Ep. 66 - Bringing Monuments Home (from PRX's Monumental)

The Lonely Palette

Arts, Podcast, Art, Museum, Painting, Modern Art, Visual Arts, Art History

4.8 • 857 Ratings

🗓️ 7 March 2024

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this special episode of The Lonely Palette, I’m sharing the episode I made for the PRX limited-run podcast series "Monumental," which interrogates the state of monuments across the greater U.S. and what their future says about where we are now and where we’re going. This was the concluding episode, exploring how some monuments are larger than life, dwarfing us, making us feel small relative to the grandness of history. But what if a monument was human-scaled? What if it made us aware of our bodies in space? We don’t often think about the design choices that go into making a monument, but more and more, a new generation of artists and designers are reimagining what a monument can look and feel like, and the kinds of stories they can hold. This episode takes us to Montgomery, Alabama to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, to Shreveport, Louisiana, to the South Side of Chicago, to Navajo Nation in Arizona. It explores how many American monuments to slavery took inspiration from Holocaust memorials in Germany. And it looks at decentralized memorials that are using technology to help bring monuments to the past into the future. See the images: https://bit.ly/49FR3Ui Support the show: www.patreon.com/lonelypalette

Transcript

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0:00.0	Okay, so Ashley, I want you to close your eyes and just think about some of the
0:07.4	monuments that you picture when you hear the word monument. I live in Indiana, born and raised and one thing that's true about
0:19.2	Indiana is you're going to get a war memorial, okay?
0:22.9	There's gonna be a statue for a general, okay?
0:27.1	You're gonna find some cannons.
0:29.8	That was me from a conversation I had with one of our producers.
0:37.0	I'm from Fort Wayne, so I literally grew up around memorials to war and conflict.
0:44.2	And those have predictable forms,
0:46.2	like an obelisk or a soldier on a horse.
0:50.5	In this series, we've looked at monuments and memorials in various corners of the United States.
0:57.0	And I've noticed that the newer attempts at grappling with our history look very different from the monuments I saw as a kid.
1:05.0	Maybe it's because they're trying to tell a different kind of story.
1:09.0	Sure, artistic styles change.
1:12.6	But new kinds of stories ask us to stretch our assumptions
1:17.0	of what a monument should look and feel like.
1:24.0	This is Monumental, a podcast series produced by PRX.
1:29.0	I'm your host Ashley C-iford. This episode, we're focusing on the design choices that go into monument making.
1:42.0	Good design, you're not meant to notice.
1:45.3	You're meant to kind of experience.
1:47.9	This is producer and art historian Tamar Avishai.
1:51.8	She got me thinking more deeply
1:53.4	about the challenges of creating monuments.
	...

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