Paper Monuments Final Report

PAPER MONUMENTS FINAL REPORT

IMAGINE NEW MONUMENTS FOR NEW ORLEANS

Paper Monuments was a public art and public history project sharing undertold narratives of the city. From May 2017 to May 2019, the project served as a collective planning process inviting all of our residents to imagine new monuments for New Orleans.

Who we are

Our partners

Bryan C Lee Jr.(Co-Lead) Sue Mobley (Co-Lead) Nic Brierre Aziz Chris Daemmrich Colin Fredrickson Shoshana Gordon Brittany Lindsey John Ludlam Suzanne Raether Isabella Siegel

The American Library Association, Amistad Research Center, Antenna Gallery, Arts Council of New Orleans, the AshÊ Cultural Arts Center, A Studio in the Woods, Backatown Coffee Parlour, Crescent City Books, Community Book Center, the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans, Habana Works, Historypin, Know NOLA Tours, the Loyola University New Orleans Department of Design, Material Life, the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at the University of New Orleans, Monument Lab, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the National Organization of Minority Architects-Louisiana, the Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University, the New Orleans African American Museum, New Orleans Public Libraries, New Orleans Recreation Department, New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, Octavia Books, Pagoda Cafe, Paper Machine, RIDE New Orleans, Studio Be, Tubby and Coo’s Mid-City Book Shop, and YEP Design Works.

We have been ably assisted by dozens of volunteers over the course of the project, and our gratitude to each and every one of them, for their labor, patience, and humor, knows no bounds!

Paper Monuments was a project of Colloqate

Design, a multidisciplinary non-profit design justice practice focused on expanding community access to, and building power through, the design of communal, civic, and cultural spaces.

Portraits by Gus Bennett All other photos

by Paper Monuments team

Paper Monuments was supported by the Surdna Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Foundation for Louisiana, and individual donations. Documentation of the project process was provided by Luisa Dantas and Michael Boedigheimer of JoLu Productions as a separate project of the Surdna Foundation.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page 4

Page 5

Paper Monuments’ Goals and Values

Acknowledgments and Gratitude

Page 7

Page 8

Page 12

Executive Summary

Contesting Narratives

Claiming Space

Page 16

Page 27

Page 40

Public Proposals Quantitative

Public Proposals Qualitative

The Truly Monumental

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Paper Monuments’ Goals and Values Our team, a collective of designers, artists, urbanists, and educators, began working in July 2017 to pair scholarly narratives and locally commissioned artwork to amplify the stories that are too often lost or obscured when New Orleans history is recounted.

These are the stories of New Orleanians who were poor and working-class. Black and brown. Women and children. Lesbian, gay, trans, and queer. Immigrants and refugees. Those who fought battles for inclusion and justice; those who worked to improve lives and bring hope, but who were and are unlikely to be elevated on any pedestal.

At the same time, our team created events and engagement opportunities across the city, reaching a broad cross section of New Orleans residents to invite them to imagine new monuments for New Orleans. Paper Monuments’ goal was not to decide what individual belongs at the top of a pillar, but to join and expand a conversation about who and what we remember, what events have shaped our city and our lives, and what places and movements matter to us.

Our goal was a radically democratic one. We wanted every resident of New Orleans to have an opportunity to have a voice in this process. Public proposals were the core of Paper Monuments’ process, an expansive pool of prospective monuments, memorials and public art that ranged from the intimate to the epic and tell the stories that are important to New Orleans’ residents.

These are the stories of events and movements that challenge our belief that historical change is brought about by the heroics of singular individuals. These are the stories that open doors to finding the heroic in each other and ourselves.

The core values of Paper Monuments were equity, integrity, and collaboration. We envisioned the role of our core team as guiding and coordinating the efforts and visions of a broad collaboration of residents, scholars, artists and activists.

In centering equity, we set an honorarium for artwork that recognized the value of our local artists, and worked to ensure that both the content and the creators of all our pieces reflected the population of our city. We committed to hiring local people of color for any organizing roles for which we had funding, and to paying a minimum wage of fifteen dollars an hour for those hires.

In centering integrity, we committed to honor all community submissions, to include them in all archives and maps, despite knowing that some might be offensive or abusive. We provided opportunities for all community members to speak at our events throughout the process.

In centering collaboration, we built relationships with small business owners to distribute posters while helping to drive potential customers to their stores. We partnered with institutions such as the Midlo Center to provide research and archival support locally, and were part of a cohort of organizations and projects across several cities working to reconsider the role of monuments as public art and public history.

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Acknowledgments and Gratitude Paper Monuments is deeply grateful to the many, many people whose labor, advocacy, and knowledge helped to make this project possible! As we celebrated the conclusion of two years of this public art and public history project, we also reflected on the indebtedness of our collective to everyone involved in shaping the content and context of this work. First, thank you to Gia Hamilton and the New Orleans African-American Museum for hosting the Claiming Space final exhibit and for moderating the opening event. Thank you Sunni Patterson for grounding and closing us out with your words and spirit.

Thank you to Cody Ainey for asking the questions that matter, even when they have no answers. Thank you to Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes for being your inimitable self. We are all blessed to have you in our lives and our community.

We would like to thank all of the writers who contributed: Danielle Abrams, Thomas Adams, Malik Bartholomew, James B. Borders IV, Pepper Bowen, Anna Livia Brand, Roberta Brandes Gratz, Richard Campanella, Emily Clark, Keith Dunn, Adrienne Dixson, Rien Fertel, Denise Frasier, Sylvia Frey, Virginia Gould, Shana M. griffin, Laine Kaplan-Levenson, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Larry Powell, Lauren Lastrapes, Al Jackson, Laura Kelley, Lydia Nichols, Emily Maw, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Mary Mitchell, Wendi Moore-O'Neal, John O'Neal, Bertha O'Neal, Marguerite Nguyen, Frank Perez, Michael A. Radcliff, Malik Rahim, Timothy David Ray, Kiki Reinecke, Katy Reckdahl, Trent Smith, Elizabeth Steeby, Sharlene Sinegal-DeCuir, Lynnell Thomas, Bryan Wagner, Leon Waters, Nick Weldon and Amber Wiley.

We would like to thank all of the artists who contributed: Langston Allston, Jeffrey Arlyn, Bryan Brown, Eliza Carey, Hannah Chalew, Sean Clark, Rachel Cockrill, Kimberly Coleman, Jose Cotto, Pippin Frisbie-Calder, Rebecca O’Malley Gipson, CeCe Givens, Jeff Goodman, D. Lammie Hanson, Bernie January and the students of YEP Design Works Monica Kelly, Lee Laa, Kate Lacour, Tiffany Lin, Henry Lipkis, Liz Lerman, Daniela Marx, Hugo Martinez, Brendon Palmer-Angell, Jeremy Paten, Matt Phelan, Cubs the Poet, Nik Richard, Renee Royale, Lydia Stein, Kiazer Sylve, Jane Tardo, Kyle Blake Tveten, Sly Watts, Carl Joe Williams, Carla Williams, and Alberta Wright.

We are grateful to our Re:Present jury, many of whom also served as advisors and supporters throughout the project. Thank you to Ron Bechet, Willie Birch, Marcela Correa, Erin Greenwald, Gia Hamilton and Greg Lambousey.

We are grateful to our Crossroads storytellers: Nic Brierre Aziz, Phoebe Ferguson, John Hankins, Tilman Hardy, Chris Lane, Sunni Patterson, Rebecca Snedeker, Jackie Summell and Mama Jennifer Turner. To those who were a part of our Imagine New Monuments series in partnership with the New Orleans Public Library: Mary Abler at the Martin Luther King, Jr. branch; indee mitchell, Aesha Rasheed and Dr. Elizabeth Steeby, and our host at the Smith Branch, Pam Nath; and to our friends at the Keller Branch, including Sharon Kohl and again Kiki Reinecke, who made the Rosa Freeman Keller poster release party possible!

