Call Number:

Ms. Coll. 1400

Repository:

University of Pennsylvania: Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts

Extent:

• 3 linear feet (3 boxes)
• 40.9 gigabytes

Preferred Citation:

Monument Lab records, 2015-2017, Ms. Coll. 1400, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania

Date:

2015-2017 (inclusive)

Creator:

Monument Lab (Art Studio)

Form:

Posters, Proposals, Promotional materials, Maps, and Machine-readable artifacts

Abstract:

Founded in 2012, the Monument Lab is an independent public art and history studio based in Philadelphia. Founded and led by Paul Farber and Ken Lum, Monument Lab works with artists, students, activists, municipal agencies, and cultural institutions on creative avenues for public engagement and collective memory. This collection documents the Monument Lab project, undertaken in partnership with Mural Arts Philadelphia, from 2015 to 2017, addressing the question, "what is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia?" The project collected 4,500 monument proposals, of which twenty were selected for temporary exhibit at a variety of public sites across the city

Founded in 2012, the Monument Lab is an independent public art and history studio based in Philadelphia. Founded and led by Paul Farber and Ken Lum, Monument Lab works with artists, students, activists, municipal agencies, and cultural institutions on creative avenues for public engagement and collective memory. Monument Lab focuses on building collaborative projects and facilitating conversations around city monuments across time. The studio and its curatorial team initiates art exhibitions, commissions, research projects, a national fellows program, a web bulletin, and a podcast. The Monument Lab began with classroom conversations between Farber, Lum, and their students.

In 2015, the Monument Lab began an initial experimental project wherein students and educators gathered hundreds of monument proposals. This collection focuses on the second phase of this project: a 2017 citywide exhibition in partnership with Mural Arts Philadelphia. The 2017 project took place over nine weeks, during which 20 temporary monuments were installed in 10 different sites: City Hall, Franklin Square, Washington Square, Logan Square, Rittenhouse Square, Penn Treaty Park, Vernon Park, Norris Square, Malcom X Park, and Marconi Plaza. The project also included "special project sites" at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), West Philadelphia, and Kensington, as well as a field research office at the Barnes Foundation on 20th Street. Alongside the temporary installations were shipping container "labs" staffed by research teams comprised of youth researchers, artists, and community members. The project was organized around a central question posed to collaborators and the public: What is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia?

Research teams conducted 250,000 in-person engagements and gathered 4,500 monument proposals which were subsequently scanned and uploaded to OpenDataPhilly (https://www.opendataphilly.org/showcase/monument-lab-map) and http://proposals.monumentlab.com (some are also available on Monument Lab's website). The research teams recorded interactions with the public in research logs, transferred some proposals on display at PAFA, and analyzed the project in a final Report to the City (2018). It was also described in book edited by co-founders Paul M. Farber and Ken Lum titled, Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia (Temple University Press, 2019).

The proposals include perspectives and imaginations from a wide range of ages, ideas, and locations. Beyond providing a snapshot of the diversity of public spaces and parks, this project examines the nature of public engagement with monuments and the various ways we pull meaning from them. It gives a sense of how the public impacts and is impacted by monuments, public space, and civic infrastructure more broadly. It also gives a sense of the cultural, artistic, civic, and educational networks in Philadelphia, including the City of Philadelphia; Philadelphia Parks & Recreation; Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy; Historic Philadelphia; Independence National Historical Park; Penn Institute for Urban Research; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Price Lab for Digital Humanities; and the University of Pennsylvania.

Sources Consulted:

http://monumentlab.com/research

https://www.muralarts.org/artworks/monumentlab/

http://monumentlab.com/monument-lab-project-2017

http://monumentlab.com/about-monument-lab

This collection documents the Monument Lab project, undertaken in partnership with Mural Arts Philadelphia, from 2015 to 2017, addressing the questions, "what is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia?" The project collected 4,500 monument proposals, of which twenty were selected for temporary exhibit at a variety of public sites across the city. This collection contains some of the 4,500 public proposals, information about the 20 projects which were installed in each of the "laboratory" sites, a small number of general oversight files as well as promotional material for the project.

Material is organized in three series: (I) The Monument Lab's administrative files, (II) public engagement materials, including proposals, and (III) promotional materials. The first series includes administrative files dating from 2015 to 2017, featuring a map of the 20 temporary monuments erected in 2017, a hard drive containing data from monument proposals circa 2015 to 2017, a lab managers and staff handbook for the Mural Arts Philadelphia September 2017 projects, and policy files from Logan Square's Lab in 2017.

The bulk of the collection is found in series II which includes original copies of proposals gathered at different sites around the city and field notebooks from volunteers describing the nature of interactions in parks. Participants were given blank proposal sheets which asked for name of monument, location for the monument, zip code and age of proposer, and a description or sketch of the proposed monument. The proposers, representing a wide range in ages (from 2 to at least 73) and ethnicities, took their task in degrees of seriousness, from proposing statues of themselves to reflections of Philadelphia's political and cultural past to the hopes of peace, love, equality, and environmental progressivism for city's future. Sketches range from rough to very skilled and for the most part are extremely thoughtful presentations and reflections of what makes Philadelphia unique as well as areas which citizens clearly see as needing improvement. Lab logs for each location include a record of the number of interactions and the number of proposals for given days; sometimes including descriptions of interactions.

Series III includes a limited amount of promotional and public-facing materials, including a flyer and poster advertising the project, posters describing a few of the selected projects, a coloring book, and newsletters about the project generally and the projects selected.