Alex Klein

Welcome to the I is for Institute podcast. My name is Alex Klein, the Dorothy and Stephen R. Weber CHE '60 curator at ICA, the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. In this series, you'll hear from our colleagues working in contemporary arts organizations around the world, about their individual perspectives on the work they are doing to shape and imagine different institutional models. At this critical moment when museums and their infrastructures are being reevaluated, these dialogues highlight pressing concerns for artists, art workers, arts institutions and their publics. We invite you to follow these ongoing conversations and to access the archive at our website www.iisforinsitute.icaphila.org. In this episode, I'm joined by James E. Britt Jr. ICA’s former DAJ Director of Public Engagement in conversation with Ken Lum and Paul M. Farber, about their work with Monument Lab, an organization based in Philadelphia that seeks to shine light on and destabilize the systems of power embedded within our monument landscape. They share their insights on how organizations can reframe the way they work within and alongside communities and their perspectives on how histories are held by people and not statues.

Paul Farber

I'm Paul Farber, director and co-founder of Monument Lab.

Ken Lum

And I'm Ken Lum. I'm the senior curatorial advisor to Monument Lab and I'm also the co-founder, and I am the Marilyn Jordan Taylor, Penn Presidential Professor and Chair of Fine Arts in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design here at Penn.

AK

What is the mission of Monument Lab? And can you give us some insight into the structure of the organization?

PF

We've really evolved, I think. You know, in in sharing that I think about our journey, both Ken and I as close collaborators, but also the team around us, we started as a classroom project. And then Ken and I met and, with other collaborators, worked on making an exhibition that would occur in the courtyard of City Hall. And then we really kind of went from there and now have become a studio, a think tank, kind of a civic agency. You know, our mission- or I can say this in another way- like our vision is that monuments must change. And we build prototype monuments with artists and public spaces, we do participatory research, we have a fellows program and other forms for engagement and interaction. And all of this is around facilitating conversations around the past, present, and future of monuments with an eye on justice, resistance, and hope.

KL

Further to what Paul just said, we're keenly interested in spacial production, particularly with respect to the question of the social geography of race, of difference, and how space operates to differentiate according to skin color, to social class, privilege, gender, and all that. And how within that, we try to foment a contest of spacial imaginings that are different or at odds with with the normative systems that are in place, through the prism of a very dominant form of, system of representation, which is the monumental form.

James E. Britt Jr.

There's an interdisciplinary nature to the work that you all do at Monument Lab. And it also exists between the two of you in terms of where you're coming from professionally. So if you can just talk a little bit about your trajectory in terms of your professional experiences.

PF

You know, I think part of the dynamic in how we founded Monument Lab and also all of the collaborators that continue to make Monument Lab what it is today, we're coming from a lot of different disciplines as artists, as researchers, as professors, as educators, but we're also coming from a number of different experiences, in and out of institutions that have kind of brought us to Monument Lab, and envisioning. I think fundamentally for Ken and I, we thought of Monument Lab as a socially engaged art project. Our form, our medium is the civic agency. And that both kept us in the realm of fundamentally being artists and thinking like artists and working as artists, and also finding ourselves in spaces that we're also responsible and must carry with us kind of ethics of follow through, of work. There's contracts to sign and, you know, I think at the core of us being artists. For me, I'm thinking back to getting a chance to meet you, Ken, for the first time back, you know, we both were teaching in 2012. We didn't know it. We were on on different sides of Penn's campus: I was in urban studies, you are in fine arts. But we realized when we met, shortly after that semester, that we were asking very similar questions with our students in and out of the classroom. And you said that we were kindred spirits. And think even above and beyond that, you in your point in your work really opened doors for me and also really thought about the way that we could work in a transformative way. And that just really changed my life and I think has opened up so much for the Monument Lab team as a whole. Yeah, and I have to return the compliment, not just to be courteous but in a very profound and meaningful way, Paul also changed my life. I recognize that he has the energy, a kind of keenness, a kind of acuteness of intelligence and also open mindedness, in terms of the disciplines to respond to James' question of multiple disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. And I think that's rare. But I also think just to be more specific, in terms of James' question, disciplinarity has been what's created what we call the norms and the fixities. And so interdisciplinarity, or multidisciplinary, at least operates to challenge those norms, it operates tear down the divisions and borders of specialization, differentiation, according to fixed epistemes and so on. And I think that's very, very, very important. And you know, Foucault made an entire career out of that as well. That's why it's multidisciplinary, because knowledge is always in a state of flux, right? And the truth is, there's no singular truth, the truth is always out there somewhere. But it's usually a conglomerate of truths that you might say, truths that maybe only true in an absolute sense for a fleeting moment, before it becomes not true anymore. So I think multidisciplinarity, it also behooves us to become more expert in many more discursive fields. And I think that's really important. Because right now, we live in a society where people who are not experts at anything, they deride expertise, and they deride anything that's not reaffirming of fixities. And I think that needs to be challenged. Yeah. And just to add to that, Ken, what I always really appreciate about the spaces that we've held together and we've gotten to work in, no matter what the subject matter is, we feel that spirit, and at the same time, this is why we work on monuments because monuments have held this aura of permanence, of authority, of fixity. And that's a falsehood. They've always been in flux, they always change. They've been products of people in certain moments, creating decisions about how to contour, shape, and claim historical veracity or the historical narrative. And I think what we've caught on to, in part, is something we've learned by spending a lot of time paying attention to the public sphere. In the vein of the scholar
Joseph Roach is not that we've abandoned the archive, or the institutional spaces, but we've been spending more time outside in the street, to paraphrase Dr. Roach. And I just think about that, in the work that we do, monument, the things that we conventionally call monuments, the work that we do is a lot about unfreezing them and unfixing them. And recognizing what is what happens when you don't just treat a monument as something as a spectacle to behold, but turn around and think of it as a perch or a platform to view other movements in slow and long rhythm, going around in society and the dynamism and the debates. And that is the spirit of our kind of practice of meeting people where they are and looking around.