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We would like to thank all of the collaborators, co-conspirators, and colleagues who lent their expertise and vision to shaping the Paper Monuments project. Thank you, always, to Connie Atkinson, Barbara Brown-Wilson, Elgin Cleckley, Alfredo Cruz, Jackie Curtis, Flozell Daniels, Ethan Ellestad, Sylvia Frey, Kevin Gray, Maggie Hansen, Abram Himelstein, Candice Huber, Dasjon Jordan, Jennifer Kretschmann, Melissa Lee, April Martin, Gilad Meron, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Jerry Maldonado, Danny McElmurray, Molly Mitchell, Marla Nelson, Larry Powell, Ameca Reali, Bob Snead, Mama Jennifer Turner, Mama Vera Warren-Williams, Bryan Wagner and Amber Wiley.

Deepest gratitude to Jess Garz, Paul Farber, and Laurie Allen for the hours that became weeks and then months of shaping this work into something richer and more meaningful than we could ever have initially envisioned. We have been and remain in awe of the tremendous work that you all have done through Monument Lab and are excited to see what comes next!

Paper Monuments began with a group of friends and allies asking the question, “What’s next?” and found ourselves within an incredible network of projects and cities asking the same questions. We were humbled by the opportunity to exist as one of many groups doing this work. It was inspiring to collaborate with many of these efforts, to challenge ourselves to do better based on the examples set, and to simply witness the abundant commitment and creativity of these diverse approaches.

We sit in deep gratitude that our work was part of the many brilliant concurrent conversations around complicating New Orleans' histories. These included NOLA.com/The Times-Picayune’s 300 for 300; the New Orleans Museum of Art’s exhibit Changing Course: Reflections on New Orleans Histories; The Data Center’s New Orleans Prosperity Index: TriCentennial Edition, Hidden History Tours; Know NOLA Tours, Last Call: The New Orleans Dyke Bar History Project; A People’s Guide to New Orleans, , the incredible projects and programs of the Neighborhood Story Project, including Queer Cartography; the New Orleans Committee to Erect Historic Markers on the Slave Trade; the New Orleans Slave Trade Marker and App Project; New Orleans Historical; Remaking New Orleans: Beyond Exceptionalism and Authenticity he Whitney Plantation, WWNO’s TriPod: New Orleans at 300 and many, many others.

Paper Monuments’ team was inspired by a constellation of projects across the United States and the world which are amplifying stories of places, movements, events and people long erased and obscured. These included, but were not limited to, the aforementioned Monument Lab in Philadelphia, Untold RVA in Richmond, Virginia; Black Gotham Experience in New York City; the Fourth Plinth in London; A Paper Monument for the Paperless in Amsterdam and many more.

We give many, many thanks to our core volunteers, including but not limited to Michelle Barrett, Dana Elliot, Joanna Farley, Lyneisha Jackson, Nick Jenisch, Jebney Lewis, Dez McWilliams, Erica Rawles and Maddi Wells. We were ably assisted by dozens of volunteers over the course of the Paper Monuments project, and our gratitude to each and every one of them, for their labor, patience, and humor, knows no bounds!

To the people of New Orleans, thank you for the opportunity to tell some of your stories, and for the honor of hearing the stories that you wanted to tell.

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Executive Summary Paper Monuments was developed as a project in the context of the city removing four Jim Crow-era Confederate statues from public spaces in New Orleans in the spring of 2017. Our collective began with the question, “What’s next?” which grew into an exploration of what had been, what was, and what mattered to the residents of New Orleans; an exploration that would unfold throughout the celebration of our city’s Tri-Centennial year, over the arc of a historic municipal election, and within a growing network of projects and cities asking the same questions.

In answering, “what’s next?” we initially echoed the approach of our sibling public art and history project, Monument Lab, which had begun asking Philadelphia residents in 2012, “what’s an appropriate monument for our city today?” Over the course of our two-year process, however, we adapted that model to address differences in culture, urban form, and context between the two cities. Paper Monuments drew heavily on our collective backgrounds in community engaged design processes to layer various phases and media of public art and public history while collecting and applying data iteratively throughout the project.

Our process, which is explained in greater detail below, was designed to scaffold various phases and mediums of public art, public history, and public engagement into an ongoing praxis. We created posters and installations to expand public knowledge of New Orleans rich and often contested histories, engaged scholars and artists to tell those stories in compelling ways and created accessible installations and events in public and civic spaces. We also engaged local artists to create temporary, three-dimensional prototype monuments which drew from and interpreted the themes expressed in the public proposals.

While the most visible elements of the Paper Monuments project were the public art installations, public proposals for prospective new monuments were at the heart of the process: a collection of what our city’s residents desired to see valued through their representation in public spaces throughout New Orleans. We set out to collect fifteen hundred public proposals, an ambitious, but achievable number over the course of two years and fell short for a variety of reasons which disproportionately came down to the impacts of weather and climate on a public space project.

In the following pages you will find a quantitative analysis of the geographic and demographic representation of 1167 proposed monuments submitted by New Orleans residents. The residents who submitted them lived in every zip code in our city, ranged in age from 3 to 78, and broadly reflected the racial and gender diversity of Orleans Parish.

You will also find a qualitative analysis of the central themes of those proposals, a collection of what our city’s residents value and desire to see valued through their representation in public spaces throughout New Orleans. These included our city’s vibrant cultural history and current practices, an overwhelming desire for greater monumental representation of women and Black people, a vision of an equitable and diverse city monumentalized and made real, and a deep, inspiring, insistence upon love in all of its least celebrated but most essential forms; maternal, familial, communal and of course, love of this incredibly special place.

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CONTESTING NARRATIVES May 2017 - September 2019 When Paper Monuments began, one of the earliest conversations with the team at Monument Lab drove home two key differences in our respective cities’ social contexts that our project would have to address: the first was the need to allow for a period of empty pedestals and the second, to expand the range of New Orleans’ historical narrative beyond the romanticized marketing approach that drives tourism and in turn influences how we all view the city in which we live.

The first of these was primarily temporal; the conflicts around Confederate monument removal were still very fresh at that time, there had been a period of weeks in which armed white supremacists “guarded” the locations of monuments slated for removal and residents of New Orleans engaged to various degrees in a delightfully broad range of activities to make them feel unwelcome.

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Beyond the direct confrontations and the openly affiliated Nazis, however, there were more nuanced contestations, in which the merits of aesthetics and historical provenance were debated in marginally greater degrees of good faith.

It was abundantly clear that the removal of four statues was insufficient to close those debates, and that immediate replacement was unlikely to achieve that goal either. From our perspective, the conversations generated were the primary net gain of the removal process, sharpening contradictions in perception and surfacing conflicting understandings of history and the city.

Paper Monuments was intended to join, document, and expand those conversations about who and what we remember, what events have shaped our city and our lives, along with which places and movements matter to us. We believed, and still believe, that New Orleans needed to allow for a period of empty pedestals in which the absence of resolution could sustain our collective capacity to continue the conversations begun within the removal period.

The necessity of expanding the range of New Orleans history to challenge the authority of the “known” history presented by our tourism industry was less temporally bound, but no less critical. The centrality of tourism and the tourist narrative to perceptions of New Orleans are so strong that they have shaped scholarly work and defined public investment. They have also created a shorthand of cultural signifiers that “authentically” typify the city: gumbo, jazz, exoticism, and languid debauchery. We sought to disrupt that narrative, and to present more expansive understandings of our collective history, both for its own value and to help encourage public proposals that engaged deeply with the city rather than regurgitating its tropes.

Top left: Poster distribution at the Contemporary Arts Center Top right: Installing ‘Sit-in at McCrory’s’ on Canal Street Left: Second iteration of the People’s Gallery on Canal Street

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Expanding the Range of New Orleans History

The Enslaved Peoples’ Uprising of 1811 installation, OC Haley Blvd in Central City

The Pythian Temple goes up in the CBD

The economic motive behind New Orleans’ historical constructions as tourism marketing device is particularly stark; however it differs from more traditional history-making processes primarily because of the totality of the message, and the persistence of the messengers, within that market-driven framework. History-making as a project, and as an inherently political project, is largely enacted through the synthesis of contested narratives into the singular and unassailable voice of authority. The subaltern are erased, or at best referred to in aggregate, while those who had power and agency are given their names, if not the nuance of their contexts.

