From Controversy to Conversation: Engaging Monuments and Memory

Join us for a lively conversation, at The Walters Art Museum, on contested history, collective memory, power, and aesthetics of public space, including a discussion about what to do with Baltimore’s decommissioned Confederate monuments and their former sites.

There will be a reception following the panel discussion.

Speakers:
Hannah Burstein is a curator, researcher, and public programmer. Her interests include contemporary interventions with historical objects, constructions of race in public space, alternatives to traditional museum interpretation, and horror. She is the curatorial associate of The Brick and the MONUMENTS exhibition at MOCA in Los Angeles.

Nekisha Durrett is a DC-based mixed-media artist who employs the visual language of mass media to illuminate individual and collective histories of Black life and imagination. Durrett has recently been awarded the commission for the ARCH Project at Bryn Mawr College in partnership with Monument Lab and is in production on Queen City, 35’ tall “vessel” in Arlington, VA that pays homage to 903 individuals displaced for the construction of the Pentagon in 1941.

Martha S. Jones is a writer, historian, legal scholar and public intellectual whose work aims to understand the politics, culture, and poetics of Black America. She is the author of: The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir, Vanguard and Birthright Citizens and director of the Hard Histories at Hopkins Project at Johns Hopkins University.

Hamza Walker is the director of The Brick (formerly LAXART), a nonprofit alternative art space in Los Angeles. An award-winning curator, writer, and educator, his practice explores the rhetoric of race in the United States, racial identity, and politics. He is the curator of the Monuments exhibition currently on view at MOCA in Los Angeles.

Event sponsored by the Walters Art Museum and the Johns Hopkins University's SNF Agora Institute and Program in Museums and Society.

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