AK

I think that's such a beautiful description that I think is so well reflected in the title of your organization. That idea of a monument, which is supposedly fixed in time, but is actually a reflection of the fluidity of power structures at any given moment. And that lab is pointing to that fluidity or that state of flux. So, I just thought that was a really lovely exchange between the two of you about how we can start to, I guess, challenge these structures through these public presentations. And so I also love that in your description of your organization you talk about that intersection of public art and history studio, and that it grew out of a classroom. That in and of itself feels like it has that call and response kind of built into it. I wanted to pick up on the current conversation around monuments because a lot has happened in the last year around, calls for Confederate monument monuments to be removed. After the murder of George Floyd we saw monuments coming down, or statues, all over the world that maybe called to colonial pasts. And it seems that a lot of the consolidation of protest really came to the fore around these symbols. And I was wondering if you could bring us up to the present about your current thinking, in response to this moment, if it is changed anything in your work, really just maybe mobilize things that were already inherent in your project?

PF

Let's just say, I've always been critical of the way monuments are purported to function as neutral, its premise on myth, and of universality and, exaltation of whatever is depicted. And also consensus of meaning, right? Even though that meaning is applied differently to different audience members. And so I was always critical of that. But I have to say that since the founding of Monument Lab, I've kind of realized how much I underestimated the nefarious character of monuments. I guess I didn't think it was good, but the degree of underestimation is what was a surprise to me. In the sense that, you know, monuments are tied to many things, you can extend it out to the incarceration system that's in place in the United States. Let's just take the example of a monument of a Confederate soldier in front of a courthouse in a small town somewhere. That monument projects, the idea of differential liberties of movement. Some people can move towards that monument, who are white let's say, and those who are Black and of a different color, or even different persuasion, you are not supposed to be part of that audience, right? In fact, you would shy away from there, because if you're there, your sense of identity would be heightened in front of it and it may be a threat to you bodily. and so liberties of movement, of refuge, all kinds of systems of confinement, it's actually being reaffirmed by these monuments. And that's not something I learned, but something I underestimated the degree of perniciousness. You know, I knew that it was not good, but like just the degree of it and how extensive the hold of this kind of semiotic field that's emanating from monuments is. That part I've learned a lot, even as I'm working with Monument Lab. I mean one of our values is learning as mutual exchange, and a lot of the spirit that we've tried to carry in our artist collaborations and the work that we've done in public squares or our fellows program, we really ask questions that we want to know the answer to. And we generally don't ask questions that have one answer, they should elicit a multitude of responses. Some of those responses take the form of contemporary art installations and others take the form of a report to city leadership. Sometimes it's something entirely different, we're always thinking about form, as well as content, as well as function. But I think something that Ken picked up on, thinking about the last few years, especially. When we started our work, even in 2012, we felt like we were late. Because already more than a generation's worth of activists, artists, students, scholars had been making these connections in their organizing, and in their work. And as the years have gone by, since we started teaching about monuments, let alone formed Monument Lab, this continues to kind of take hold. And so, you know, anytime you see a headline in any kind of media or pops up on your phone, like 'city takes down monument,' there's a lot of work going on in there that erases the work of activists, many of whom are grassroots and from communities of color, and multiracial coalitions, who made it possible for a takedown to even be talked about, and then afterwards are going to continue the work of healing, repair. And so I think that part of what I take away from these moments is, one, how it has swelled up and has taken time to fully emerge. And now that it's here, we can no longer delay, the more just vision for public space that we know is there. And, they're of course, really important ways to think about monuments being toppled and tackled, and that comes out of profound frustration and the very violence of most of our public symbols. There's also a lot of work happening in municipal art circles where many monuments are being debated in the way they've always been debated. This is not the first time that we've had monuments move and change form, and that's debated. It just is one where the people who are leading the conversation are ones who haven't been invested in keeping the status quo. And I think it's really important to note, a lot of times we'll hear from a municipality or someone who's like, 'well help us figure out, which is the bad monument, the racist monument, the sexist monument to take away, and that will solve our problems.' It's kind of like that old book, 'Where's Waldo', except you're not looking for the one, actually it's the whole crowd. And if you don't really think about the processes that got you the monuments that you've inherited, and seek to radically reimagine those, and imagine how power is enacted and transformed, then you're going to have the same results. And I think that for us, we have to keep that spirit of learning that we can channel our experience, our conversations, our really meaningful relationships and built into that must always be a hunger and a necessity of learning, that continues and evolves.