To challenge the authority of New Orleans’ “known” and marketed history, Paper Monuments relied heavily upon formal scholars for the poster series; asking that they lend their expertise to the project of disrupting conceptions of history, while admittedly simultaneously upholding academic hierarchy for the sake of establishing our projects’ legitimacy. In an attempt to counter our own complicity, we made the strategic decision to withhold formal titles, in an effort to ensure that the work produced by informal scholars carried the same weight as those within the academy, but regret the necessity of doing so.

Paper Monuments’ process was dedicated to re-envisioning not just which stories we told about New Orleans, but also how and where we told them. The artwork created for each historic narrative ranged widely in style and approach, drawing in viewers and readers who might not have engaged with traditional mediums for presenting history. We also wanted to ensure that everyone had access to seeing these stories of our shared histories. To that end, posters were available

Installing McDonogh Day Boycott posters on construction fencing around the former John McDonogh High School.

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Stories Unfold installation pieces at the Main Branch of the New Orleans Public Library on Loyola Ave in the Civic Center.

for free in a 12” by 18” format at all branches of the New Orleans Public Library, at New Orleans Recreation Development Commission centers, and independent bookstores throughout the city including Community Book Center, Crescent City Books, Tubby and Coo’s Mid City Book Shop; and at Studio Be, a Black art and cultural venue. Our newspaper series, The Paper Trail also provided context on the project at an accessible reading level and showcased posters along with public proposals. The Paper Trail was distributed to dozens of corner stores, coffeeshops, barbershops and other social spaces.

First of three issues of The Paper Trail, printed in spring 2018

Picking up posters at Community Book Center on Bayou Rd

As a collective whose professional experience was largely grounded in the built environment and design professions, our approaches and tactics were heavily informed by that specific expertise, making Paper Monuments posters publicly accessible through the tactic of placemaking; wheatpasting posters near the events described, creating a city-wide scavenger hunt for installations on blighted buildings and creating large scale galleries within the Canal Street corridor, focusing on transit stops identified by transit advocacy organization RIDE New Orleans as having high frequency use.

The Canal Street galleries leveraged transfer wait times as long as forty-five minutes during the day, and longer at nonpeak hours, along with the necessity of bus and streetcar transfers among our working-class residents for visibility, reading time, and proposal collection. The galleries also allowed our team to use tours and media coverage of the installations to highlight these systemic transportation problems as persistent, yet rectifiable, challenges facing New Orleans’ workers.

Team members and volunteers install the first iteration of the People’s Gallery at Elk Place and Canal Street, the primary transfer location for the RTA bus system.

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CLAIMING SPACE September 2018 - July 2019

In September of 2018, Paper Monuments put out an open call and hosted a workshop at Paper Machine in the Lower Ninth Ward for local and regional artists. The artists in attendance were asked to draw upon both the Paper Monuments poster series and the catalogue of public proposals to develop work for Paper Monuments’ Re:Present New Orleans, a collection of ten temporary public art installations distributed throughout the city of New Orleans in March and April of 2019.

1

Why do you call New Orleans home?

Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd from Oretha Castle Haley to Claiborne Ave

2

new. | we are monumental

Basin St at Toulouse St

3

We Can’t Keep Doing This

Villere St between Ursulines and Gov Nicholls

4

12 14 16 18

Gov Nicholls St between Marais and Villere

5

Remember, Then

St Bernard Circle St Bernard and Claiborne

6

Remediation

Delcazel Playground Opelousas and Verret St

7

Together

Bayou St. John at St. Philip St

8

Above: Remediation at St. Bernard Circle, Right: Portal/ Passage in its installation form on the African American Museum campus

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6038 St Claude Ave 2533 Columbus St 2336 Esplanade Ave

9

6630 St Claude Ave at Delery St

10

Jose Cotto + Cubs the Poet

Jane Tardo

Langston Allston

Colloqate Design

Lydia Stein

Brendon Palmer-Angell

Nik Richard

Portal/Passage

Carla Williams, Renee Royale, Kimberley Coleman and Lee Laa

Malheur au blanc qui passera ces frontieres

Carl Joe Williams

Paper Monuments Re:Present New Orleans jury: Ron Bechet, Xavier University Department of Art Willie Birch, Artist Marcela Correa, Arts District New Orleans Erin Greenwald, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Gia Hamilton, New Orleans African American Museum Greg Lambousey, Louisiana State Museum Bryan C. Lee Jr., Colloqate (representing the Paper Monuments team)

A Public Process for Prospective Monuments Artists who attended the workshop, as well as those who had submitted initial “intent to apply” notices, were provided with up to twenty public proposals, representing themes selected by the artists themselves. Artists had two additional group working sessions with the Paper Monuments team and jury members to refine their proposed work, draw on additional public proposals for reference, and receive support in planning their neighborhood engagement approaches, along with support for installation and insurance logistics.

With funding to support only ten pieces, our team worked to balance a desire to expand into neighborhoods beyond the urban core with the desire to ensure that installations were located in places where relatively large numbers of people would see them, either in the course of daily travel or by relative ease in seeking them out specifically. A final exhibit of the Paper Monuments project at the New Orleans African American Museum from May to July of 2019 allowed an additional opportunity for viewing all of the Paper Monuments Re:Present pieces gathered in one location, along with the majority of the Paper Monuments posters.

Top left: We Can’t Keep Doing This, Basin St at Toulouse Top right: Malheur au blanc qui passera ces frontieres at Antenna’s Paper Machine Middle: Standoff in the Desire at Edith Sampson Playground Right: 12 14 16 18 on NOAAM’s Villere St fence Far right: Remember, Then at NOAAM, Governor Nicholls St .

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Still made primarily of paper, though wood and rebar made occasional appearances, the transitory nature of the Paper Monuments Re:Present installations built on a central premise of the project; challenging the conception of monuments as permanent features of metal or stone, while simultaneously referencing the ephemeral cultural practices of our city: the claiming of space through second lines, the continuum of oral history in African-diaspora cultures, the call and response exchange of brass band, gospel, and Mardi Gras Indian musical traditions.

Responding to public proposals calling for environmental justice and honoring the grassroots efforts by residents, many of them immigrants, to rebuild the city after hurricane Katrina, artist Lydia Stein created Remediation, a field of fifteen foot sunflowers made of bamboo and papier mache that towered over the intersection of St. Bernard and Claiborne Avenues, while in turn standing in the shadow of the highway overpass. Remediation was a direct reference to widespread planting of sunflowers in 2006 and 2007 in an effort to remediate soil across the city, and was recognized and remembered as such by neighborhood residents and passerby.

The installation also served as an unexpected and very welcome investment in the visual and social fabric of the Seventh Ward, one that drew attention from the public and the press.1 As we worked to remove the piece from its temporary site for a final exhibition at the New Orleans African American Museum, pedestrians stopped our team to ask why we were taking their sunflowers away, while drivers rolled their windows down to shout, “where are you taking our art?!”

Brendon Palmer-Angell, another Paper Monuments Re:Present artist, drew upon the many proposals referencing quotidian or “small c” culture, creating Together, a collection of portraits of the intergenerational Black community in New Orleans’ West Bank neighborhood of Algiers. The portraits, which when assembled created a profile of a young Black girl through the use of negative space, were installed in the Delcazel Playground, located on a current de facto segregation line in the neighborhood. The elders represented were touched to see their images monumentalized in a playground they had been prohibited to use as children under Jim Crow.

Poet Sunni Patterson, a frequent Paper Monuments collaborator and one of those featured in the piece, provided deeper history for the site selected; revealing that the Jim Crow playground had been built atop an antebellum cemetery on the Duverje plantation. While the bodies of the slave owners had been reinterred in suburban Metairie in the 1910s, the bones of those they had enslaved remained buried under our feet.2

Top left: Together at Delcazel Playground in Algiers Point Top right: Why do you call New Orleans home? at NOAAM during Paper Monuments’ Claiming Space exhibition Right: new | we are monumental in the neutral ground of Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd at Oretha Castle Haley Blvd

1

2

WWL staff, “Towering sunflower sculpture appears in Seventh Ward” WWL-TV March 25, 2019,

R. Stephanie Bruno, “Vanished cemetery in Algiers Point a historical puzzle” Times-Picayune, January 19, 2017

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Public proposals, a continually expanding pool of prospective markers, monuments, memorials and museums by and for the people of New Orleans, were the core of Paper Monuments’ process.

