Bryn Mawr College is engaging Monument Lab, a public art and history studio in Philadelphia, on a multi-year collaboration to design a process for commissioning a campus public artwork that responds to the legacy and harm of exclusionary practices at the College.
Bryn Mawr College’s partnership with Monument Lab will include commissioning artist proposals toward an eventual campus public artwork. This process will be informed by campus and community-based research that aims to reckon with, dismantle, and reimagine narratives of campus history in order to help offer an artistic and reparative vision for its future. A central question that would guide the project: What stories are missing from Bryn Mawr’s campus?
The administration of Bryn Mawr College will bolster the initiative by integrating it into the campus and curriculum through opportunities for paid student internships, faculty and staff research, and project-specific interdisciplinary courses. This vital work builds on previous and ongoing efforts by College students, staff, alumnae/i, and faculty to reveal and repair harm, and ensuring that an honest reckoning with Bryn Mawr College’s history and a clear-sighted look at our present are paving the way to a future of truth-telling and reconciliation.
This initiative will unfold over a multi-year period, with a broad engagement process beginning in the fall of 2021 for students, staff, faculty, and alumnae/i.
Project Co-Leads: Monique Scott (Associate Professor of History of Art and Director of Museum Studies, Bryn Mawr College) and Paul Farber (Director, Monument Lab)
Bryn Mawr College Team: Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chief of Staff and Secretary of the College)
Monument Lab Team: Kristen Giannantonio (Chief Operating Officer), Sue Mobley (Research Director), Nico Rodriguez (Associate Director of Projects), and Patrice Worthy (Project Manager).
Bryn Mawr College Advisory Committee: History Advisory Group
More About Monument Lab:
Monument Lab is a nonprofit art and history studio based in Philadelphia. Monument Lab works with artists, students, educators, activists, municipal agencies, and cultural institutions on participatory approaches to public engagement and collective memory. Founded by Paul Farber and Ken Lum in 2012, Monument Lab cultivates and facilitates critical conversations around the past, present, and future of monuments. As a studio and curatorial team, we collaborate to make generational change in the ways art and history live in public. Our approaches include producing citywide art exhibitions, site-specific commissions, and participatory research initiatives. We aim to inform the processes of public art, as well as the permanent collections of cities, museums, libraries, and open data repositories. Through exhibitions, research programs, editorial platforms, and fellowships, we have connected with hundreds of thousands of people in person and millions online. Monument Lab critically engages our inherited symbols in order to unearth the next generation of monuments that elevate stories of artists, educators, and grassroots coalitions. For more information, visit MonumentLab.com