Dr. Cat Dawson — Monumental: How a New Generation of Artists Is Shaping the Memorial Landscape - with Charlotte Ickes

For centuries, monuments have telegraphed the values and origin myths of dominant culture in public space and on massive scale. They have signaled both who is part of a culture and who is not, often overlooking histories that complicate the stories they tell. Yet in the last 50 years in the United States, the role of monuments has changed significantly. Numerous historical monuments have been removed or toppled, bringing to the fore a long-repressed conversation about the relationship between the monumental landscape and national identity. In Monumental, Cat Dawson takes up the social, political, and art historical causes and ramifications of this important shift.Examining the conditions that have led to and define this new era, Dawson reveals that these interventions are as indebted to the monumental tradition as they are to representational strategies that grew out of twentieth-century social justice efforts, from the Civil Rights movement to queer organizing during the AIDS crisis.Since 2014, a new generation of artists has established a groundbreaking role for monuments, calling into question the very notion of what a monument is through novel investigations of how symbolic structures can be made and what stories they can tell. This book tells the important story of that sea change.PURCHASE HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780262049757?ic_referral=5w8x0-vX66uXTXW1y3pXu1Oh5G1VtbXfwxZcG1PELcgwMyW0Su5lpVaUvP78ybyQgGirEY73xwUjAXGMjnnCisQ2H-d8PvoTcVMP3_prA6LUfURO7rRMF-QGhyIS5mS30HYpQ1UCat Dawson works at the intersection of art history and feminist, queer, and trans studies. They are currently Visiting Assistant Professor in Art History and the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Smith College and University Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.Dawson is in conversation with Charlotte Ickes. Art historian Charlotte Ickes joined the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in 2019. As curator of time-based media art and special projects, she stewards the museum’s growing time-based media art collection and organizes exhibitions of contemporary art