KL

At Monument Lab we're always also thinking about the question 'How do we foment spatial imaginaries?' in this age where there's an increasing or ascending privileging of private interest over the public good. I'm speaking about acculturation. I'm speaking about cooptation, appropriation and so on. And it makes it very, very difficult because we're in a capitalist society. That's one of the questions we always have to ask ourselves because we do get a lot of solicitations of interest from private parties. And we have to dig deep and keep to our principles in terms of, 'do we go with this offer? Or not? Or do we decline it?' And we try to have everyone involved in discussing that, and responding to that question before we even respond.

JBJ

I have two questions. One, who is your audience? So is your audience, the person that sees that Confederate statue and says 'I want it down, it doesn't represent who I am and what I believe in.' And is it also the person that 'this is representative of who I am and my heritage and my history, and I want to keep it up there?' And isn't about trying to convince one group that this is problematic? Or is it another group that you are affirming? And then the other question I have is, we often talk about, this moment of reckoning, and it has a sort of an external pressures that are better placed on it. But also, there's the internal pressures that happen too. And Alex and I've had these conversations, and many colleagues at other institutions that just as important have been the internal dialogues that we were having, as institutions, and many of us are still having with our colleagues. And so I'm curious on both of those fronts, how you all address those issues?

PF

I think they're deeply related. I mean, one is that we kind of spurn the term audience and we kind of think about participants, because we want to think about the possibility, in one sense, that projects that we curate, produce, create as artists are not complete until they are received, they're interacted with, whether that's by a small group of students or the denizens of a city. But it's also it's a bit of a Brechtian move, it's to break frames, it's to insist that, while someone who might be looking for the center, for the norm, for the status quo, we always want to resist it, we want to call people in, to understand, not just how to participate, model some form of civic engagement that's critical, that's creative, that is thinking about harm reduction and repair, memory as a force for truth telling. But we also want them to figure out where they are and blur those lines between where the project ends and the world begins. And I think part of that is reflected in one of our values, that process matters as much as outcome. I mean, we say that in the work we do, but I'll also say, there are times when we have I think, like projects we've done at city hall where you are working toward a public installation, and someone will come up to you and say, 'Oh, were you the guy who was standing in the middle of city hall eight months ago? I recognize you,' and you're like 'Me?' but yeah, because we're not neutral. And we're not aiming to be and we don't believe in neutrality. Neutrality is actually a kind of dangerous sense. You know, think about the work of La Tonya S. Autry and Mike Murawski, the museums are not neutral movement. And so I think part of what we want to do when we think about participation, audience, is to think about these numerous roles that people can play, in and out of a project. And that includes the staffing on the project. We try to pay people for the work they're already doing, which is generally artists, teaching artists, students. We want to kind of find people in motion and think about their entrance and exit out of our project as part of a negotiation. And as I said, the Brechtian sense is that we want to have people be aware of the frames. And those frames are, in part, the normalcy: the idea that a statue is a safe place with a finished story that is just above us and untouchable. And instead, we want you to unfreeze the monuments and understand how they're constantly shifting and changing, that people hold history, not statues. People can uplift statues, it takes maintenance, money, and mindsets to keep them from crumbling down. And that's the kind of work we want to think about throughout our projects. And that also applies to who's staffing a project, what time it's open, what are the hours, what are the access points, and we want to constantly think about how to keep our integrity high and our barriers for entry low.

KL

Well, Monument Lab should not be, you know, ecumenical, with respect to audience. We don't treat every audience with equal regard. The pro-Confederate monument person will probably not like us as much, and we, quite frankly, aren't as interested in them, as well. And not that we spurn them, we just believe in giving voice to the voiceless, that's who I think our primary audience, first and foremost. Because every time you have a monument, you also have buried histories, alternate histories, that is not privileged, that has been buried, that has been suppressed even in order to privilege the monument that is there, all that buried history is carried by bodies, carried by race, and carried by, and experienced by bodies. Bodies that are voiceless, bodies that have never been heeded, bodies of the poor. Those I would say, are the first audience, I don't mean that in a hierarchy, but certainly a key audience. The other audience, which is also key, and again, it's fluid in terms of these domains, is pedagogical, right? Students, people who are interested in learning more, in a very Socratic sense of pedagogy, and so on. So, that's what we're interested in: the vulnerable, the people who are pushed down and are down, in fact, for no fault of their own. And that's what we're most interested in.

