ONLINE: Markers, Monuments and Meaning: A National Conversation

press release: Learn about the history of monumental art in the United States and investigate the current controversy over historical monuments and markers – and the meaning we build up around them. This one-hour, Zoom webinar will begin at 3:00 p.m. (CDT) on Thursday, July 16. The panel will be moderated by the Ruth and Hartley Barker Director and CEO of the Wisconsin Historical Society, Christian Øverland, and professor of history and director of Marquette University’s Center for Urban Research, Teaching, and Outreach, Dr. Robert Smith. 

Register at https://wisconsinhistory.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_U5G-0-sBRlCMUvrVu6fVrg

While historical organizations have long grappled with how to interpret difficult history, recent events have added an increased sense of urgency for communities considering the meaning and message of historical markers, monuments, and statues that commemorate historical events and figures representing difficult topics and themes in history. Join us as we invite a panel of nationally renowned experts on monumental art to discuss the historical context of the current controversy and to consider the meaning of these markers, monuments, and statues in our built environment and national consciousness. 

Karen L. Cox is an award-winning historian and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She is the author of four books, is the editor or co-editor of two volumes on southern history, and has written numerous essays and articles on the subject of southern history and culture. Her books include Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, which won the 2004 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians for the Best Book in Southern Women’s History and was reissued in 2019 with a new preface. She is also the author of Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture, and, most recently, Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South. 

A successful public intellectual, Dr. Cox has written op-eds for the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, TIME, Publishers Weekly, and the Huffington Post. She regularly gives media interviews in the U.S. and around the globe on the subject of southern history and culture, especially on the topic of Confederate monuments. She also appears in Henry Louis Gates’ PBS documentary Reconstruction: America after the Civil War. Her forthcoming book, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Equality, will be published by UNC Press in 2021. 

Ken Lum is known for his conceptual and representational art in a number of media, including painting, sculpture and photography. A longtime professor, he currently is the Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design in Philadelphia and is co-founder and chief curatorial advisor for Monument Lab.

Since the mid-1990s, Lum has worked on numerous permanent public art commissions, including for the cities of Vienna, the Engadines, Rotterdam, St. Louis, Leiden, Utrecht, Toronto, and Vancouver. He has also realized temporary public art commissions in Stockholm, Istanbul, Torun, Innsbruck, and Kansas City. He is currently working on a memorial to the 1986 Lake Nyos disaster for the Government of Cameroon.

Lum was co-curator of Monument Lab: A Public Art and History Project, a city-wide art public art exhibition in Philadelphia in 2017. The exhibition dealt with the ways in which space is engaged in terms of a city’s monumental landscape. The aim of Monument Lab was to better understand the mechanisms of memorialization by questioning the status of the monument in the context of its canonical disposition. The exhibition was widely praised and became a touchstone for other cities dealing with the problems of controversial monuments and statues.