Teachable Monuments: Using Public Art to Spark Dialogue and Confront Controversy

Description

Monuments around the world have become the focus of intense and sustained discussions, activism, vandalism, and removal. Since the convulsive events of 2015 and 2017, during which white supremacists committed violence in the shadow of Confederate symbols, and the 2020 nationwide protests against racism and police brutality, protesters and politicians in the United States have removed Confederate monuments, as well as monuments to historical figures like Christopher Columbus and Dr. J. Marion Sims, questioning their legitimacy as present-day heroes that their place in the public sphere reinforces. The essays included in this anthology offer guidelines and case studies tailored for students and teachers to demonstrate how monuments can be used to deepen civic and historical engagement and social dialogue. Essays analyze specific controversies throughout North America with various outcomes as well as examples of monuments that convey outdated or unwelcome value systems without prompting debate.

Sierra Rooney is Assistant Professor of Art History at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, USA. She is the author of numerous articles on public monuments and controversy. Jennifer Wingate is Associate Professor of Fine Arts at St. Francis College, USA. She was co-editor of Public Art Dialogue (2017-2020) and is the author of Sculpting Doughboys: Memory Gender, and Taste in America's Worlds War I Memorials (2013). She has published on representations of the domestic display of FDR portraits, WWI memorials, and public art. Harriet F. Senie is Professor of Art History at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center, The City University of New York, USA. She is the author of Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11 (2015), The 'Tilted Arc' Controversy: Dangerous Precedent? (2001), and Contemporary Public Sculpture: Tradition, Transformation, and Controversy (1992). She has edited several anthologies on different aspects of public art.

[E]ditors Sierra Rooney and Jennifer Wingate set the tone for a compelling, multifaceted approach to the challenges and complexities of monuments that mark contested histories and that serve overlapping and changing purposes. While the editors refer to the anthology as a field guide, it also serves as a set of blueprints for laying pedagogical foundations that can support the complexities of multiple histories and for framing rooms that allow for challenging discussion, debate, and conflicting points of view ... Teachable Monuments reinvigorates those debates at another vital cultural moment, where critical discussions about the influences and impacts of monuments and memorials on our understanding (and often misunderstanding) of American histories are needed to help us find our way through the national struggle for social justice. * RACAR * Teachable Monuments join[s] an already sizeable contemporary collection of works by traditional historians, public historians, and art historians, among others ... [This book] on monument controversies, removals, and reimaginations help[s] to fill out even more of the story, a story encompassing the revival of, but also, turn away from, racial violence at local and national levels, in the past and in the present ... Teachable Monuments is a valuable contribution to the current genre of monument books. * The Public Historian * At a moment of incendiary rhetoric and iconoclasm, Teachable Monuments arrives at the perfect time, offering concrete ways to foster socially productive dialogue across a variety of artistic, educational, and civic spheres. * Amy Werbel, Professor, History of Art, Fashion Institute of Technology, USA * Teachable Monuments is an essential volume providing a theoretical foundation to examine monuments and their attendant controversies, while also offering lessons with direct applications from the classroom to the conference room. Museum curators, government officials, nonprofit staffers, community activists, and public art consultants will find much of use in this book, addressing the many stakeholders and competing interests in our monument landscape. Nearly any educator, from grammar to graduate school, will find something to engage their students here. So much more than a field guide, Teachable Monuments provides suggestions for project based learning, examples of curriculum planning, ample case studies, and best practices in the field. Its organization into three interrelated strategies (Teaching, Political and Engagement) is user-friendly and further enhances their connections. Issues of monument stewardship (including commission, removal, relocation, deaccession and preservation) are contextualized within a social justice framework. Rather than shrug off the contested histories and divisive politics of many monuments, the essays in this anthology face the discriminatory and traumatic legacies of racism and colonialism head-on, amid the rising agency of public activism, protest and resistance. Historical perspectives and cultural values no doubt shift and evolve over time, and so must monuments and their meanings. If monuments have the power to articulate "ideologies of hate," our reinterpretations can imbue them with the transformative potential to illuminate more just paths forward. * Cher Krause Knight, Professor of Art History, Emerson College, USA * An invaluable resource for those who want to learn from the protests that are shaking monuments across the country, as well as for artists, activists, and organizers working to change the memorial landscape we have inherited. * Kirk Savage, William S. Dietrich II Professor, University of Pittsburgh, USA *