When you go out, walk down the street, head to the nearest park or gathering place, and look around, what do you find? Trees and grass – more than likely. Maybe a playground and trash cans too. But keep looking, and what else do you notice? What else have people built?

If there is a statue or sculpture, who does it represent? If there is a sign or plaque, what does it say?

And what do they say about the people who left them there?

Until recently, our country lacked a reliable or comprehensive way to answer questions about an important part of the public sphere: namely, what we commemorate, commemorate and honor together.

But we saw standing statues of Confederate generals. We have encountered more tributes to war than to peace. And we have strived to find examples of the most influential women in our history who are publicly remembered.

When we looked around and started asking these questions, the big picture became clear: our monuments told a story that didn’t quite match what we know as America.

In 2020, the Mellon Foundation launched the Monuments Project Initiative with a quarter-billion dollar commitment to bolster our efforts to preserve the stories of those who have often been denied historical recognition. Among the first grants was $4 million to support Monument Lab, a nonprofit public art and history studio in Philadelphia, whose first project under this initiative was the design and implementation of an audit of the existing memorial landscape in the United States.

The results of the audit – drawn from the archives of around 50,000 conventional monuments – were sobering, but not surprising.

The National Monuments Audit has given us a real opportunity not only to confront the commemorative landscape as it is today, but also to begin to write new chapters that tell a more complete, accurate and complex story of who we are as Americans.

The newest of our Monuments Project grants confronts our history head-on – using everything from dance and participatory visual art to physical relocation – as a way to bring out the joys and sorrows that were missing or were erased from historical records.

Together, these four projects pose – and begin to answer – deep questions about what a monument is and what new approaches to commemoration are possible in the years to come.

Exploring Antebellum and Black Sites through Wideman Davis Dance

Left and right: Performance of Migratuse Ataraxia in South Carolina in 2019. Photo: Sean Rayford.

Alabama and South Carolina: The Wideman Davis Dance Company explores the intimate stories of pre-war spaces through dance.

The South is replete with antebellum and post-industrial structures and spaces that invoke the inextricable legacies of slavery and white supremacy. But to engage in these spaces in a meaningful way, and to overcome the erasure that has so deeply affected black history, requires information, context, and access that is not readily available to the public. The South Carolina-based Wideman Davis Dance Company believes that dance helps tell the layered stories of black spaces through time. Many of these spaces, rich in historical ideas, continue to be fluid and active in the communities where they sit, but are rarely commemorated. To fill this gap in our historical understanding, Wideman Davis Dance created Migratus Ataraxia, an interactive dance-based performance that was staged in a former plantation building in Harpersville, Alabama. A grant from Mellon will help Wideman Davis Dance develop the Migratory model with three six-month residencies in Southern cities that engage local communities and engage live audiences in intimate pre-war stories told through dance. Both ephemeral and participatory, the performances reinvent what a monument can be.

The relocation of Iⁿ ‘zhúje ‘waxóbe

Left: Erecting a stone at “Kansas Pioneers…” in 1929. Courtesy of the Watkins Museum of History. Right: The community organizes around the movement of the stone. Photo: David Loewenstein.

Lawrence, Kansas: The Kaw Nation, community organizers and the town of Lawrence move a sacred stone (Iⁿ ‘zhúje ‘waxóbe) to its rightful location.

Iⁿ ‘zhúje ‘waxóbe (EE(n)ZHOO-jay wah-HO-bay) is a twenty-five ton glacial erratic stone of deep and long-standing spiritual and cultural significance to the Kanza people of the Kaw Nation. Why, then, is the stone sitting in Robinson Park in Lawrence, Kansas, holding a plaque dedicated to “the pioneers” of Kansas? In 1929, as part of the city’s 75th anniversary, Iⁿ ‘zhúje ‘waxóbe was desecrated – moved from its natural location at the confluence of Shunganunga Creek and the Kansas River to what is now a park named after the first governor of the state, Charles Robinson, and installed there as a monument to the settlers. In 2019, after years of demands for a return from citizens of Kaw, the town of Lawrence issued a formal apology; and now a broad coalition of groups, including Kaw tribal leaders, are working with the University of Kansas to ensure the stone’s safe relocation to land held by the Kaw Nation. A grant from Mellon will support the relocation of the stone, build infrastructure at the natural site as directed by the Kanza, and develop interpretive programs there, as well as in Lawrence at what will be the stone’s former site. .

Irei (Comforting the Spirits) of Japanese-American World War II incarceration

Left: Manzanar Ireitō (“Soul Consoling Tower”) built by inmates during World War II. Courtesy of Shinjo Nagatomi Collection, Manzanar National Historic Site. Right: Rendering of the Irei Names Monument.

Los Angeles, CA: Working with a coalition of Japanese-American community groups, Professor Duncan Ryuken Williams and the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture are creating the first-ever memorial to every person of Japanese ancestry incarcerated during the World War II in American Concentration Camps.

The American policy of internment and incarceration during World War II significantly altered the lives of more than 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry. Today, more than 75 years after the camps were closed, there is still no comprehensive list of the names of those affected, nor a consolidated monument to recognize each individual who suffered forced eviction, family separation, unjust deportation and incarceration in times of war. A grant from Mellon will help address this absence by supporting the creation of the first comprehensive list of names which, in turn, will be featured in the three facets of Irei’s Monument of Names: 1) a sacred book of names (the Ireicho “book to console the spirits”) listing each incarcerated person; 2) a Ireihi (“structure for consoling the spirits”) sculptural memorial on which the names of incarcerated persons will be projected, to be exhibited at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles as well as in many former places of detention; and 3) a website Ireizo (“warehouse of consoling spirits”) where the names and information of the internees and the incarcerated will be collected in a virtual memorial.

The return of the JXN project

Richmond, Virginia: The JXN Project is rebuilding the first home built by a black homeowner.

Richmond, Virginia: The JXN Project is rebuilding the first home built by a black homeowner.

It is believed that one in four black Americans can trace their roots to the rivers of Richmond, Virginia. Yet the city’s historical significance as home to Jackson Ward—the nation’s first historically recorded black urban neighborhood—is often superseded in historical accounts by Richmond’s role as the capital of the Confederacy. In its commitment to restorative truth and redemptive storytelling, the JXN Project recently revealed the remarkable fact that the first home purchased by a black homeowner was, throughout history, moved from Jackson Ward to Sabot Hill Plantation. in Goochland County, which belonged to a Confederate Secretary of War. Bringing the spotlight back to the owner – Abraham Peyton Skipwith, now fondly remembered as the “founding father of Jackson Ward” – a grant from Mellon will support the rebuilding of the house to its rightful origin, while establishing the house as a as a national historic site and a space for community programming.

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