Never Forgotten: Public Monuments and Contemporary Memorializing

Never Forgotten: Public Monuments and Contemporary Memorializing

What is the function of a public monument? How do we engage with it? Do all public monuments serve a similar purpose? Are they for private or collective memory? We’ll explore some striking public monuments throughout downtown Vancouver, including early 20th-century traditional examples like the Cenotaph, the Angel of Victory and the Monument to Chinese-Canadian Veterans. We’ll then consider new approaches of counter-monuments, such as the Vancouver AIDS Memorial, the Marker of Change, Writing to You and the Terry Fox monument. We’ll examine the visual tradition of monumental memorials that have shaped Western art and the contemporary art transition to participatory experiential monuments. Important groundbreaking monuments like Maya Lin’s famous Vietnam War memorial, among other remarkable examples, will be discussed.

Lecturer
Efrat El-Hanany, PhD, is a faculty member in the Art History and Women and Gender Studies Departments at Capilano University in North Vancouver. An art historian, she specializes in the visual culture of the Italian Renaissance with additional interests in traditions of Jewish art, contemporary art, and the art of China.

She graduated from Hebrew University in Jerusalem with a BA in the history of art and East Asian studies and a BA in education. After several years' experience teaching and developing educational programs at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, she went on to earn an MA and a PhD from Indiana University in Bloomington. Her PhD dissertation, Beating the Devil: Images of the Madonna del Soccorso in Italian Renaissance Art (2006), focuses on issues of iconography, gender, and social and religious history.

Efrat’s engagement with art history has taken many forms: she has published on diverse topics and presented at numerous academic conferences. She has for many years taught continuing studies courses at various cultural institutions around Vancouver and elsewhere.

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