PF

You know, the thought that we had, is our form as a civic agency, that has meant different things at different moments over the last few years, I think. Whereas now we're really grateful to have been the inaugural recipients of a grant from the Mellon Foundation for their monuments project, a quarter billion investment, really making sure that we have a fuller representation of history across this country. And as a part of that, we are producing a national monument audit. We're distributing $1 million in funds to 10 local grassroots teams across the country over the next year. And it's really transformative for us in a number of ways. I want to also say what that's allowed us to do is grow our team, but also even just to be clear, kind of create a basis. Before the Mellon grant, we had zero full time employees, Ken and I included. The words monument and lab sounded very heavy and official, but it was really a group of committed people who had worked across projects who we were able to string along after our 2017 citywide exhibition to get grants from the Surdna foundation, support from the Weitzman school and the Sachs fund at Penn, just to do some bare minimum, pulling us together and keeping our momentum going. Our goal had been to really figure out how we come up with like a studio assistant that might work half time. And what we're able to do now is really think about both some of the people that we've been working with over the last few years, to bring them in full time or halftime or with serious engagements, and then get to grow the team to some of our dream collaborators. So I think about you know, while Ken and I are here representing Monument Lab, people like Naima Murphy Salcido, our Director of Partnerships, Sue Mobley our new director of research, Laurie Allen, who was our first research director, and now as a senior research advisor, and just a team of really remarkable people: Kristen Giannantonio, who was our project producer for our 2017 exhibition, and used to be full time in the fine arts department at Penn and now is our Chief Operating Officer. And this is a group of people that, thanks to the Mellon grant, get to do the work that we want to do, that's in our purpose. But we also get to plan across several years, which we've never been able to do. So we've tried to be strategic and tactical. It's also meant for us a big shift where we felt like we were in some ways a project that attempted to do the work of institutional critique, we would find ourselves enmeshed in or nearby or the barnacle on a big institution and nibble at the hand that feeds us, so to speak. And now we're increasingly seen as an institution, and that's a big shift for us, we have to, you know, we have to actually be able to take responsibility, it's a gift and a duty, to be able to be in a position wherein we take that really seriously every day. And for the sake of our work, for the sake of our body of work, for the sake of our team, we also want to continue to think about: how do we, as artists, as curators, not accept a stasis and exist as in our own constellation in a way that honors the long arc of our work? And I think in that way, every day is a fascinating day. And it's a real test to live out the mission of the organization, and also to challenge deep down with the question of how will monuments change? And how does art function as a force for transformation, for questioning, and for coalition building? I'd love to hear a little bit more about how that dovetails with the maybe behind the scenes work that you're doing. You had mentioned this idea of an artistic material, a policy, which I think is really interesting and provocative. And maybe that also is an entry point for you to talk about the grant that you received. It would be very interesting to hear a little bit more about these things that are not as visible as the public presentations.

JBJ

As you just pointed out, Paul, you're becoming an institution. And there's all kinds of expectations that come with that. And to your point, how then do you remain a radical entity, without being an institution? It seems like some ways that you're doing this, for example, you have a building, yet you have no defined space, necessarily where people, it doesn't serve as a repository for work. And that, you know, you go to these various spaces, you activate centers, you know, throughout the world, that could be one model of doing that. You also talked about it from a staffing model as well. I'm also thinking about this in terms of just your your name itself, you know, you have the monument component, but then you also have a laboratory and what that means, but then you have the other layer of studio. How do you put all this together in one sort of cohesive mixture, maintaining the uniqueness, the specialness, of your group without it becoming, you know, an institution or the institution?

PF

That is the question every single day. And it goes to our grandest, boldest visions for the art we make and curate, and to the smallest, micro mundane ways that we conduct business with ourselves. And I think there is a ethos of creativity and care, that is cutting through everything we do. And we find that if we don't prioritize that and create space for ourselves to hold court, to listen, to ground ourselves, we can't expect anyone else to follow suit. Just a note on space, because we're really, really thrilled we moved into our first ever headquarters an old firehouse in Philly. You can see it from the L near Fishtown. And it was a decommissioned firehouse. It's owned by a monument conservator, they've cleaned the love statue in that space. And we've moved in. And in a way, it's a dream space for us. It's undefined, historic, but it's constantly changing and shifting. And still, in some ways, a really bad office. There's such a great place to connect. It's really COVID minded. There's a particular kind of airflow there with windows and doors and multiple entrances that we really prioritized in this moment. We're still figuring out how to utilize it. And one of the principles that we've had is that this should change every day. And at the same time, we have to protect space for our team to do the mundane: write back emails, process invoices, get people paid, make plans. I think of this in the context of the reality of what we've done in that kind of space we've been able to produce as Ken said. We've never had a headquarters. We've set up shop in shipping containers, in public spaces, in a museum gallery, in a museum mezzanine, libraries, the valet station outside the Barnes Foundation. You know, that was really our first ever office, we did it as part of the 2017 exhibition for a few months. And it was an agreement that we would be a spectacle, we would always be visible, you'd be able to see in the windows and it would look like an art space. And we said, we need a printer, and the internet password, and we're gonna have meetings there. And so as people were kind of looking in on us, we were meeting with Hans Haacke, and Tyree Guyton and Marissa Williamson, in that space actually doing work. And so I think for now we're very used to being nimble. I mean, we've set up shop in all kinds of places. I think, for us, the challenge is how to keep that spirit of being hungry, of being resourceful. I think also back to one of the earliest lessons I think we got is, Monument Lab for our 2015 exhibitions, the first one we ever did, where we were on the verge of figuring out how we would create our first lab, the learning lab, the engagement hub that went next to the prototype monument. And, you know, we had this idea that we're going to do this build out of a pavilion, and we started looking at the list of costs of what a bespoke pavilion for that project, which was funded with a Discovery Grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, we realized, like, we're putting a lot of money into security, which if we just flip this around, and don't do a bespoke pavilion, but create a hub from a shipping container that costs $400 to rent per month that we got from the lot by the airport, we could put that money into hiring students and a public historian and a social worker. And it just early on created an ethos for us that when we invest in something, we want to do it intentionally. And when in doubt, if the budget is showing you that you have to invest in things that you don't want to invest in, like the notion of hyper security, distance away from artwork, in your fighting for a freer society, and more proximity and engaging with our work, then maybe got to change the terms of your project at that time. And so, our new space is an insight, I think, into the way we think, but also, it's a way to kind of visit us and really figure out: Have we been able to utilize a home base to continue to open up possibility for ourselves and for other people? That will be the litmus test here.

