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             Commemorative Public Art: Illuminating Untold Stories

Join artists Nekisha Durrett, Sadie Barnette, Lava Thomas, and Professor Monique Scott in a public conversation with Monument Lab about the role of commemorative public art in illuminating untold stories and shifting narratives of place. Durrett, the selected artist for ���ճԹ�'s ARCH project commission, will be joined by leading public artists Barnette (Eagle Creek Salon, Family Style 2) and Thomas (Dr. Maya Angelou Monument), each of whom will explore their own recent projects speak through the breakthroughs, challenges, and opportunities for reimagining commemoration alongside Monique Renee Scott, Associate Professor of History of Art and Director of Museum Studies at ���ճԹ�. Nekisha Durrett (b. 1976 | Washington, DC) is a mixed-media artist who employs the visual language of mass media to bring forward histories that objects, places, and words embody but are not often celebrated. Her expansive practice includes public art, social practice, installation, painting, sculpture, and design. Through deep research and material investigation, she finds historical traces in the present that are filled with stories easily overlooked. Her work contemplates biases and the unreliability of memory as information is filtered over time. Durrett illuminates individual and collective histories of Black life and imagination, addressing her own younger self and the stories she wished she had learned. Durrett holds a BFA from The Cooper Union in New York City and MFA from The University of Michigan School of Art and Design as a Horace H. Rackham Fellow. She is the Howard University Social Justice Consortium Fellow and a finalist for the 2023 Janet and Walter Sondheim Art Prize. Durrett has recently been awarded the commission for the ARCH Project at ���ճԹ� in partnership with Monument Lab and is in production on Queen City, a 35’ tall “vessel” in Arlington, VA, that pays homage to 903 individuals displaced for the construction of the Pentagon in 1941.

Lava Thomas tackles issues of race, gender, representation, and memorialization through a multidisciplinary practice that spans drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, and site-specific installations. Drawing from her family’s Southern roots, current and historical socio-political events, intersectional feminism, and African American protest and devotional traditions, Thomas’s practice centers on ideas that amplify visibility, healing, and empowerment in the face of erasure, trauma, and oppression. Sadie Barnette’s multimedia practice illuminates her own family history as it mirrors a collective history of repression and resistance in the United States. The last born of the last born, and hence the youngest of her generation, Barnette holds a long and deep fascination with the personal and political value of kin. Barnette’s adept materialization of the archive rises above a static reverence for the past; by inserting herself into the retelling, she offers a history that is alive. Her drawings, photographs, and installations collapse time and expand possibilities. Political and social structures are a jumping-off point for the work, but they are not the final destination. Her use of abstraction, glitter, and the fantastical summons another dimension of human experience and imagination. Recent projects include the reclamation of a 500-page FBI surveillance file amassed on her father during his time with the Black Panther Party and her interactive reimagining of his bar — San Francisco’s first Black-owned gay bar.