Public Proposals - Quantitative These are the stories of events and movements that challenge our belief that historical change is brought about by the heroics of singular individuals. These are the stories that open doors to finding the heroic in each other and ourselves.

As the remainder of this report will focus on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the public proposals, we consider it appropriate to provide a separate overview of the intent and content of the process of proposal collection and the longterm retention of these materials.

1,500-proposal Goal Paper Monuments set an initial goal of collecting 1,500 public proposals, or roughly .4% of New Orleans’ total population, with the idea that this was an achievable, if ambitious, number based on the experience of Monument Lab in proportion to the population of Philadelphia. At our interim report, we had expected to exceed that number, based on projected collection rates and then-upcoming events; unfortunately that expectation was not met. Despite extending our collection time-period, we were repeatedly stymied by persistent climate events in the spring and summer of 2019, which disrupted scheduled meetings, presentations, and outdoor tabling.

Creating a Representative Sample Our goal, as a radically democratic project, was to ensure that we reached as many people as possible, and that the population we were sampling for public proposals reflected that of the population of New Orleans with a high level of fidelity. We used adaptive approaches over the arc of the project to do so, while also applying targeted outreach and oversampling to balance some of the more common means by which representative sampling in public engagement often falls short of equitable outcomes. Proposals were submitted online, at New Orleans Public Libraries, at our partner independent booksellers, and at any Paper Monuments event, pop-up, or presentation.

Countering the Limitations of Internet Reach As a small group with a very limited budget, the Paper Monuments team faced the challenge of many small organizations: The need for inexpensive or free modes of outreach often leads to overreliance on social media, with all of its inherent biases of social networks and internet access related to socio-economic status, racial category, and age. To correct for this, we built strong partnerships with civic and community institutions, worked to be physically present within the systems and locations through which people could be reached directly, and developed a large network of volunteers to assist in proposal collection.

Equitable Representation through Overcorrection We also recognized that beyond the biases inherent in any given point of access will still lend themselves to higher response rates from those best organized and most motivated to shape civic life. This typically looks like neighborhood associations, better-resourced schools, or civic booster groups self-organizing to participate at high volume. Rather than seek to limit the engagement of those organizations, which tend to skew samples wealthier, whiter, and older, we attempted to correct for this sampling bias by deliberately oversampling working-class residents, and Black residents, along with children and youth.

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Lack of Consistent Population Density in Public Space Proposals were not limited to any given site or sites, and residents were invited to name and place their monuments wherever they deemed fitting. The proposal form was anonymous, with spaces for tracking statistical information on zip code, nativity, age, optional categories for race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. All submitted proposals were retained as part of the collection, regardless of completion of form, content within, medium or mode of submission. Only proposals with a zip code within Orleans Parish were considered for analysis, those from outside the city were filed separately.

Cataloging The public proposals were coded and cataloged with the assistance of two paid interns, Isa Siegel and Colin Frederickson, who had previously worked on the Monument Lab project through a collaboration with Haverford College. By applying a uniform cataloging system, the proposal collections from Philadelphia and New Orleans can be compared, expanding their usefulness for future researchers and creating a model that is now being expanded to several other cities undertaking similar projects.

Openness Because of the fraught context of monument removal in which our team began our work, we persistently faced assumptions about bias in our preferences of individuals who would be allowed to participate in public events or submit public proposals, as well as the types of public proposals that we would “allow.� All of our team, along with our volunteers, were given orientation training in diffusing conflict prompted by those assumptions. Our team leadership modeled an open approach: inviting all opinions, proposals and speakers to participate. All public proposals collected are included in the archive, regardless of content.

Archiving and Digitization Digital copies of the public proposals will be made available through the Louisiana Digital Library collection, and physical copies of the public proposals are archived at the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at the University of New Orleans.

Digital copies of the Paper Monuments posters are accessible as part of New Orleans Historical, a project of the Midlo Center. Two physical copies of each of the Paper Monuments posters have been added to the archives of both the Historic New Orleans Collection and the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University.

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Systems Engagement A 2017 trip to Philadelphia heightened our awareness of an additional contrast to our sibling project, Monument Lab, in highlighting New Orleans’ comparative lack of density. It would have been impractical to achieve our public proposal goals through their installation model, which placed small shipping containers in heavily used public spaces. Instead, we developed a more mobile approach, adaptive to the conditions in which New Orleanians already gathered in large numbers, and with an assessment of the types of outreach and engagement appropriate to each of those conditions and contexts.

This approach required us to frame our systems analysis at the front end of the project, and to adapt quickly to shifts in opportunity and challenges as they arose. Despite our initial analysis and best efforts to leverage existing systems, there remained substantial barriers to consistently reaching working-class New Orleans residents for proposal collection. While we had identified a number of civic systems through which we should have been able to reach

PUBLIC TRANSIT

Above: 1811 Uprising installation at Jackson and Oretha Castle Haley, intersection of #91 Jackson-Esplanade and #15 Freret bus lines Far right: Second iteration of People’s Gallery, Canal and Elk Place, part of the RTA”s busiest bus interchange serving over a dozen lines Right: Standoff in Desire, Re:Present installation by Nik Richard adjacent to #80 Louisa bus stop 18 COLLOQATE DESIGN | PAPER MONUMENTS

our priority populations, not all of them proved equally porous to intervention, nor equally productive for our proposal collection goals.

The transit system, along with our various civic and cultural institutions, offered consistently strong results, with opportunities for cyclical and overlapping approaches to outreach (via posters, installations and newspapers) and engagement (via proposal collection through tabling, story circles, and supported research events). The public library system offered an amazing partnership, supporting research events, panel discussions, and permanent stations for poster distribution and proposal submission.

Sadly, other systems, such as public education and public spaces, proved far more difficult to navigate. We repeatedly found our efforts to engage hampered by overlapping and conflicting fiefdoms, a general lack of clarity on processes or decision-making authority, and vague, if deeply felt, concerns that the subject matter might upset unspecified constituencies.

PUBLIC SPACES

Above right: Artist Nik Richard, Paper Monuments co-lead Bryan Lee, Jr. and a Desire resident speak about 1970s Black Panther organizing on Louisa St Far right: Storytelling in the park on Jeff Davis Blvd Right: Paper Trail distribution at City Council Chambers

EDUCATION

Above right: Collecting proposals at Encore Academy in the 8th Ward Far right: Homer Plessy Elementary teachers and students presented their proposed monuments at History Unbound Right: Canvassing at Tulane’s Newcomb Art Museum COLLOQATE DESIGN | PAPER MONUMENTS 19

Mapping Respondents’ Locations

Throughout the project we closely tracked responses by zip code to ensure that our public engagement efforts were reaching across the entire city; with particular attention given to collecting proposals from residents of New Orleans East and Algiers. Zip Code tracking also served as a point of reference for indicating racial and ethnic identification, and provided some framework for socio-economic status, which we did not explicitly collect information regarding, but which are reflected through geographic distribution in a city markedly more segregated by both race and class recently than has been historically true.

Proposals collected from residents of selected ZIP codes The ZIP codes 70113, 70114, 70115, 70116, 70117, 70118, 70119, 70122, 70126, 70127, 70130 and 70131 were most frequently reported as places of residence on public proposal forms.

70113 (Central City): 39 70114 (Algiers Point, Upper Algiers): 31 70115 (Uptown, Riverside, Irish Channel) 96 70116 (French Quarter, Marigny, Treme, Seventh Ward): 29 70117 (Upper and Lower 9th Wards, Bywater) 82 70118 (Uptown, Universities, Carrollton, Hollygrove): 77 70119 (Mid-City) 122 70122 (Gentilly) 60 70126 (Pontchartrain Park, Florida, Desire, parts of New Orleans East): 35 70127 (New Orleans East, Versailles, Michoud): 25 70130 (CBD, Warehouse District, Lower Garden District, Irish Channel) 31 70131 (Lower Algiers, Aurora, Cut Off, English Turn): 32 20 COLLOQATE DESIGN | PAPER MONUMENTS

Locations collected Public and Civic Spaces All New Orleans Public Library locations, Ashé Cultural Arts Center, Backatown Coffee, Canal/Basin/Elk/Rampart bus interchange, City Hall lobby and Council Chambers, Community Book Center, Unanimous Jury Coalition offices, Studio Be, Small Center for Collaborative Design.

