Philadelphia-based studio Monument Lab has been announced as the curatorial leader of a new public art installation on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. 

The pilot exhibition of the Trust’s new Beyond Granite series will be on view for a month (August 18th to September 18th) and feature a response to the program’s thematic question about whose stories “remain untold” at the important site using a selection of six prototype monuments designed by artists Wendy Red Star, Derrick Adams, vanessa german, Ashon T. Crawley, Tiffany Chung, and Paul Ramírez Jonas.

Monument Lab founding Director Paul Farber and last year’s Pulitzer Prize for Criticism winner Salamishah Tillet are co-curating the exhibition and say it will treat the monuments as “a statement of power and presence in public.” 

“Beyond Granite: Pulling Together builds out platforms for artist-led civic engagement, historical interpretation, and storytelling as a means for advancing what it means to imagine, build, live, and grow with monuments in the nation’s capital and beyond,” the Lab describes further via a press statement.

The alternative designs, whose subjects include AIDS victims, Native Americans, and Vietnamese immigrants, among others, will be spread between the Smithsonian metro station and Lincoln Memorial. The latter location was selected due to its connection to the historic performance of Black opera singer Marian Anderson delivered at the site on Easter Sunday 1939 in response to segregation. The performance was later deemed “a story of triumph — a story of pulling together, a story of splendor and real democracy” by the visionary civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune.

The installation is funded through the Mellon Foundation’s new Monuments Project, a $250 million initiative that was announced in 2020 and recently awarded $25 million to nine important public memorial projects across the country, including Los Angeles’ Memorial to the Victims of the 1871 Chinese Massacre.

“Our hope is this prompt and the exhibition pushes a greater understanding of what monuments can be — beyond granite and not always bronze, and also reveal what is missing and what is already made visible on a space as dynamic and diverse as the National Mall,” Farber and Tillet explained in an interview with The Art Newspaper.

A video overview of the project can be viewed below.

Video courtesy of Trust for the National Mall/YouTube