Previous News and Updates
Bryn Mawr College’s ARCH Project (Art Remediating College Histories), in partnership with Monument Lab, is a multi-year collaboration to design a process and commission a campus public artwork that responds to the legacy of exclusionary practices at the College. This vital work builds on previous and ongoing College-supported efforts by students, staff, alumni, and faculty to reveal and repair harm, ensuring a reckoning with Bryn Mawr College’s history and a clear-sighted look at the way to a future of inclusion and reconciliation.
Artist Proposals
Presented March 2023
Amanda D. King '11
Working Title: Motherwork Mound
Project Description
The proposed dynamic landscape sculpture Motherwork Mound elevates schist stone emerging from below ground to acknowledge the hidden sub-surface passageways used to conceal Black maids, servants, and porters who served Bryn Mawr students without being seen. In recognition of these invisible undervalued laborers, the title references the theory of sociologist Patricia Hill Collins. Her concept of “motherwork” uplifts the persistent contributions of Black women to society, providing devotion, care, and protection; nurturing people, movement, and community; and cultivating places of learning, healing, and transformation. Those Black employees began a legacy of motherwork that continued in the labor of the first Black graduate, Enid Cook, in the unique supportive role of Perry House, and in the direct action of Black student activists in 2020. Motherwork Mound summons radical care, transparency, and accountability, recalls Bryn Mawr’s hidden labor and racial history, and fosters evergreen, ever-evolving, reciprocal relationships. It creates a central home for both human solitude and human interaction, and for daily rituals of belonging, and offers an open invitation to reflect and reconnect, while reclaiming visible space for the recognition of marginalized campus identities and narratives.
Motherwork Mound will occupy an area of roughly 700 square feet and vary in height from zero feet at its perimeter to seven feet at its peak. The domed form is split, revealing a concave interior in which to linger or through which to pass. Materials include schist stone; limestone; soil; grass; interior architectural supports; and interior lighting. Suggested placement is the central campus axis between Taylor Hall and Old Library.
About Amanda D. King '11
A conceptual artist, cultural strategist, and social justice advocate, Amanda D. King uses arts and culture to envision possibilities for transforming individuals, communities, and society. King's multidisciplinary expertise in jurisprudence, art history, fashion, and culture inform her socially engaged practice, which utilizes visual communication & design, creative consulting, and arts education to mobilize her community and reciprocate grace. King was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where she manages her studio practice and serves as creative director of Shooting Without Bullets. King earned an A.B. in history of art at Bryn Mawr.
Jean Shin
Working Title: Weaving Tunnels
Project Description
Weaving Tunnels is a space for healing, gathering, and collective remediation. This public sculpture pushes the maintenance tunnels beneath the Old Library to the surface of a campus pathway, transforming them into a metaphor and meeting place. Weaving Tunnels is an arched tunnel lined with benches and covered in dense, woven metal rods at its center, which gradually thin and leave the tunnel’s entrance open to the sky above. The benches are an archive of textures sourced from salvaged baskets and hand-woven objects that call upon Athena’s presence as guardian of weaving and peacetime pursuits. Painted yellow and lit from within, Weaving Tunnels is an airy, bright counterpoint to a campus architecture defined by stone and burdened by the legacy of exclusionary practices. The metal rods that cover the sculpture serve as functioning looms for collective, creative intervention. Drawing on Bryn Mawr’s culture of self-governance, Weaving Tunnels is an invitation and a provocation – it asks the campus community to gather and tell its story with intention, rewrite its discourses, imagine, create and weave an equitable future that extends beyond Bryn Mawr. In time, the artwork will become a living, poetic archive of a vibrant community asking and answering the most meaningful questions.
Approximate dimensions for Weaving Tunnels are 32 x 8 x 8 feet. Materials include painted recycled aluminum, salvaged fabric, fabric collected from the Bryn Mawr community. Suggested placement is the pathway leading to the main entrance of Old Library.
About Jean Shin
Jean Shin is known for her sprawling and often public sculptures, transforming accumulations of discarded objects into powerful monuments that interrogate our complex relationship between material consumption, collective identity, and community engagement. Often working cooperatively within a community, Shin amasses vast collections of everyday objects—Mountain Dew bottles, mobile phones, 35mm slides—while researching their history of use, circulation, and environmental impact. Distinguished by this labor-intensive and participatory process, Shin’s creations become catalysts for communities to confront social and ecological challenges.
Nekisha Durrett
Working Title: Don't Forget to Remember (Me)
Project Description
Don’t Forget to Remember (Me) challenges the forgetfulness at the core of institutional racism beginning with its title. As a site-specific public artwork for Bryn Mawr’s ongoing legacy as an institution with exclusionary practices, Don’t Forget to Remember (Me) calls out the responsibility institutions have to use our past to inform our present and to intently build and rebuild the groundwork for our future. Thinking of the minds, bodies, and souls who paved the way for their future generations, Don’t Forget to Remember (Me) equally pays tribute to everyone courageous and privileged to push societal norms in the name of equity, and to those who were forced to live in those spaces. In acknowledgment of the 0.9 mile distance Enid Cook (‘31) walked from her residence at 46 Prospect Avenue to campus everyday when she was enrolled, this work makes its mark on the ground below. Delineating a woven path of braids within the soil of a contentious space defined by pervious pavers, this installation commands a downward gaze with a refusal to break from the ground plane. From above, the woven path takes the shape of a knot that cannot be undone, symbolizing interconnectivity, and making visual that Bryn Mawr is reexamining its history to tell all of its stories; it is no longer rewriting one story over another. The community of Bryn Mawr will be able to amble across these grounds, thinking of those who came before them and paved the way as the names of those individuals will be embossed into the surface of the fired clay. These pavers will be custom made from the clay rich soil of campus, specifically the former site of Perry House, and engraved with the names of servants collected from archival research.