Schools and Educational Programs Contemporary Arts Center Teen Board, Dillard University, Eleanor McMain Secondary School, Encore Academy at John A. Shaw Elementary, Lycee Francaise, Homer Plessy Elementary, International School of New Orleans, Isidore Newman, Loyola University of New Orleans, New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, New Orleans Science and Math High, NOMA Louisiana Project Pipeline Summer Camp, Sci Academy at Marion N. Abramson High, Tulane University, University of New Orleans, Xavier University

Pop-ups at events 826 New Orleans Youth Writing Center opening, American Institute of Architects Crawfish Boil, Antenna:Signals, Ascendance, Ashé Holiday Arts Market, CAC Second Thursdays, Duncan Plaza Arts Market, New Orleans Museum of Art, Newcomb Art Museum, New Orleans Jazz Market, Palmer Park Arts Market, Pass It On, Pythian Market Happy Hour, Uptown Super Sunday, Water Block Party Events hosted Claiming Space at NOAAM; Cross Section at Ace Hotel; Framing History: Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service at Colloqate; History Unbound at the Main Library, Imagine New Monuments at MLK and Robert E. Smith Libraries, Poster Release Party at Rosa Keller Library; Storyboards at Ace Hotel, Stories at the Crossroads at Canal St and Jefferson Davis Pkwy and at Bayou Rd and North Dorgenois St COLLOQATE DESIGN | PAPER MONUMENTS 21

Age The age range for Paper Monuments public proposal respondents was 3 to 78 years, with high concentrations of middle school, high school and college age students (n =151 ages 10-13 n= 219 ages 14-18, n=157 ages 19-25, respectively), reflecting both the intentional oversampling of youth and young adults, and the rather less intentional consequences of our curriculum’s application in classrooms, which provided a greater volume of submissions per occurrence than engagement with individuals at community meetings, ongoing events, or self-generated Paper Monuments events and pop-ups.

The cumulative effect of that sampling bias was to pull the median age of public proposal submitters below that of the city median age: 27.5 years to 35.7 years respectively.3 However, this did represent a slight increase in the median age (26.5) from our interim report, reflecting efforts in the final months of Paper Monuments proposal collection to correct for previous oversampling, by shifting to a more passive role regarding schools and expanding our presence at events and locations where older residents, and particularly elders, were a larger segment of the population.

NUMBER OF PROPOSALS RECEIVED BY RESPONDENT AGE

Nativity In recognition that one of the more salient population markers over the past decade was the distinction between native born New Orleanians and “transplants,” Paper Monuments tracked the rates of each accordingly. The distinction was made between non-natives with fewer or greater than 11 years residency in the city as an attempt to capture the wave of young professionals who came to New Orleans during the Katrina recovery, and specifically in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, as a possible distinct sub-category, and to potentially analyze any distinction between the proposals submitted. However, the high number of children in our sample helped to draw our attention to two unanticipated problems in proposal design that rendered this category effectively moot.

3 Data USA. MIT Media Lab, Deloitte, Macro Connections.

Accessed April 25, 2016

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Originally, Paper Monuments had asked if people were “transplants,” a term we then changed to “non-native” early in our engagement process, as a result of concerns that the former term was alienating. However, a startlingly high number of children and young teens selected “non-native 11+” as their answer, including children aged 11 and below.

Upon reflection, we realized that the question could be, and likely was, being read as referring to indigenous or Native status, as relates to ethnicity, rather than as was intended.

In parallel, we received numerous questions from teenagers and young adults as to whether Katrina displacement in their youth allowed them to claim native status. Because there was no practicable way to tell how broadly this question had been misconstrued, or whether adults also responded from these or other assumptions and questions, we have removed the category from our analysis entirely.

“How do you identify?”

Over the arc of the Paper Monuments project, we fieldtested and used several public proposal submission forms, primarily allowing for more or less space for written and drawn responses, along with minor variations in the prompt and in our tracking data. For much of the first year of proposal collection, while zip code, nativity, and age were collected as consistent data points, other categories of social identity were approached through the open ended question, “How do you identify?”

The pattern of response to that question was compelling in its own right, first, in that it largely tended to go unanswered. The total number of replies was only 250 out of the total pool of nearly 750 proposals considered for the interim report. Also interesting was that within these, the most frequent answers were inclusive of gender identity (n=162) and/or race and ethnicity (n=152), that many people provided multiple answers and layered identities, (i.e. African-American; Male; Gay) and that despite clear indication of variations in identity salience and conditionality, a single or primary identity may override all others, (i.e.

Queer AF, a mother).

For the sake of greater consistency, however, a single, final version of the public proposal form, which was field-tested in November and December of 2018, was used for the period of the Paper Monuments process after the interim report. This final form specifically named the identifiers race/ethnicity, gender identity, and sexual orientation as categories to be considered, while allowing additional room for other variations of self-identification in an effort to respect the role of these categories in shaping individuals’ social worlds along with the importance of demographic fidelity.

While the self-identification questions remained optional, these guideposts helped to create greater consistency in responses. That said, even the highest frequency category: gender, had only an 82 percent response rate for the final specific category proposal form, and less than 50 percent overall response rate for the total pool. In addition, even with specific identity categories given, the vast majority of people left at least one of the categories blank. With the above caveats, we offer the following demographic report:

NUMBER OF PROPOSALS RECEIVED BY RESPONDENT GENDER, RACE AND ETHNICITY

United States Census Bureau. Using Census July 1, 2018 population estimates for point of comparison.

Accessed January 22, 2019.

4

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Gender Our largest category of identity responses were for gender (n=509), a centrality which we find echoed in the qualitative analysis of proposal content as well, suggesting that there is a primacy to gender in the consideration of monuments.

Of our gender identity responses, 58.5 identified as female, up considerably from the 52.5 percent who had indicated a female identity at our interim reporting period, a category that encompassed responses of woman, girl, and female; though not mother, sister, or grandmother for questions as to clarity. This can be compared to Orleans Parish’s overall rate of 52.3 percent female, to which we were much closer at the interim mark, with the standing caveat that the overall response rate is less than 50 percent for gender on all public proposals.

Those indicating male are far fewer in our data set, 40.0 percent to Orleans Parish’s 47.7 percent though anecdotally, our volunteers and engagement coordinator reported much closer gender parity based on visual identification.

Responses of non-binary/non-conforming (n=9) and transgender (n=2) were each coded as separate gender categories, and were coded as gender rather than within the LGBTQIA framework, as sexual preference was not indicated. This offers statistically minimal impacts on the coding of sexual orientation as a response category, but is the reasoning behind the name of that category of response.

Race and Ethnicity In keeping with the overall demographics of New Orleans, the primary racial identifications of our respondents were Black (a category that encompasses responses of AfricanAmerican, Af-Am, Black, Cape Verdean, Jamaican and AA) or White (a category that encompasses responses of Caucasian, Cauc., Italian, Irish, Irish/English, and White).

These responses, which together made up 87 percent of those indicating race or ethnicity, were 45 percent Black to Orleans Parish’s 59.8 percent, down considerably from 65 percent at the interim mark and 42 percent white, as compared to Orleans Parish’s 34.1 percent, and up considerably from 26 percent at the interim.

Other racial and ethnic group identifications were Indigenous or Native at 2.9 percent of the sample to Orleans Parish’s 0.2 percent; Mixed-race at 3.1 percent to Orleans Parish’s 1.8 percent; Hispanic/Latinx (a category encompassing responses of Mexican, Honduran, Hispanic, and Latinx) at 5.3 percent to Orleans Parish’s 5.5 percent; and Asian at 1.6 percent to Orleans Parish’s 3.0 percent. All points of comparison for Orleans Parish are from the July 2018 Census estimates.

We suspect that both the low rate of response, and variable identity primacy, for the original question “how do you identify?” impacts the percentages as represented to a significant degree. High interim percentages likely reflected the heightened centrality of a racialized identity for Black respondents, both broadly and specifically in the context of monuments, while the comparatively lower percentages for the proposal form period with specific identity categories may reflect a leveling of the role of racial identity when 24 COLLOQATE DESIGN | PAPER MONUMENTS

the question is asked across the board. It is also possible, however, that in our efforts to correct for the potential undersampling of White respondents at the interim point, we then overcorrected through large numbers of responses at events at the Smith Library in Lakeview and Latter Library in Uptown, along with two schools with significant White majorities: NOCCA and Lycee Francais.