KL

Yeah, a lot of the structure alignment also isn't like pyramidal in terms of power. Of course, you always have to have a leader who makes decisions and so on, from what I've known of Paul, he's always asking everyone within Monument Lab, 'what do you think of this? Kristen, what do you think? Is this a good idea?' And we're not looking for yes-people, we're looking for honest opinions. That takes an effort keep maintaining, you have to make people feel that they have a high stake in the success of Monument Lab and that what we're doing is for the purest of reasons. It's an everyday work in progress. Of course, there's a hierarchy of some sort, but it's not like from here to here, it's kind of like this, it's only one step, right. I know, for example, just to cite Laurie Allen, sometimes she'll say things and express an opinion, and they'll be quite direct and forceful. And I realized, yeah, that's right. That's, that's something that she's right. And I guess I was a little bit afraid to acknowledge, maybe that was true for you, Paul as well, she would point out something I'd go, 'yeah, that's a good point.' And, you know, because often you have these group dynamics and you become almost afraid to bring up something because you kind of think, well, you know, we've moved too many steps in this direction. And that's just the dynamic of groups and organizations sometimes. But I find that at Monument Lab, nobody's afraid to speak out and say, 'Well, wait a second,' even if so much work has gone on in terms of progressing so many steps. The 'wait a second' may require us to backtrack, right? Take back all that work and go, 'yeah, right, we were going down the wrong path. There, this is better.' And that takes a lot of work. And it also takes we have to keep would be very open to the responses from the members of Monument Lab.

AK

I appreciate you both being self reflexive about this danger of reproducing the very bureaucracies that you're setting out to critique, which I think is always a potential within organizations as they grow and get more funding and become even more ambitious in their reach. And so, I'd love to probe a little bit more and push to hear a little bit more concretely about how you work across different communities and with different organizations and across institutional bodies?

PF

That's a great question because I think we work in such a relational manner. And we're interested in collaborations that bring forth a common set of values and ethics and hopefully mutuality, and try to take some moments in each project, each setting, to take stock about this moment in time, this group of people at the table, this particular process. I'm just thinking about some of the groups of people that we work with museums, we work with universities, but we also build coalitions with grassroots artists, educators, memory workers. And I think one of the things that builds a bond and a trust, and then, for us beauty, and precision and power, is an attention to the ways that we as individuals are a part of systems and are a part of institutions that involves sometimes a power mapping, where you're thinking about the person who is speaking to you, or working with you as the lead on a project, and fundamentally trying to figure out where they situate in an institution, and how you can build rapport and also really understand what they're going through. And it's important to have boundaries and understand that we all have different needs. But there is an importance to try to find a commonality, try to find common questions, that's a path for a project. I think that we have been brought into a number of conversations with municipal governments. They're fascinating, they're often challenging because they are enmeshed in other systems of power, that often underestimate art, and delegitamate art and negotiate against art, even if they rely on art. I'm thinking of in our city, here in Philadelphia, that last year, at a moment where our art office was zeroed out in the budget, that press conferences in the city took place in front of monuments or with a, with a backdrop of the iconography of past generations, at a time where artists were doing all that they could do in building mutual aid projects, and fighting for justice and doing the work of care. So all of that's at play. And it's different in every project. And for us, we're thinking about, how do the set of relationships and a common question, build some kind of core for a project to then exist, and function and do the work we want it to do, both in public space and in organizational space as well. And that's a high burden for us. But it's part of why we do the work that we do, to have that full gamut, to think about relationships that, even beyond the timeframe of an exhibition, will continue doing the work of unfixing, of pushing, of building coalitions of justice and care.

KL

I'm an artist, and Paul's basically an artist, he may teach over in urban studies, but he's really an artist. I personally have always been interested in the procedures and operations of art. And of course, the art itself becomes recursive and becomes parts of institutionalizing processes. But art also has the mechanisms. And the discursive means, even the kind of elusivist discursive means to challenge and to question processes of institutionalization. I think working from the perspective of art has a great deal of application in terms of institutionalization questions on a broad level anyways. I guess this is also responding to the earlier question, which is, by thinking as artists, we also maintain the kind of unpredictability, everything is open to us in terms of techniques, in terms of strategies, tactics, and so on.

JBJ

When you all talk about not being hierarchical, in terms of your organization, are these labels sort of arbitrary for you all, in terms of who's the artist? Who's the historian? Who's the curator? Is it that anyone can occupy those roles? This also a part of the Monument Lab experiment where these things are just open to anyone, that is sort of blurring these lines are intentional? Is that a part of the process that that you all are engaging with the audience?

