Later this month, the National Mall will become the site of six temporary art installations — the first time the Mall’s federal overseers have hosted an art exhibit there.
The installations, part of “Pulling Together,” are meant to expand the concept of a national monument and challenge viewers on issues like land dispossession, enslavement, segregation, and LGBTQ+ discrimination. The exhibit is the pilot of a larger project known as “Beyond Granite” and poses the central question: “What stories remain untold on the National Mall?” “Pulling Together” will be on view from Aug. 18-Sept. 18.
Beyond Granite is the Trust for the National Mall’s $4.5 million effort to create more inclusive and equitable monuments, in partnership with the National Capital Planning Commission and the National Park Service and with funding from the Mellon Foundation. Stretching from the Smithsonian Metro stop to the Lincoln Memorial, the installations include works from visual and performance artists including Ashon Crawley, vanessa german [the artist’s styling], Wendy Red Star, Tiffany Chung, Derrick Adams, and Paul Ramírez Jonas.
“Pulling Together” draws on the tradition of dissent and performance art on the Mall, a place where the 1987 AIDS Memorial Quilt was displayed and Dr. Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. The name itself was inspired by the 1939 Easter Sunday performance by Black opera singer Marian Anderson on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial after she was rejected by the nearby Constitution Hall in a segregated capital city.
Educator and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune called Anderson’s performance for 75,000 people on the National Mall “a story of hope for tomorrow — a story of triumph — a story of pulling together, a story of splendor and real democracy.”
Philadelphia-based arts and history nonprofit Monument Lab curated the exhibit with Bethune’s quote in mind. The project fits within the organization’s mission to “unearth the next generation of monuments that lift up stories of belonging, of representation, and of finding ways to repair and reconcile harms in the past,” says Monument Lab Director Paul Farber. The pieces include:
DCist/WAMU spoke to Crawley about what it means to have one of his works displayed on the National Mall. He is a writer, visual and sound artist, and professor of religious studies and African American and African studies at the University of Virginia. He grew up in the Pentecostal Church and says that as a child in the late 1980s and early ’90s, he remembers choir directors, singers, and other musicians — Black men, in particular — who would “disappear” with little explanation. He remembers hearing homophobic sermons about sin and AIDS, he says.
“I think the importance of [my installation] being on the National Mall is that it takes a story that has been so cloistered and spoken about mostly in hushed conversations and raises it to the national attention,” Crawley says, “Because it remains a story that needs to be told.”
In the Black Christian tradition, a homegoing is a sacred ritual that celebrates a loved one’s release from this life into the next. Crawley’s three-section musical piece offers a homegoing for the Black and queer church musicians “who often died unceremoniously, sometimes rejected by their families, sometimes unable to have homegoing ceremonies,” he says. Each section features original music Crawley composed and recorded with a choir and close collaborators. The score was inspired by the sounds Crawley grew up with in the church — listeners will hear an abundance of Hammond organ — and is dedicated to those “whose souls remain with us on this plane of existence.”
The National Mall has been a symbolic battleground of ideas, a place that balances the nation’s “triumphs and traumas,” Farber says, adding: “It’s important to note, the Mall bears the most hopeful and heaviest burdens of the American experiment.”
The selected artists all have a history of creating large works of art in a short period of time and working in different mediums, says “Pulling Together” co-curator Salamishah Tillet, a professor at Rutgers University-Newark and a Pulitzer Prize-winning contributing critic at large for the New York Times.
“They spent time on the Mall. Some of them spent time in the archives of D.C., and others, reimagining their own experiences on this sacrosanct space, and then came up with these very distinct art installations,” Tillet says. “It’s kind of a more traditional approach to how we think about exhibitions, but it’s atypical for the Mall.”
Organizers are also involving people from the local arts scene in the programming surrounding the exhibit. Each day of the exhibit from 12 p.m.-7 p.m., Monument Lab will host welcome stations at different sections of the Mall where paid local artists and students will invite guests to write down their thoughts on what stories and themes are missing on the Mall. On Aug. 19, some of the artists will be at their installations, participating in an open house-style program. For example, german will lead guests in a “blue walk” around the Lincoln Memorial, a movement or ritual and song inspired by her Of Thee We Sing sculpture.
The curators and partner agencies are hosting an Aug. 25 event at the U.S. Institute for Peace with panels about the history of public monuments and art in D.C. with authors like Natalie Hopkinson, a D.C.-based writer, historian, and professor. In coming up with the programming, Monument Lab also worked with mixed-media artist Nekisha Durrett, whose recent work focuses on the Black neighborhood that was displaced to construct the Pentagon.
As part of Beyond Granite, Monument Lab released a 2021 study concluding that the U.S. monument landscape is overwhelmingly white male-dominated. Of the 50 most represented individuals in U.S. monuments, only five were Black or Indigenous, and there were no U.S.-born Latinx, Pacific Islander, or self-identified LGBTQ+ people. At least half of the top 50 figures owned slaves.
Given these gaps in representation, the agencies involved will use this pilot to help guide their public programs and installations going forward, Tillet says. “It’s a remarkable moment in which we’re actually continuing this process of democracy and asking people what they would like to see,” she adds, “and what makes them feel like they belong to the Mall, to D.C., and to our country at large.”
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