it starts to become stagnant and nothing that's stagnant is healthy. I think monuments have to change into something that is living. One of the ways that it stays living is by collective participation, a collective memory. A lot of the monuments that we look at today have not done that. It's one memory and it starts to fester and become stagnant. That's why I want to lean toward that branch of the tree where monuments, through an indigenous perspective, move closer to nature, to prayer and it's not one person, but multiple things.
[NR] That that brings me back to thinking about who these monuments are for. I think a lot about our struggling planet and our earth and the fact that commemorating history in traditional statuary is pointless. If it's not a living monument, if we don't take care of the earth, who's going to be around to read this stuff? That's been on my mind a lot. How do you think the landscape of public monuments will change in the future—5, 10, 50 years from now? Are there thoughts about future of our relationship with monuments or some examples of public projects that work to build a more inclusive understanding of history?
[KC] this was actually the section of the conversation that got me the most excited in my prep. I started furiously scribbling on a notepad because I’ve done a lot of research into this the last couple of years. I worked on a big public art project that is going to finally be realized here in the next couple of weeks in Omaha in our Gene Leahy Mall. Everyone goes into their work with an agenda, so as I started shepherding this selection committee, I certainly had thoughts in mind and they all pointed toward what you were just talking about and how we can rethink what a public art project, or what a monument, is. The theme that kept arising was that monuments are no longer representational things. We're moving away from the body, we're moving away from identifiable objects, we’re moving away from the stagnant object to your point, Inkpa.
I know we're running out of time and I’d be happy to kind of drop a few examples in the chat, but there have been great public art projects by artists like Allison Janae Hamilton and Duane Linklater and Hank Willis Thomas, who has a forthcoming project in Boston Commons. Thinking about all that led me to things like the Aids Memorial Quilt and this gun violence memorial project that Hank Willis Thomas has been stewarding. It's not in public. It's at currently at the National Building Museum, I think, but it's a living thing in so much as people who are affected by gun violence can contribute items to it in these sort of glass bricks that get that build on top of one another. So, I think we're moving away from a monument that looks like an identifiable person and a thing meant to represent a moment, or an event, or an achievement and into these things that are a little more open to interpretation that can change with us as opposed to reflecting what happened before us.
[MF] Also, we talked about the traditional statue, like a pedestal figure erected on the top of a pedestal. I was lucky enough to witness Rumors of War by Kehinde Wiley in Times Square a few years ago before it moved to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. It's there permanently now. It’s definitely a traditional figure on top of a pedestal, but it’s a young African American man with Nike sneakers and dreadlocks. It sits close to those confederate generals. I find that just as powerful.
[NR] Thank you all for your comments. I feel like we tackled a lot today and got through quite a bit. I’m feeling hopeful from this conversation and the next 50 years. You look at January 6th and where our nation goes from there. Who gets to choose how that story is told? Where does our history kind of go from here? That’s an important thing for those who come next if we want a better world together.
We have a couple minutes left. If you have any questions, please drop the chat. We'll try to hop on them really fast. Also, I know panelists have a lot of cool stuff going on right now. Feel free to share with the with the Zoom.
[KC] Really quick, I did drop a bunch of links to some projects and sculptures I’ve been looking at in recent years in the chat--living memorial projects like we talked about, if anyone's interested. Joslyn Art Museum is closed to the public for two years, but just because our doors are closed doesn't mean that we are not doing anything. We've got a ton of projects in terms of programs, lectures, classes, and public art making activities. There's still a lot going on. If you're in the Omaha area, keep an eye on our website for upcoming programs. For those of you who don't know, we're doing a major site expansion and renovation. Construction is well underway at this point, so our doors are closed, unfortunately.
[MF] This summer, I am doing a project in a partnership with River Valley Arts Collective and Stoneleaf Retreat and presenting a work at the Al Head Foundation. It's all upstate New York area starting in June. The work will be mainly sculptural some film too. It's a third iteration of American Recordings prospectively titled American Lumber. It's all about trees. I am also very fortunately receiving this year's Guggenheim Fellowship, so I’ll be working with them starting this month, actually.
[NR] Amazing. Thank you thank you. Any final events or other projects you've been working on?
