Transforming Commemoration through Public Art

Join artists Nekisha Durrett, Sadie Barnette, and Lava Thomas in a public conversation with Monument Lab, about the role of commemorative public art in illuminating undertold stories and shifting narratives of place. Durrett, the selected artist for Bryn Mawr's ARCH project commission, will be joined by leading public artists Barnette (Eagle Creek Salon, Family Style 2) and Thomas (Dr. Maya Angelou Monument), each of whom will explore their own recent projects to speak through the breakthroughs, challenges, and opportunities for reimagining commemoration with moderator Monique Renee Scott, Associate Professor of History of Art and Director of Museum Studies at Bryn Mawr College.
(Art Remediating College Histories), in partnership with Monument Lab, is a multi-year collaboration to design a process and commission a campus public artwork that responds to the legacy of exclusionary practices at the College.
Parking: Parking lots are located at the College's Gateway Building at 801 Yarrow Street (Morris and Yarrow) and the Campus Center at 816 New Gulph Road. Additional parking can be found via the campus map: https://www.brynmawr.edu/campusmap/

Lava Thomas tackles issues of race, gender, representation and memorialization through a multidisciplinary practice that spans drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, and site-specific installations. Drawing from her family’s Southern roots, current and historical socio-political events, intersectional feminism and African American protest and devotional traditions, Thomas’s practice centers ideas that amplify visibility, healing, and empowerment in the face of erasure, trauma and oppression.
Sadie Barnette's multimedia practice illuminates her own family history as it mirrors a collective history of repression and resistance in the United States. The last born of the last born, and hence the youngest of her generation, Barnette holds a long and deep fascination with the personal and political value of kin. Barnette’s adept materialization of the archive rises above a static reverence for the past; by inserting herself into the retelling, she offers a history that is alive. Her drawings, photographs, and installations collapse time and expand possibilities. Political and social structures are a jumping off point for the work, but they are not the final destination. Her use of abstraction, glitter, and the fantastical summons another dimension of human experience and imagination. Recent projects include the reclamation of a 500-page FBI surveillance file amassed on her father during his time with the Black Panther Party and her interactive reimagining of his bar — San Francisco’s first Black-owned gay bar.
Nekisha Durrett is a mixed-media artist who employs the visual language of mass media to bring forward histories that objects, places, and words embody, but are not often celebrated. Her expansive practice includes public art, social practice, installation, painting, sculpture and design. Through deep research and material investigation, she finds historical traces in the present that are filled with stories easily overlooked. Her work contemplates biases and the unreliability of memory, as information is filtered over time. Durrett illuminates individual and collective histories of Black life and imagination, addressing her own younger self and the stories she wished she had learned.

• Bryn Mawr College Leadership: Monique Scott, Millicent Bond, Homay King, Ruth Lindeborg
• Student Researchers: Annalise Ashman, Elliot Waters-Fleming, Faryal A. Khan, Olivia L. Harkins-Finn, Aaliyah R. Joseph
• Monument Lab Team: Paul Farber, Gina Ciralli, Nico Rodriguez, Elliot Waters-Fleming, Sue Mobley
• Photography: Daniel Jackson
• Supported by: Bryn Mawr College

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Great Hall, 212 North Merion Avenue, Bryn Mawr, United States