History of Art and Architecture

Colloquium - Paul Farber, Co-founder of Monument Lab

Wednesday, March 4, 2020 - 12:00pm

202 Frick Fine Arts

Please come for a moderated Q&A with Monument Lab co-founder Paul Farber.

Paul will discuss some of Monument Lab’s work since 2017, when their team burst into national prominence with an exhibition of temporary memorial interventions across Philadelphia’s neighborhoods and a massive engagement with the city’s residents around the question, “What is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia?” Since then Monument Lab has expanded its work to cities across the U.S. and has organized a national fellows program of activists working with public art and public memory.
From Monument Lab’s “Report to the City” (2018): 

As a nation, we are in the midst of a long reckoning over our inherited monuments.

Across the country, after pressure from activists, artists, and students, city governments are grappling with questions of representation in the monumental landscape.The removal of several statues, including those dedicated to Confederate generals and other problematic figures, has garnered attention and created a few sites of cultural repair. The memorializing of a handful of new figures in some cities adds chapters to local public histories. However, the untroubled, overwhelming status quo fills out the rest of our historical imaginations and civic spaces. We are haunted by the unresolved matters of the past and our inability to adapt, address, and remediate in the present.

Paul M. Farber, PhD is a curator, historian, and educator from Philadelphia. He is Artistic Director and Co-Founder of Monument Lab and Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Public Art and Space at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

Farber's research and curatorial projects explore transnational urban history, cultural memory, and creative approaches to civic engagement. He is the author of A Wall of Our Own: An American History of the Berlin Wall (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) which tells the untold story of a group of American artists and writers (Leonard Freed, Angela Davis, Shinkichi Tajiri, and Audre Lorde) who found refuge along the Berlin Wall and in Cold War Germany in order to confront political divisions back home in the United States. He is also the co-editor with Ken Lum of Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia (Temple University Press, 2019), a public art and history handbook and catalogue designed to generate new critical ways of thinking about and building monuments.

In addition to curating Monument Lab’s City Hall exhibition (2015) and citywide exhibition (2017) in Philadelphia, he is a co-curator with Salamishah Tillet of Monument Lab’s A Call to Peace exhibition in Newark (2019). With Monument Lab, he directs research residencies with the High Line and Pulitzer Arts Foundation, convenes a national fellows program, and hosts its podcast featuring artists, scholars, activists, and designers shaping the next generation of public art.