We were pleased at the increased percentage of public proposals from within our Hispanic/Latinx communities, and disappointed that enacting our plan for engagement with Vietnamese communities in New Orleans East and on the West Bank was less successful. It is worth noting within this report that an increase in extreme weather events driven by climate change resulted in periodic street flooding throughout the last phase of proposal collection. Because our approach was oriented to participating in ongoing community and organizing meetings in that period, we missed out on approximately twelve scheduled events.

By far, the events most likely to be cancelled were those whose participants relied on public transportation, or where organizers were most sensitive to their constituencies who might be relying on public transportation, factors related directly to socio-economic class and, by extension, race.

Similarly, family-oriented events, or events that normally have intergenerational participants were more likely to be cancelled, or if held the number of families with children was reported as low by the hosts. For those doing public engagement work or participatory research in the future, this is likely to be a growing consideration.

Primary Themes Culture culture Love (maternal, familial) Love (platonic, love of place) Historical correctives Blackness, non-monolithic Education, teachers The Feminine Environmental and kinetic The truly monumental Representing a better world Shaping a better world Primary Locations The collection of public proposals placed potential monuments on sites both public and private throughout the entire city of New Orleans. Proposed locations were often directly tied to the themes of the proposal, thus we saw, for example, many Seventh Ward locations for monuments and memorials representing Creole culture and antebellum African-American individuals and narratives.

Major intersections, streets and avenues were also well represented as potential sites, including Canal, Claiborne, Elysian Fields, Magazine, Poydras and St. Bernard.

Proposals for new monuments in City Park and the French Quarter were also extremely common, with a much broader range of themes for either location than for most other sites and less specific reasoning for those locations within the proposal.

Many proposals offered hyper-specific locations, often near

the site of a particular event or at the home or significant space in the life of the individual named in the proposal.

Hyper-specific locations were also sometimes at or near the home of the proposer, as indicated by an address within the given zip code, or direct written identification as such.

These proposals were more common amongst the younger residents, which may reflect both fewer landmarks and street names known, a wonderfully less developed sense of the norms of public art placement, or the impulse to see and keep one’s monument close and not be stymied in reaching it by adult whims regarding transportation!

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These are the stories of events and movements that challenge our beliefs that historical change is brought about by the heroics of singular individuals. These are the stories that open doors to finding the heroic in each other and ourselves.

Public Proposals - Qualitative The public proposals we collected were a fascinating view into New Orleans’ residents diversity of perspectives and preferences, as well as reflecting the incredible potential for all of our community’s residents to thoughtfully and creatively shape our city. Residents proposed monuments that ranged from the deeply idiosyncratic: a chess piece that represented the individual’s love of the game and honored chess master Paul Morphy, but envisioned as a black queen, representing Black women; to the universal: an atom, because they make up all of the world, proposed by an eleven-year old.

Read as a collection, this body of public proposals revealed a number of extremely strong themes that manifested within and encompassed the pool of individual proposals. Many of these themes were intersecting, with elements that interlocked or overlapped, such as the relationship between musical and cultural practices, stoop and street life, and gentrification; or the association of traditional New Orleans and South Louisiana foods with mothers and grandmothers.

Many of the proposals were more strictly memorials than monuments; they invoked that which has been lost and which is at risk of being forgotten. A large body of the proposals, however, were truly monumental, in that they put forward a claim upon the future and asserted a clear vision anchored by the physical intervention of a monument. All of the proposals we received were undergirded by the most central theme of all: the deeply felt and very personal love that New Orleanians have for their city.

Culture, as Expressed in Musical Formations Cultural themes and practices were strongly present in both the form category ‘why is this a story that needs to be told’ context and in the monument proposals themselves, though strikingly not with any consistent overlap. While food certainly appeared within this theme, particularly seafood, it was overshadowed by the prevalence of proposals for monuments honoring New Orleans music. Historically rooted forms were more frequently proposed or given as context for proposals honoring the overarching musical legacies of the city, with a strong preponderance of proposals for monuments to jazz music and well-respected early jazz musicians, including Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and Buddy Bolden; along with proposed monuments to Storyville as the geographic origins of jazz.

There was a sharp break from the overarching categorization of “Culture” as presented in the proposals based in the early 20th century to more particular manifestations of specific artists or locations along with proposals for musical genealogies for the period of New Orleans cultural history that follows. Relatively few proposals were offered for mid-century musical forms such as R&B as forms, though locations such as J&M Studio and the Dew Drop Inn, along with individual artists like James Booker, Mahalia Jackson, Professor Longhair, Lee Dorsey, Allen Toussaint and Fats Domino were proposed, the latter most persistently in the context of the creation of Allen Toussaint/Lee Dorsey/Fats Domino Circle. Interestingly, the proposals submitted in 2019 had a high prevalence of pianos, both as specific instruments central to New Orleans’ musical legacies, and as prospective playable installations.

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At our interim report, the majority of the cultural proposals, with strong consistency in context and content, focused on modern manifestations of New Orleans culture; with suggested monuments to Mardi Gras Indians, brass bands, second lines, Super Sunday, rappers and bounce musicians. The proposals received after the interim period differed somewhat in focus, more frequently and specifically calling out brass bands and Mardi Gras Indians, with less range in genres of musical or cultural practices. For both periods, this category of street level, accessible culture was persistently contextualized as the most valued aspect of the city; alternately its heart, soul, center, etc.

Sadly, a very strong subtheme of this category was the perceived or threatened loss of this same street level culture.

Answers to the public proposal form question ‘why is this a story that needs to be told?’ often referenced loss of culture through gentrification/displacement while simultaneously celebrating the community derived within these cultural practices.

Culture The sub-theme of loss through displacement was also threaded through the third variant of culture identified in our public proposals, which we have termed “little c” culture. These were proposals that elevated the quotidian experience of life in our city’s neighborhoods and wards: intergenerational exchange, elders on porches, conversations at the corner store, the interwoven lived experience of warmth, welcome and belonging. These proposals drew out the grace of the city; the sense of welcome to family, friends, and strangers alike, the deeply embedded practices of gathering on a stoop, in a backyard, around the kitchen table.

Food was a reliably central element within the big and small c cultural themes, which elevated traditional dishes: gumbo, jambalaya, pralines, and etouffee, as well as cooking and eating as community and familial practices. Leah Chase came in for special mention as the only chef specifically named in the proposal collection, and she was named repeatedly, which will be discussed more thoroughly below. This theme was also a particular favorite for younger children, with non-New Orleans specific proposals such as pizza and chicken nuggets along with more locally focused sweets; there are a lot of beignet mentions here! King cake makes a few appearances as well. Traditional dishes were often mentioned in the same breath as the women who made and make them, grandmothers and mothers were evoked often, weaving connections between food and the feminine within the “small c” culture theme.

Many culture proposals evoked the communal virtues of feeding the neighborhood. A few both celebrated that generosity and also extended it; proposing groves of fruit trees available to all as a living monument. Others spoke to the complexity and multiplicity of perspectives that add richness and challenge to living together here. Most were intimate in scale; one “taking place on [a] back porch or kitchen with newspaper layed [sic] down, children running around, others were intimate in detail: a monument to the “Happy Hello Lady” who rides her bicycle down St. Charles Avenue playing Motown and brightening everyone’s day or to “Fortune’s Porch” a gathering place made special by the quiet and thoughtful presence of the person, more than the place itself.

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That people make the city, and are in turn shaped by the city may seem axiomatic; we often characterize populations by their geography. New Yorkers are impatient, Parisians aloof, but New Orleans is a small place, a city of recognizable faces, making it possible to identify the people and practices that shape us by description and by name.

Jeffrey Andrews’ Paper Monuments Re:Present installation, “Why do you call New Orleans home?” drew upon the small “c” culture proposals, interpreting them in a series of watercolor portraits and narratives from Mid-City residents. It was remarkable how recognizable they were, these bayou-side images of the people you run into at the coffee shop or grocery store. Their responses to her prompt echoed through the public proposals as well, New Orleans is home because it is home to a generosity of spirit, a sense of belonging, a quietly astounding people.