KL

Well when I say I'm not trying to privilege the status of the artist and then divide up the world into these are the true artists and these are the charlatans, or these are not artists, I don't think that's the question. I think the question, the privileging is thinking like an artist and anyone could do that, right? What that means for me is being as open as possible to really always question every step of a multiple step process. And to always remember that and to always think aesthetically, think creatively, every step. You know, you've got a lot of artists who are professional artists, sure, I guess they're artists, but they're also professional artists. That's not what I'm talking about, I'm not talking about the artists that is happy being on a roster of a gallery, and then waiting his or her or their two and a half years, and oh, it's my time, it's their time to show again. Of course, they're making art, and they're showing the gallery, right, but that's very limiting. I personally have always had deep skepticism of that world which is not an easy position to hold if you want to be an artist in the art world. And I feel like I've paid my price there but at least I can be true to myself. And so when I say artists, I'm speaking about a artist in a very democratic sense that anyone can be an artist, if you think artistically.

PF

Just to build on what Ken is saying, we respect local knowledge and expertise, and look to build strategy and tactics, and coalition's across locations. And sometimes that kind of localized setting is actually in a discipline or a vocation, it means that you put in the work, it really does matter who appreciate the kind of knowledge that can happen, that's based in a locality. Sometimes though, that's local knowledge that's honed by the grandmothers on your block. That's not in you know, an academic setting or that's in having lived it. It's a lot about figuring out that knowledge is relational too, just like creativity is, and artistry is as well. The building strategy and tactic is key for us. So it does matter what role you play, you may play multiple roles, you may wear multiple hats, and it's not to reify or demand some kind of pure notion. But instead to understand how my work and your work and our work together, coheres, collects and builds, power, presence, opportunity. And I think that can always, of course, create tensions because we come in with expectations, with particular literacies or vocabularies. And it's hard to work across that. That's also ultimately the payoff when we can bring our full selves, our multiple kinds of knowledge we bring, not just those that we've gained just from reading or just from living in one place, but when it really blossoms and that we can share it and build with it. I think then there isn't a fixed formula, it is about: in this moment, in this time, in this project, what table do we gather around? Or what circle do we try to build? And where also do we mark where we have something in common? And also how do we respect differences and build in boundaries as part of a healthy and lively ethos as well. But understand and figure out, we're up against very serious things. We want to have joy in our justice work, we want to have purpose in the work that we do. And we want to have room for lots of kinds of experience, knowledge, expertise, to have space and work in tandem, whenever possible.

KL

And local knowledge or I prefer what Foucault calls subjugated knowledges, is often overlooked and ignored, in fact, precisely because of the lack of so called official expertise. It's their knowledge that's been learned by lived experience, not by, you know, going to school or not by going down some specialized path, epistemological path where you accrue knowledge through pedagogy or whatever. And we ignore that at our peril. It's amazing how much knowledge there is at the local level at the lived level right and tragic aspect of that it's doubly tragic because we ignore it. But the second aspect of that tragedy is that the people with that knowledge themselves have been taught that their knowledge is of no value, right? And so they don't offer it. And so it needs to be tapped into, and that's one of the challenges that we took on at Monument Lab, we would recognize that these people here have knowledge and we value that knowledge and we're not going to filter that knowledge. We're not going to hierarchize that knowledge and so on, we're going to take whatever knowledge comes to us. And so we have to instill trust in the communities with which we work, so that they feel, you know, 'Hey, you are really interested in me, no one's ever cared about my opinion ever before.' And that is not easy to get to that point, that requires a lot of work. But once you get to that point, it's amazing how much knowledge issues out and amazing how much we learn from all kinds of people.

AK

There's so many things I want to pick up on here. And I think this connects really so well to how we began the conversation. What you're talking about, I think resonates so much with the big questions that museums, arts organizations have been asking themselves, or being asked about how they, quote unquote, "engage community", or invite people in or keep people out. And so you as an organization that, yes, you have a hub, but you really are an organization without walls in many respects. And I'm, I would love to hear you reflect a little bit more on that process of how you really do engage in dialogue, and have meaningful relationships with local communities and have these exchanges where you do invest in local knowledges, knowledge bases. Because it's something that I think arts organizations talk a lot about, engaging communities, but often their walls keep communities out. So can you walk us more through the process and the way that you've attempted to do this, enact this in your work, and maybe even some of the pitfalls or where you feel you've failed?

