Who gets to be remembered in a city, and why? That will be one of the questions on the dais when artist Catherine Opie joins current and former LA Times architecture critics Christopher Hawthorne and Carolina A. Miranda for a conversation on the topic at The Broad Museum in Los Angeles tomorrow evening.
The conversation will take as its focus the works of Opie as they tie-in with the mission of the city’s Civic Memory Working Group that Hawthorne helped found. The museum will also present Opie’s recently-acquired work monument/monumental, which documents a 2020 road trip from Richmond, Virginia and the attempt by Black Lives Matters activists there to reclaim a noteworthy statue that depicted Robert E. Lee. Opie’s work will be presented in the context of how commemoration can best be processed through the built environment in the 21st century using lessons from the past as a critical guide.
Los Angeles is no stranger to the debate surrounding public monuments, dumping statues of Junipero Serra in addition to that of Christopher Columbus in Grant Park and an oddly-placed monument to the city’s forgotten Confederate war veterans in the Hollywood Forever cemetery in the past few years as the movement to erase some of the physical legacies of white supremacy made its mark on the liberal stronghold. Like Opie, Miranda has been an active force in the movement, using her writing to advocate for the victims of history in a way that was echoed by major policy updates recently published by the city.
“Oversights speak volumes about the histories our city considers worth honoring and those it has chosen to overlook,” she wrote in a 2020 editorial. “And in highlighting the history of the powerful, there are other histories — through purpose or inertia — that get overlooked.”
The event begins at 7:30 pm and will be available to stream via YouTube. More information about discussion and other events in the museum’s Un-Private discussion series can be found here.
3 Comments
These conversations are long overdue. Our civic monuments should represent our highest ideals, even if not always attained. That said, what does the oversized cheese grater have to do with this topic?
It's the facade of The Broad, the venue for this event
Thanks.
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