Jeffrey Andrews’ portrait and dedication in memory of Sharee Walls

‘Why do you call New Orleans home?’ installed on the banks of Bayou St. John at Toulouse St in Mid-City, along bike path connecting Jeff Davis Blvd and City Park

Here too, gentrification and displacement were named often as general concerns; as a threat to the continuance of New Orleans’ quotidian culture and as part of the contextual reason for the proposal, though we also had multiple specific proposals to or about gentrification itself.

These monuments were envisioned as banners displaying the places in which they are installed before they were gentrified, or more proactively, monuments enacted as policy, through rent-controlled housing, anti-gentrification laws, and investments in local businesses to serve the current residents of our neighborhoods.

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Nor was this sense of loss confined to current displacement, with proposals focusing on specific previous large-scale erasures from the built and lived landscape of our city, including the housing projects, the vista of Claiborne pre-interstate, Charity Hospital, Storyville, Circle Foods, and Six Flags. There were also a variety of proposals honoring spaces lost to integration, such as Dryades Street as Black Canal Street and Lincoln Beach, along with those that actively worked against segregation under Jim Crow, such as the Dew Drop Inn and Quorum Club.

Love Love, and particularly maternal love, was a strong theme among the public proposals. These proposals were also broadly distributed throughout the city for prospective monument locations, often tied to specific residential addresses, presumably the current or former homes of the mothers referenced. Single mothers come in for special mention, both as a category of mother deserving special recognition, and in the form of personal gratitude under form question ‘why is this a story that needs to be told.’

Our initial assumption that public proposals for monuments to mothers would be concentrated in the youngest children’s submissions was not particularly borne out, though there is a small spike at ages nine and ten, which may be associated with the increased independence of later childhood. There is another small bump in proposals associated with the late 30s and early 40s, which may be associated with becoming a mother or losing a mother, and which tended to be universal rather than particular in the monument proposed, i.e. mothers, motherhood as opposed to “my mother.”

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Public proposals offered in memoriam also often focused on maternal love, most frequently at a generational remove, with numerous submissions honoring grandmothers both as specific individuals and as a valued category of women.

The majority of the maternal proposals in memoriam were brief and very celebratory. However, we also received a heart wrenching proposal, entitled “Remember Me” for a monument dedicated to the children abandoned by their mothers, with the personal narrative of the proposer.

Beyond mothers and grandmothers, elevating the feminine was a strong theme across the public proposals, with many prospective monuments dedicated to girls and women, both particular and representative of the gender as a class.

While some of these sat firmly in the present, with references to Kristen Visbal’s “Fearless Girl” statue on Wall Street and #BlackGirlMagic, the majority fit firmly into one or both of two interlocking categories, that of the historical corrective and that of Blackness, both of which are explored at greater length over the next several pages.

Familial love more broadly was a thread of the love theme, with proposals concentrated amongst respondents in middle childhood. These referenced both nuclear and extended family as named individuals and as collective units, as well as some broader community conceptions. Interestingly, children were rarely proposed as monumental subjects as individuals, being primarily referenced as a collective category, often one that was utilized to signify aspirational and future-oriented visions for equality, with a sharp emphasis on diversity. Love of place, more thoroughly explored under “small c” culture often overlaps here as well, with expressions of how ties to both biological and logical family, neighbors and strangers, shape that culture.

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Historical Correctives As makes sense for a public history project launched within the context of Confederate monument removal and oriented towards contestation of popular historical narratives, a significant throughline of all public proposals received was the motif of historical correction and complication. These were occasionally straightforward reinsertions of the missing; public proposals for specific erased or elided figures, such as a proposed monument to the victims of the Battle of Liberty Place or Claudette Colvin, the Montgomery teenager whose actions could have sparked the historic bus boycott had Black leaders not marginalized her role based on her extramarital pregnancy.

Erased or elided populations also came in for mention, we received quite a number of proposals for monuments to the region’s indigenous populations: Caddo, Chapitoulas, Choctaw, Chitimacha, and Houma, particularly towards the end of our research period, a measure of the success of the Bulbancha 3000 project locally, as well as emerging national trends towards specifically naming the original populations of land. Perhaps in keeping with that trend, we had a proposal to redesign Jackson Square, adding a monument to those forcibly exiled along the Trail of Tears, to be placed in conversation with the current statuary of Andrew Jackson, contesting his legacy and foregrounding the suffering inflicted on those displaced from their lands. New Orleans’ historic and current Filipino, Honduran, Bengali, Cuban, Irish, Vietnamese, and Sicilian communities were also named as missing from the city’s narratives about race and as valuable contributors to the rich diversity of place.

Caribbean, and specifically Haitian, progenitors were repeatedly referenced as a fundamental population to shaping the New Orleans we know. We received proposals for honoring these historic connection, as well as those which emphasized ongoing cultural ties to Haiti, with boats and bridges suggested as modes of representation. One proposal within this theme tied that past to the present, raising the gendered merger of family lines after the Haitian Revolution but rescripting them to incorporate cracked earth and flood waters that evoked the Haitian earthquake of 2010 and Hurricane Katrina.

Other approaches to historical correctives focused on making visible the invisible, particularly as applied to the many extant historic buildings and locations associated with enslavement across the city’s landscape. A significant number of proposals called for more visible, and viscerally impactful, representations of New Orleans’ role in the slave trade; from proposal for monuments depicting people disembarking into slavery in Algiers to reproductions of the slave markets in the French Quarter. Some respondents proposed monuments to Black labor, as labor, and its willfully erased seminal role in the creation of American prosperity. We also received many proposals which called for telling the stories of resistance to enslavement, in the form of monuments to the maroon settlements of Juan San Malo and the revolt of 1811.

Labor and worker resistance more broadly were also well covered. Many of the proposals for particular populations explicitly named the types of labor they most often performed: on the docks, in trade, picking fruit, rebuilding the city. One respondent, responding to the Tchoupitoulas floodwall that renders the port once open the city now invisible, proposed a mural that would envision the economic and human activity behind it. We also received a number of proposed monuments to labor strikes, both generally and specific actions, including those covered in Paper Monuments’ poster series, the 1867 Streetcar Strike and 1892 General Strike. Few of these monuments to labor and workers rights were as fun, however, as the proposed monument to Karl Marx playing in a field of smiling children and smiling flowers.

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Carl Joe Williams’ Re:Present piece Malheur au blanc qui passera ces frontieres (Woe to the White who will cross these borders), a monument to the San Malo Maroons, installed at the New Orleans African American Museum.

However, another thread within historical correctives reflected an impulse to complicate “known” history; restoring human fallibility and shades of gray to the actions of historical figures, or to contextualize the period of action for which they are most known within the arc of their overall lifetime. Along with Andrew Jackson above, we have public proposals for monuments to figures such as Jean Lafitte represented as both hero and criminal, blurring the lines between the two and highlighting the role of power in defining either as a singular truth, along with a proposal for “the real” George Washington, as a soldier and wartime leader rather than a remote statesman from a martially minded ten year old, and several proposals for the return of P.G.T. Beauregard, within the context of his post-civil war role(s) in reconciliation, rather than as a Confederate general.

Blackness and the Feminine as Historical Corrective The large number of proposals for monuments honoring women and Black historical figures, who are wildly underrepresented in public art, historical representation, and monuments nationally, clearly relate to the theme of the historical corrective, but each offered enough volume and variety to stand as their own themes. Within the theme of historical corrective, restoring the feminine to public space and public memory was by far the primary subtheme, only logical given the appalling lack of monuments and memorials representing half the population. The lack of representation of women in monuments and memorials was explicitly raised both on the level of a category of representation desired and deserved, and as the contextual framing given for the groups of women and individuals suggested in scores of proposals.

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Those who took on the larger issue of female representation tended to list numerous locations or to specifically request the creation of many additional statues, works of art and plaques honoring women. Others simply listed the names of many women, or types of women, who should be represented through public art and memorial. Similarly, Black historical figures from the colonial period to the very recent past were often presented as a list, or as a call for multiple interventions across the city. Many held to the standard paradigm of the monumental: valorizing singular male leadership, often military, as with proposals for monuments to Noel Carriere, Andre Cailloux, Toussaint L’Overture; but the majority were far less traditional in focus. Collectively, these urged a consideration of the diversity of the Black experience and the mobility of the diaspora, calling upon ties to Senegal and the Slave Coast, as well as Haiti, Cuba, and the broader Carribbean.

