MONUMENT LAB
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Mission Statement
“Monuments Must Change” Monument Lab is a nonprofit public art and history studio based in Philadelphia. We cultivate and facilitate critical conversations around the past, present, and future of monuments. We believe that monuments must change, and by disrupting the status quo of how monuments are made, preserved, and interpreted, we hope to contribute to a future society defined by joy, regeneration, and repair.
About This Cause
At Monument Lab we envision a society where monuments are dynamic and defined by their evolving meaning, not by their hardened immovable and untouchable status. As a studio and curatorial team, with 12 team members and ~20 consultants, we collaborate to make generational change in the ways art and history live in public. To illuminate how symbols are connected to systems of power and public memory, we engage critically with our inherited monument landscape and work joyfully with artists, organizations, and movements to imagine the next generation of monuments. Monument Lab exists in its current form due to societal demand. We emerged in 2012 from a series of classroom conversations and grew into a curatorial collective in 2015 to produce a sculpture envisioned by the late artist Terry Adkins in the center of Philadelphia’s City Hall. The sculpture served as a public classroom installation and a site-specific hub for civic engagement. In 2017, we curated a citywide exhibition in Philadelphia, reached hundreds of thousands of people in person and over a million online, amidst the larger call for change in the monumental landscape and wide-spread acknowledgement that what is currently on the pedestal misrepresents our history. This project became an exemplar and touchstone for the monument community in our city and beyond. Given the acclaim of our early work and the rising interest from cultural organizations, municipal agencies, activists and funders, we decided to incorporate as a nonprofit organization and grow in scale. This vision was supported by a transformative $4 million investment in our potential for impact and organizational infrastructure by The Mellon Foundation in 2020, who awarded us the inaugural grant from their landmark Monuments Project.