PF

I think intentionality is really important. Being really clear on what you are trying to do, what you can do, what you can't do. I remember early on one of the first moves we made in our in our first project in 2015, thanks to some great advice from Nancy Chen, who at that point was on the staff at Asian Arts Initiative, she said, 'it's really important for the sake of your public participants, but also your staff to put your intentions on the wall.' And so that when someone walks in, and they have a great idea, or they were they have a question about who you are, but like everyone is operating from the same understanding. What we saw in that moment, and I think it spilled into many other projects is a ground level for understanding. That's not meant to be pouring cold water on someone if they don't get it right, or some kind of cautionary tale or even worse, trying to be more opaque. I think we try to be sophisticated and nuanced. And then have people enter from that standpoint and complexity always, but to have the terms of engagement really clear, what we can and cannot accomplish, from our point of view. And utilize that so that, you have a staff member who is engaging a member of the public, and they get asked a question. And rather than just thinking on their toes to try to please someone or saying I don't know, they can have that shared point of reference. I think that that also extends to things that we try to do. And I even catch us not always doing it, which is like when you reach out to someone for an engagement, being really clear on what the terms are, what the scope of work might be, what the payment, what the time frame, we try to think about those things, I bet we can always do better. But I know that we're thinking about that intentionality, we're trying to shake the idea that monuments are universal, and timeless, and therefore beyond reproach, or that there's some kind of zero sum game, like 'what do you do, you keep all the monuments or you tear them all down?' What do you expect, and there's so many more options that are needed to really respond to the demands of our time. But we actually want to start from the point of view that there are legacies of exclusion that we have to respond to, we don't want a norm of white toxicity, just to quote unquote, return to, we actually want to respond to the fact like our monuments, are institutions have not been universal and timeless, but that are products of process, of power, and that the work on an institutional level, but institutions are made up of individuals, is figuring out how to respond to that meaningfully and, and listen and learn. And I think going along with that, a final point I'll make is that, at the heart of every project, we have a question. And the spirit of that is a research question. But it's research in the most artistic, creative terms, where to Ken's point we want people to think as artists, we want people to think with artists. We work really closely with artists, had amazing opportunities to work with people who are in high regard in the field and others who are making a space for themselves. But at each point, to think about questions that we actually want to know the answer to. And I will say, if you're looking to do community engagement as a check- the-box, and you don't actually want to learn what people have to say, that's not community engagement. And so if you actually want to know the answer to a question you're asking, that's the question you should ask. And I think that's been something that's grounded us, and keeps us in a space of of learning and evolving.

KL

Also I think if you were to go to the monumentlab.com website, and look at who we are, you'll see that it's a pretty diverse group. We've got people from every stripe, and I say that proudly. Including young people, older people, people who are different, people who are poor. I come from a single mother, you know, who worked in a sweatshop all her life. And I think it's very important that each of us bring our life experience to monument lab, and that we're not afraid to say, 'yeah, that's, that's my background,' I don't see it as a badge of honor, necessarily, but, you know, that's what shapes me. I can maybe I can give the example of, you know, because I'm chair of Fine Arts at Penn, we often will get an MFA applicant. Some of my colleagues, I like all my colleagues, I'm not impugning them. But some of my colleagues might say, 'Well, that was all very odd candidate.' And I'll go, 'yeah, that person was odd because that person grew up smoking weed and hanging out at the local mall in Topeka, Kansas.' And that's all he knows, and he played video games, right. But that person also is dissatisfied, that person also has some dissatisfaction about the way things are. And he's just not been directed yet. He's just not read enough yet. And so the reason why I was able to recognize that was because that person was me. In some respects, that was my background. I'm proud to say under Paul's leadership we are always taking 'this wait a second,' is this the right move? Is this true to our principles? Is this true to what we know is most important in terms of what we see and feel in society with respect to also our own lived experience? That's always at the fore. And that's always at the fore when we encounter people and, and work with people.

JBJ

This is a simple question, but why Philadelphia? You all are doing work all across the globe. But this is your home base, knowing you all there's a deeper correlation to it, and connection. And if you can really tease out for us what that is specifically about this community that resonates with you all, and with monument lab, specifically, and how you see it in the broader context of how the lab will continue to evolve.

PF

I mean I think it's important to answer it on a personal level, and then as a group and personal. Philadelphia is the place monument lab was born because Ken and I met in Philadelphia, we were on two very different life paths. I'm from Philly, I'm born and raised here. I left for a were on two very different life paths. I'm from Philly, I'm born and raised here. I left for a decade, I was coming back to finish my dissertation, Ken was new to Philadelphia. But we found each other at a moment that the city was undergoing a profound transformation that was about a cultural renaissance. And other parts of it were prolonged challenges in terms of school closures and budget cuts that disproportionately affected communities of color, a murder crisis, a city that one in four residents were living under the poverty line. And that's the Philadelphia that we met. And that was in Philadelphia, I would just say for me, as I was preparing to come back home thinking of centering artists. I saw Zoey Strauss's 10 years, a few months before I was coming home. And I remember I had an ambivalence about being back in Philadelphia. And I saw that show. And it cleared up an urgency that I feel I got to kind of really live out and extend when Ken and I met and we started working with our collaborators. The other thing just about Philadelphia is that it is a birthplace of independence, but it's also a place of enslavement of land dispossession, of not just injustice of the past, but an injustice that happens against the backdrop. This is a city where the contradictions of the American project are laid bare. And I think in part that is important to center our work here ongoingly and feel it as a home because many people look at Philadelphia as the site and the symbol for that. That's a place to do reckoning work, that's a place to build new ways of thinking and being. It's also a place that art has led an ethos where artists have vision. And we can continue to honor that by deepening our roots here, even as we extend and build across to keep putting Philly on the map.

