What Qualifies as a Monument in 2024?
The idea of what qualifies as a monument has been much debated in recent years. Now the Black Reconstruction Collective, a group of leading Black American architects and designers, which includes Walter Hood, Amanda Williams, and Sekou Cooke, is launching its first public art project, one that challenges the very practice of monumentalizing and archiving history.
The series, UnMonument, is conceived as an impermanent, traveling exhibition, with installations planned across the country in cities from Los Angeles to Atlanta to Syracuse, New York.
The yearlong series kicks off August 8 in Brooklyn, with a piece by Nigerian-born visual artist Olalekan Jeyifous. His “unmonument” consists of a repurposed maintenance lift, following the form of a mobile trolley that Mario Gooden designed for his installation in the Black Reconstruction Collective’s 2021 exhibition at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. “In reimagining the project, we sought to challenge conventional ideas about permanence, mobility, and adaptive reuse, positioning our work as a critique of larger-scaled, permanent monuments and the figures or events they commemorate,” Jeyifous says. “This led us to explore various types of industrial equipment that could be adapted to suit our needs.”
Jeyifous’s design will be on view at Weeksville Heritage Center for three days, August 8–10, the short time frame underlining the ephemerality of the endeavor as a whole. The location is a poignant one, as Weeksville was once home to one of America’s first free Black communities. After Weeksville was purchased in 1838 by James Weeks, it went on to become a center for abolitionist work and a domestic refuge for free Black people from both the North and South. Now the center comprises three residential buildings that were erected between 1860 and 1940.
“Weeksville exemplifies the self-sufficiency and creative resilience of Black folks in the face of ongoing systemic oppression,” says Jeyifous, now based in Brooklyn himself. “Its historical significance makes it an ideal site for the UnMonument, as it embodies the principles of cooperative and participatory engagement.”
Following Weeksville, the structure will travel in September to Syracuse, New York, with an intervention by architect Sekou Cooke, and then continue on to Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, in December with an addition by architect and engineer Felecia Davis. In 2025, stops will include a January installation by architect and educator J. Yolande Daniels in Los Angeles and a June stop by architect and designer Emanuel Admassu in Atlanta.
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