"The program was first announced last December along with its inaugural participating artists: I.R. Bach, Mercedes Dorame, Glenn Kaino, Ruben Ochoa, and Ada Pinkston. In February, Monumental Perspectives was named as one of five inaugural grantees under the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s $250 million Monuments Project grant-making initiative. Monumental Perspectives received $1.2 million in funding for the further development and expansion of the program. In addition to bringing together artists and technologists from Snap’s Lens Creator community, the program also engages community stakeholders and historians to examine “key moments and figures in the region’s past and present that have too often been overlooked” per LACMA.

The virtual monuments and murals that these five artists have created illuminate how we can reimagine and rebuild commemorative spaces across the country, and embodies the visionary work we aim to support through The Monuments Project,” said Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation, in a news release. “Like these immersive commemorations, we’re excited to see more artists using innovative means—beyond bronze and stone—to memorialize historical figures, ideas, and movements, and to recontextualize existing monuments that teach too little of our collective history in public spaces."

— Excerpted from The Architect's Newspaper article, "Five virtual monuments are now viewable at LACMA, MacArthur Park, and across L..A." by Matt Hickman, April 13, 2021

"2021’s Liverpool Biennial opens in two phases. The first, last week, included the unveiling of seven outdoor commissions, including a photomontage mural of layered flowers, small animals and red lips by Linder in College Lane, a bronze sculpture of two cast heads by Rashid Johnson at Canning Dock, and, at Exchange Flags, Teresa Solar’s Osteoclast, large sculptures resembling human bones that are made of kayaks. The first phase also features a range of digital commissions, including a podcast series, tutorial videos by body percussion ensemble KeKeÇa, and an AI project – The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine – by Ubermorgen, Leonardo Impett and Joasia Krysa.

. . .

Works by Judy Chicago, Martine Syms and Haroon Mirza will go on show in Liverpool galleries once they reopen in May, but the biennial’s early, mostly digital phase, is a timely exercise. We might still be in the beta stage of online exhibitions, homesick for white walls, but digital art is booming. A Jpeg file by artist Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) sold for more than $69m earlier this month. Podcasts, algorithms and webcasts may not be traditional art forms but, as we spend more time at our computers, they can elevate our online experience – and integrate contemporary art into our daily lives."

— Excerpted from The Guardian, "Liverpool Biennial review – bleeps, bones and a machine that curates" by Kadish Morris, March 28, 2021

"SITE: Art and Architecture in the Digital Space, in the words of Library Street Collective, fosters “a unique digital connection between the visual arts and the built environment, incorporating aspects of storytelling, architectural history and an artist’s unique perspective.” Key in bringing SITE to life was architectural photographer James Haefner, whose evocative photographs of Detroit landmarks serve as a backdrop for the aforementioned artworks to be inserted. As Library Street Collective emphasized in a statement, the exhibition is wholly digital, meaning that the “art displayed is skillfully and seamlessly rendered into its environment” without any on-site installation work. The gallery also noted that this type of virtual exhibition is ultimately a more environmentally friendly one when compared to conventional, site-specific events as it removes carbon-intensive “exhibition transit from the equation.”

PUBLIC ART

"It is commonly used to broadly designate artistic works that have been specifically realised within/for the public realm. This includes works that are ephemeral and works that have an enduring nature (often described as ‘permanent’ to signal an expectation of the long term endurance of a work over generations). This wide spectrum that exists between works that endure for only a few hours, or even a few minutes, to works that are conceived as enduring over centuries, or even millennia, also includes a wide range of different modalities in terms of the internal temporality of a given work (episodic, cumulative, or subject to changing conditions of visibility) and the spatial qualities of a given work (site-specific, mobile, dispersed, fixed-in place, place-defining, digital/virtual and so forth). The journal Public Art Dialogue, established in 2011, provides an indicative example of the inclusive approach to public art “defined as broadly as possible to include: memorials, object art, murals, urban and landscape design projects, social interventions, performance art, and web-based work."

MONUMENT / COUNTER-MONUMENT

"The conventional sense of monument is as a structure or building that is built to honour a special person or event, or of a building, structure or site that is an important part of history. Historically, and contemporarily, a key function of art in the public realm is the production of monuments, which often combine landscaping, architectural, sculptural and textual elements within complex semiotic-structures that may also serve as sites of formal civic ritual or public festival.

While much of the research discussion of art and the public realm might appear abstract and removed from the day-to-day affairs of non-specialists, the monument is one dimension of art in the public realm that has garnered international visibility in mainstream political and media debate, and that has often become a talking point within everyday life. Media coverage has been triggered by recent controversies on university campuses such as ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ (#RhodesMustFall) and the various campaigns to remove or modify American Civil War and Confederacy era public statuary in the USA. One especially notable event has been the extraordinary public violence of the 2017 protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, initially triggered by the plans to remove a statue of the Civil War era figure, General Robert E Lee. In recent decades the term counter-monument has been invoked as part of a range of public art practices that critique or contest the dominant modes of official commemorative practice. Although these practices define themselves by opposition to traditional state memory practices and monumentality, they have also helped to reinvigorate public debate and professional interest in commemorative practices, structures and landscapes. Quentin Stevens et al note that the ‘terminology and analysis in scholarship on counter-monuments have remained relatively imprecise with writers in English and German employing the term ‘counter-monument’ or Gegendenkmal in different and sometimes confusing ways.’ Rather than a definitive term, counter-monument may be taken to note a practice that seeks in some way to contest or revise the traditional terms of civic commemoration through ‘permanent’ structures."

WHAT ART CAN DO HERE

"Art can make us experience water differently. We are in need of experiences that make us see the water, and see the system. We need experiences that erase invisibility and encourage comprehension of our place in our local ecology. We need to notice how our home is part of the watershed, how our car drives a street that is a stream. Witnessing the work of Seattle Public Utilities Drainage and Wastewater, and seeing the flow of water through our environment, offers us the chance to experience our place as a complex ecology. Likewise, art can make the connection to science through acts of translation and creative communication." — p. 5

"This document provides an outline of recommended future program pillars and guiding principles that emerge directly from key insights and findings across all engagement activities, an overview of which is provided in subsequent chapters."

BACKGROUND ON THE NEW DIRECTION FOR THE PUBLIC ART PROGRAM:

"The City of Calgary’s Public Art Program has faced significant controversy, leading to City Council calling for a freeze on the program in 2017, which has been in place for the past 2+ years. Local economic and political context has contributed to ongoing challenges facing The City’s Public Art Program. The program has come under severe scrutiny by public, media and some Councillors, in particular over concerns that a couple of high profile public art projects were deemed inaccessible, poor value for investment and were considered to have been implemented without adequately transparent decision making process and community engagement."