KL

You know, for me, I left I left a city on the West Coast, which was, you know, highly capitalized, you might say, and the number one game was, how much did your house value go up? Right. And all the while there was like ten thousand heroin addicts, and displacements of people into further and further up the valley, even them, there's no more space to grow. And so it became untenable, even though I have that nice place. But at the same time I didn't want to be in that kind of environment I like the challenges. And so when I came to Penn, initially, I declined Penn. And then, when I ended up at Penn, I also recognized that the city was in the throes of reinvention from a development point of view, and also from other points of view, such as, what kind of city do will Philadelphia become? And I realized that it was very open city, and that I could make a difference within that. Or at least I had enough confidence to feel that the city was open enough to me, for me to try to make a difference in Philadelphia. And man, at some point, something strange happened, I started to fall in love with the city. I know you're not supposed to fall in love with a city, but I did [laughs]. I started falling in love with Philadelphia. And on paper, you're not supposed to fall in love with Philadelphia [laughs], I know that. But there's something really beautiful about the city, really great about the city. And especially at this moment, right? I wanted to be part of part of this change.

AK

I want to maybe ask one last question and make an observation. You gesture to the transformative potential of art to enact change. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that our first conversation in this series was with Sofia from the Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam, who changed their name to Melly after a work of yours, it's on the facade of the building, Melly Shum hates her job. I'm just thinking about this current moment we're in with the pandemic, where publicness has also shifted in tenor, being together in public places, when many museums and institutions have had to close their doors. And I would love to hear a little bit more about the importance of publicness for you in the urgencies of the public and the transformative potential of the public.

KL

I would say that, you know, as an artist, I always tell my students to always imagine what's the public that you want, what's the ideal audience you want for your work? I don't mean like, some rich collector, I just mean like the ideal audience, the person who really would get your work, who is that person? And since I work, not just in gallery and museum shows, I also work in public space through, not just Monument Lab, but through public commissions, I like to be nimble between the domains and I think too often the art world in the Chelsea art world, which I'm a part of, I'm not pretending to be separate from it, and it's a world I'm interested in and continue to be interested in, is to insular with respect to this larger world, larger public. And I think that comes at the cost to art. It means that you have a lot of people who are potential audience who could be transformed by the power of art and, and they don't get to be because they feel trepidation, they feel reticent about and even unwelcome in these spaces, because they don't understand the work, nobody's kind of there to try to help them and so on. And of course, that's not entirely the art world's fault. It's also the lack of teaching art classes in grade schools, and so on, there's a lot of things, part of the entire system. What has resulted is a kind of elite level of understanding of art, which I love, because I teach that and I write about that as well. But at the same time, I also think elitism also has to have application in terms of theorizing the narrowness of publicness for art itself. And so I always keep that in mind, in terms of any work I do.

PF

I want to start with a challenge that we face in publicness and then try to end with holding space for some hope. The challenges are real. Public space is disappearing, public space is increasingly privatized, criminalized, surveilled, endangered by our climate crises, and I think that we can't face away from that, actually, we have to take that on. If your work is about art, creativity, I think it's really important to protect artists' creative space, in the studio in the gallery, also in time, and also really think about how you are functioning in the world and reacting and responding to those dangers around public space. And I also want to be clear that as it's not to be waxing nostalgic, that there was some purer time for public spaces, just a recognition of the deep structuring. That being said, what inspires me, inspires us, is that despite those barriers, really, we've seen artists, educators, students, occupy public spaces, reimagine public spaces, take the disappearing nature of public space, and demand something else. You know, I think that part of the energy that we're seeing around our monuments is really a refusal of the lie, the lie of a singular white toxic narrative of history, that great individual somehow rose above, rolled into town on a horse, looked off into the distance and made history. And we know that's not how history happens. We know that it's collectives, we know that the struggle is circular. We know that progress is not linear and done. We live that out every day. And so what happens off the pedestal is often much more of a reflection, or what happens next to the pedestal. It's a lot easier to speak truth to power and call out a problematic statue, than it is a statute, in the sense that our legal system, our status quo, way of quote, unquote, normalcy is really hard to intervene into. And yet transformation occurs every day and across time, because of the vision of artists, because of the vision of poets, because of the dedication of educators. And resisting the lie is one thing, imagining a fuller form of truth, and openness and care is another. And it's seeing in the face of those challenges, not just in recent memory, but across time that fill me with a sense of hope, humility and energy, that says the work that we have to do is a work that we have to do together. Of truth- telling, of speaking truth to power, and really believing in the idea that art can fuel possibility and transformation.

AK

Please join us for our next episode with Rebecca Clemen, Executive Director of Electronic Arts Intermix and Alison Burstein, curator at The Kitchen, who will reflect on their shared organizational missions to support intermediate art forms and their comingled origin stories. As both EAI and The Kitchen recently celebrated their 50th anniversaries, they will discuss how their foundational moments rooted in an alternative arts ecology inform their institutional roles in the present. In the meantime, we look forward to welcoming you in person at ICA. Please visit our website, www.icaphila.org for more information about our upcoming exhibitions and programs. I'd like to thank Jason Moran for the original music and my colleagues at ICA who helped make this podcast possible. James E. Britt Jr, former DAJ Director of Public Engagement, Derek Rigby, audio visual coordinator, Natalie Sandstrom, formerly program coordinator, Jill Katz, Director of Marketing and Communications, Ali Mohsen, digital content editor, Olive Martin, social media coordinator, and Pelle Tracey, as well as collaborators former Spiegel Wilks curatorial fellows Tausif Noor and Gee Wesley. Thank you for listening.