[IM] Well, I’ll continue working on my 60,000-pound stone sculpture in Sisseton, South Dakota. One of the exciting parts about it is that I’m involved in community. Community members can come up to the large stone blocks, 9 ft blocks by 3 ft, and they'll be able to place their hands and be remembered forever. You can go to inkpamaniart and check out my other work.
[NR] Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing.
I’m actually going up to Pine Ridge this week because the 54th annual Red Cloud Indian Art Show is going to be taking place up there at The Heritage Center. That runs June through August. It's a really good annual art show. Indigenous artists from across the nation show work and it's always a good time, so hope you catch it. They’re doing a lot of virtual stuff, since we're still going through Covid. I think they're opening for in-person stuff this year too, so check it out if you can.
We just passed eight. Thank you all so much. Thanks to everyone who tuned in. A recording of this discussion we'll be posted to the Alternate Currents blog in a couple weeks, so share it with your friends and relatives. Thank you, panelists. I had such a fun time talking with you all. Conversations like this are how things get started, so I really appreciate your time. Thank you everyone and we'll see you later. Bye.
*This transcript has been edited for clarity.
About the Panelists:
Karin Campbell is the Phil Willson Curator of Contemporary Art at Joslyn Art Museum. Since joining Joslyn in 2012, Campbell has curated several major temporary exhibitions, including 30 Americans from the Miami-based Rubell Family Collection, Word/Play: Prints, Photographs, and Paintings by Ed Ruscha, and the traveling survey Sheila Hicks: Material Voices. In addition to overseeing Joslyn’s modern and contemporary permanent collection, Campbell is the principal curator for the Karen and Doug Riley Contemporary Artists Project (CAP) Gallery, the first space in the museum’s history dedicated specifically to living artists.
Moko Fukuyama is a Japanese artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Fukuyama has received grants, fellowships and commissions from notable art institutions such as Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Foundation For Contemporary Arts, Jerome Foundation, SOHO20, MacDowell, Yaddo, Recess, The Shed, ISCP (International Studio & Curatorial Program) and more. She completed her residency at The Kitchen, New York, New York in spring 2021. During the residency, she created American Recordings, Act I: American Harvest and Act II: American Frequency in collaboration with Yo! Vinyl Richie. She was a 2021 fellow at Franconia Sculpture Park, Shafer, Minnesota and Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, New York. She recently had her solo exhibition Streaming Surface at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, New York.
Inkpa Mani is an Indigenous artist who grew up in the lands now known as Mexico and the United States and he currently lives in Wheaton, Minnesota. He earned his BFA at the University of South Dakota in 2019. Inkpa is a multi-disciplinary artist and academic. Inkpa works with paints, stone, paper, and digital media to explore his culture. His process involves community, oral histories, institutional research, and experiences to highlight the concerns and values of his people. He integrates art, history, and tradition to share new ideas of contemporary life. Inkpa shares the continuum of Indigenous art that has continued to evolve for thousands of years. He shares his knowledge of Native American history, art and culture and how Indigenous people have adapted to changes in social and cultural landscapes. He has worked on large scale sculptures, murals, and community-based arts in the Midwest as well as working with Dakota language education for the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate. Inkpa currently works at Tiospa Zina Tribal School and is earning his Business Administration degree and his Dakota Teaching Certificate form Sisseton Wahpeton College. He is currently working on a public land art project in South Dakota, a 60,000-pound public stone sculpture in Sisseton, SD.
Nathaniel Ruleaux (he/him) is an award-winning artist and culture worker currently located on unceded land of the Umónhon & Očhéthi Šakówiŋ in Nebraska. A partner, father, and member of the Oglala Lakota Nation, his work combines modern art with traditional indigenous imagery. He is a founding member of Unceded Artist Collective, and sits on the board of the Omaha Area Youth Orchestras. Recently, he created work for the national Indigenous Futures Survey 2.0 campaign. In addition to creating visual art, he is a classically-trained actor and educator. He received his MFA in Theatre from the University of Houston’s School of Theatre and Dance after receiving a BA in Theatre Performance at the Johnny Carson School of Theatre & Film at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.