Next week, Brooklyn’s Weeksville Heritage Center begins the first of a new imaginative public art installations series from the Black Reconstruction Collective. There, the industrial ‘Unmonument’ will take center stage starting August 8 as the instigator of several other small site activations surrounding it. The aim is to challenge the conventional notions of what the collective says are the most frequently perpetuated ‘myths’ about power, permanence, and the collective experience of the societies that construct them.

As a memorial to the many liberated Black diasporic communities across the country, such as Weeksville, the installation highlights an important narrative within Black history and is augmented by programming from the multidisciplinary oral tradition incubator Black Discourse. 

The Crown Heights rendition, reconfigured by Olalekan Jeyifous, precedes Sekou Cooke's Syracuse contribution in September; another from Felecia Davis in Bellefonte, PA, in December; and, next year, two others from J. Yolande Daniels and Emanuel Admassu in Los Angeles and Atlanta. This is also Jeyifous' fourth 'Protopian' piece investigating the potential to reconstitute found objects (detritus) as a commentary on ecological stewardship and liberated communities across New York state.

"By adapting a refurbished maintenance lift as a mobile site of intervention and then sequentially passing it from one Black artist to another — location to location — the industrial object is transformed into a powerful yet accessible symbol of resilience and ingenuity," Jeyifous noted. "The 'exquisite corpse' method of working emphasizes creative practices of refusal and the strength of collective storytelling inherent to liberated communities while providing a compelling platform for a dynamic and evolving archive of Black cultural expression. At the same time, this approach and object nod towards a history of violence, extraction, and exclusion in this country and in this field, through which Black creativity has persevered and flourished."

Jeyifous is, of course, currently at work on the city's official new monument to congresswoman Shirley Chisholm in Brooklyn with fellow BRC member Amanda Williams as part of the She Built NYC cultural initiative. Later versions of the installation will feature the same conceptual dynamics at play in the first Unmonument and be pursued by the BRC's other founding members, all looking to create new works of important art serving as beacons of community gathering and public discourse on race and Black liberation in line with its founding mission. 

Jeyifous is returning to Yale University this fall as a visiting professor, where he will teach his fourth successive Virtual Futures course with collaborator Beom Jun Kim. You can hear more of his thoughts about designing and spatial justice initiatives from our 2021 Next Up: Exhibit Columbus interview with the designer here.