Approximate dimensions for Don’t Forget to Remember (Me) are 37.5 m x 16 m with each strand of the knot having 6 braids that are 11” wide. Additional materials include native plantings, gravel, LED lighting and conduit. Suggested placement is the Cloisters within Old Library, chosen with the intent to reclaim the grounds located above the former servant tunnels.
About Nekisha Durrett
From vast freestanding sculptures to intimate gallery installations, Nekisha Durrett’s work leverages unexpected materials to make visible the historical connections and connotations that places and materials embody but are overlooked in our day-to-day lives. Whether reimagining pre-Colonial landscapes, bygone Black communities, or family lore, Durrett’s research-driven practice strives to carve out contemplative spaces and offer opportunities for viewers to consider what is revealed or concealed when information is filtered across time.
Risa Puno
Working Title: Roots of Recognition
Project Description
Roots of Recognition proposes an interactive installation of life-sized tree stumps cast from bronze located on the lawns in the heart of campus. Each tree stump will have a unique top engraved with text arranged in concentric circles. The text will be excerpted from some of the missing stories uncovered from the College’s history from the ongoing research with Monument Lab, as well as from the Bryn Mawr History Projects and Canaday's Special Collections. Like growth rings in a tree, the most recent stories will be closest to the outside and the oldest accounts will be closest to the inside. The designs for the tops of the stumps will also include negative space symbolizing the narratives that have yet to be (or may never be) uncovered. In addition to providing a publicly available record of previously missing stories, this installation is designed to serve as outdoor seating for the campus community. It is intended to be approachable and intimate in scale, inviting people to get close and stay awhile. I hope that this lasting memorial inspires future generations to continue the conversation about the legacy of exclusionary practices at the College and ways to make it better.
Roots of Recognition will present 12 tree stumps ranging from 2-4’ in diameter. Materials include precast concrete footings and cast bronze sculptures finished with a hot chemical patina that will match the oil-rubbed bronze decorative hardware of the collegiate gothic buildings on campus. The patina will be sealed with a durable, clear lacquer coating, followed by an exterior grade wax coating for additional protection and luster. Preferred placement is throughout the heart of campus, particularly between Taylor Hall and Old Library.
About Risa Puno
Risa Puno is a New York City based sculpture and installation artist who uses interactivity and play to understand how we relate to one another. She has exhibited with national and international organizations, including: NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, El Museo del Barrio, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston, SPACES in Cleveland, Onassis USA, New Children’s Museum in San Diego, MMX Open Art Venue in Berlin, and Science Gallery in Dublin.
Sharon Hayes and Michelle Lopez
Working Title: Gathering: Platform, Grounds, Maps
Read Sharon and Michelle's backgrounds
Project Description
Gathering: Platform, Grounds, Maps is a three-part artwork that honors and supports the vital ongoing work, happening across Bryn Mawr’s campus and communities, to create new spaces, places and narratives of belonging for past, present and future students, staff and faculty. The central component of the work is a speculative boundary and site for assembly. Gathering:Platform reconstitutes the footprint of the demolished building, Perry House, as a gathering site and platform for students, staff and faculty working on and invested in the important work of uncovering and telling, once marginalized, histories of Bryn Mawr College. Gathering:Grounds proposes a ritual event in which native plants are seeded into the soil of the cloisters as a gesture of repair and a reminder that the land on which the college sits is a force of growth, transformation and change. Gathering:Maps is a system of embedded markers that serve as way-finding for lesser-known campus histories and narratives. These markers will be developed in collaboration with multiple collectives and initiatives on campus and are intended to be a fluid infrastructure that can expand and change as new histories develop and/or come to light.
Approximate dimensions for Gathering:Platform are 74 x 90 feet. Materials include cast brick/rocks made from Wissahickon Schist stone, clay and silt collected from Wissahickon Creek and other local water and mountain valley sites, repurposed local granite rock and stone; brass inlay, mortar, gold sand/aggregate (Kintsugi technique), steel lettering stamps (alphabet and numbers); indigenous native plants of Pennsylvania and native seeds planted by students. Preferred placement is the lawn between Taylor Hall and Old Library for Gathering:Platform and the Cloisters for Gathering:Grounds. Placement of the physical markers for Gathering:Maps would be determined in collaboration with campus collectives and partners.
About Sharon Hayes and Michelle Lopez
Sharon Hayes is an artist who uses video, performance, sound, and public sculpture to expose specific intersections between history, politics and speech, to unspool reductive historical narratives and to re-ignite dormant pathways through which counter-understandings of the contemporary political condition can be formed. In her work, she lingers in the grammars—linguistic, affective, and sonic—through which political resistance appears. Hayes’ practice is in conversation and acts in collective force and resonance with the heterogeneous field of actions, voices, and practices that resist normative behaviors, complicit and unjust social agreements, and proscriptive temporalities to open up new ways of being together in the world.
Michelle Lopez is Associate Professor in Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania (Weitzman School of Design) and a multimedia artist known for her rigorous conceptual practice and boldly experimental approach to procesis and material. Lopez’s installations and sculptural works are grounded in research on the iconography of cultural phenomena that transcends material properties and investigates the way the viewer’s body interacts with architectural space to re-orient the possibility of empowerment for the disenfranchised. Her work has been exhibited at Fondazione Trussardi (Milan, Italy), LA><Art (Los Angeles, USA), Harvard Carpenter Center, PS1 MOMA, Simon Preston Gallery (NYC), Commonwealth & Council (LA) among others. She has received a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Sculpture Fellowship (2011), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2019).