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Kristen Giannantonio Monument Lab Monument Lab is a public 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. |
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Web Page: | https://https://monumentlab.com |
List Affiliations: | None |
Interests: | Art / Art History |
Bio: Founded in 2012, Monument Lab emerged from a series of classroom conversations in courses taught by Paul Farber and Ken Lum. In 2015, Monument Lab grew into a larger curatorial collective and installed a pair of outdoor classrooms in the courtyard of Philadelphia’s City Hall – one, a sculpture envisioned by the late artist Terry Adkins and the other, an adjacent learning lab operated by students and educators who gathered hundreds of public monument proposals. In 2017, Monument Lab partnered with Mural Arts Philadelphia on a citywide exhibition featuring temporary prototype monuments by 20 artists across 10 sites in Philadelphia’s iconic public squares and neighborhood parks, presented together with research labs, which engaged 250,000 Philadelphians and visitors in person and collected 4,500 creative monument proposals from passersby. The proposals informed a dataset of public speculation posted on GitHub. They were also shared in a Report to the City (2018) and the book Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia (Temple University Press, 2019). In 2018, Monument Lab evolved into a studio composed of our team of artists, curators, researchers, educators, and students. We have since launched a fellows program; completed research residencies with the High Line Network and Pulitzer Foundation; and piloted an online commons for public scholarship on monuments, memory, and belonging through our Bulletin journal and podcast platform. Our studio is based in Philadelphia, and we currently collaborate with partners in over a dozen cities, including Chicago, New York, Newark, Richmond, San Francisco, St. Louis, and Washington D.C., among others. In 2020, Monument Lab was awarded a transformative grant of $4 million by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to support the production of a definitive audit of the nation’s monuments; the opening of ten Monument Lab field research offices through $1 million of subgrants; and capacity to hire its first full-time staff. Our grant was the first project funded by Mellon Foundation’s $250 million Monuments Project. |