ARTH488W

This course investigates the political and cultural work of monuments in the United States since the Civil War. Taking recent struggles over the presence and removal of Confederate monuments as our starting point, we will consider issues of race and representation, memory and memorialization, appropriation and iconoclasm. How do monuments embody cultural values, consolidate power structures, and become sites for mourning and protest? We will examine war memorials, civic statuary, city beautification projects, and abstract public works, including Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) and the recently opened Equal Justice Initiative's Memorial to Peace and Justice in Alabama. We will also explore how contemporary artists such as Tatsu Nishi, Titus Kaphar, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Kara Walker, whose ephemeral installations, photographic projections, and new sculptural bodies challenge and reinvent conventions of monumentality.