Wednesday, March 4, 2020 - 12:00pm
202 Frick Fine Arts
Please come for a moderated Q&A with Monument Lab co-founder Paul Farber.
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.