Blackness Unsurprisingly, President Obama, just leaving office as this project began, received quite a few monument proposals, particularly from school children. We also received many proposals for local political and civic leaders over the city’s history; those formally in office like Gov. P.B.S. Pinchback, Lt. Gov. Oscar Dunn, and Mayor Ernest “Dutch” Morial and those whose authority came from other sources such as writer, publisher and activist Rudolphe Desdunes and Father Jerome LeDoux, longtime leader of St. Augustine Catholic Church and in the Treme community. People proposed monuments to Black shapers of New Orleans economic and intellectual environments as well as, and occasionally in stated contrast to, its cultural legacy. Higher-status occupations were foregrounded: Black composers and opera singers, newspaper proprietors, developers, inventors and business people, but also more quotidian, but essential, occupations: brewers, bakers, coffee, praline, and vegetable vendors.

Black shapers of New Orleans’ physical environments, both enslaved and free, also received mention; particularly architects and skilled craftspeople: iron workers, lathers, plasterers. We had a proposal for a monument to enslaved people working as blacksmiths, physically shaping a map of America as enslavers look on claiming credit. Proposals for specific enslaved ancestors, while less common than enslaved people represented as a category, did also appear, such as James Henry Holmes, sold seven times and a pastor of the First African Baptist Church in Richmond after emancipation. Black strength and resilience during slavery is a strong sub-theme; one realized through proposals that cover the arc of enslavement in the region, we have proposals for Maafa memorials, slave ship arrivals, and a striking proposal for a monument to enslaved people represented in a variety of traditional clothes and carrying out the range of their potential occupations had they not been abducted from Africa.

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Lineages of Black resistance was also a strong sub-theme, with a diversity of strategic and political orientations. We received proposals to executors of legal and legislative approaches manifested through the efforts of Homer Plessy and A.P. Tureaud, and intellectual resistance through Rudolphe Desdunes and Les Cenelles. On the whole, however, this thread focused largely on direct collective and movement-based resistance, with multiple proposals to the San Malo maroons and the 1811 Slave Revolt, though specific revolutionary and movement leaders also received multiple proposals, particularly Toussaint L’Ouverture, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and Martin Luther King Jr. One proposal creatively engaged with contextual adaptability in modes of protest and resistance, connecting King and the Black Panthers to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Other proposals focused on more local manifestations of the Civil Rights Era, suggesting monuments to honor the New Orleans founding of Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the arrival of Freedom Riders in the city, along with boycotts and sit-ins led by the local chapter of the Congress Of Racial Equality. Local movement leaders, including Oretha Castle Haley, Rev. Avery Alexander, and Jerome Smith received multiple proposals. In keeping with broader national trends in reconsidering their role and reputation, we received several proposals referencing the affirmative role of the Black Panthers through their community programs and their violent displacement from the Desire housing projects.

It was striking to see the high rate at which education leaders, advocates, and teachers were specifically named within this theme, though perhaps not surprising given the long history of education as a highly honored professional vocation in the Black community. We received proposed monuments to resisting miseducation as well as the role of Black educators in doing so, and proposals for monuments to specific educators: Norman Francis, Sylvanie Williams, Valena C. Jones (both the woman and the school), Alfred Lawless, Gladys Jones Hill, Fannie C. Williams, Frances Joseph-Gaudet, A few approached the act of education as its own monument, from a classroom for adult learners at Duncan Plaza, to a proposal for a monument to legendary Historically Black Colleges and Universities graduates in the form of enormous copies of their books piled aesthetically on Dillard University’s lawn.

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The Feminine In many ways, the elevation of the feminine is central to the entire body of public proposals: the city itself is envisioned as female, we have several proposals to mother nature, mothers and grandmothers represented as the embodiment of love, the heart of the family, the producers of food and community, and reproducers of stories and culture. Because women are so often missing from standard histories and public space, the range of proposed representation is as broad as the gulf it seeks to fill. Along with reproductive and social reproductive creation, we had proposals to women as creators of physical and intellectual things, both individual, as in a proposal to Kate Chopin writing The Awakening and shaping early feminism, and collective, as in a proposal to Black women sewing quilts that mapped the pathways to freedom.

We had proposed monuments to the Ursuline Nuns and Sisters of the Holy Family, and the women of Storyville represented as both women and sexworkers with unique identities and backstories. Monuments that recognized the pain of rape, sexual assault and domestic violence and sought to offer comfort, or simply demand recognition of that pain. One such proposal asked for a monument reorienting the narrative of the Great Migration as the reclaiming of Black women’s bodies by themselves in the face of sexual violence fostered by white supremacy. The removal of the Confederate monuments was a strike at removing the legacy of white supremacy, but it was also a strike at the patriarchy with which white supremacy is intertwined; the removal of male figures and those that celebrated male violence, an underlying motif of monumentality; these proposals offer a counternarrative.

Here too, education is a strong thread, and one inclusive of the Black women named in the prior section. Overall, the pattern is towards advocates, founders, and shapers of the city’s educational landscape: Justine Fermin Couvent, formerly enslaved, whose will provided for the creation of a free school for Black orphans; Saint Katherine Drexel, founder of Xavier Preparatory, whose alumni proudly and universally identified themselves as such in their proposals; Sylvanie Williams, principal at Thomy Lafon School when it was burned in the Robert Charles riots, founder of the Phillis Wheatley Club, driving 36 COLLOQATE DESIGN | PAPER MONUMENTS

force behind New Orleans’ first public playground for Black children and suffragette; Sarah Towles Reed, who established the New Orleans Public School Teachers Association in 1925, and spearheaded organizing union local 353 of the American Federation of Teachers; and Nora Navra, whose bequest founded the eponymous Seventh Ward library.

National figures were less abundant in this theme than in some of the others, though Harriet Tubman, Madam CJ Walker, and Rosa Parks each received multiple proposals. Local figures, both prominent and less well known, were far more common; particularly if one were to take into account the prevalence of list-style proposals and count the individuals or types separately. The women proposed ranged across the city’s history and present, as well as across fields of influence or work, but were consistently proposed based on their actions, often over decades or a lifetime, rather than their inherent status, and generally centered upon barrier breaking or contesting societal norms.

Proposals for monuments to specific local women were overwhelmingly, though certainly not solely, for Black women or women of color: Ruby Bridges, Dorothy Mae Taylor (frequent) Ursuline nuns, Marie Laveau, Marian Burkett, Oretha Castle Haley, Stormé DeLarverie, Leah Chase, Rosalie Courteaux, midwife and public health nurse Edna Mae Domino, musician Sweet Emma Barrett, Rose Nicaud, Rosette Rochon, Eulalie de Mandeville, Big Freedia, and Mayor LaToya Cantrell all received specific, and often multiple mention. Bridges and Taylor in particular came in for some of the most frequent proposals, rivaling the pattern of high volume proposals for recently deceased local icons, both were proposed across the broadest age range of residents.

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Environmental A thread that did not quite cohere into a larger theme, but retained a strong presence in the pool of proposals was that of nature and the natural environment. Trees, primarily Live Oaks and Cypress trees, were often suggested as monuments unto themselves, particularly for Tivoli Circle, New Orleans East and (somewhat ironically) City Park. Magnolias, as the state flower, were also proposed, especially by elementary school children.

Monuments to the Mississippi River, and to water more broadly, often related to trade, exchange, and connection. Like culture, the public proposals featuring natural and environmental themes were consistently undergirded by the threat of loss: a city on water, the fragility of swamps and wetlands, and rightly cited oil and gas extraction as root cause of that vulnerability.

Many of the proposals that focused on environmental or natural themes also served as “mitigating monuments:” providing water management components in their proposed design, i.e. swampland that serves as both an educational landscape and water catchment pool. There were a number of activist or awareness-raising monuments, which provided educational or informative elements working for environmental change as remediation of damage or loss, these were especially prevalent in relation to coastal land loss and the existential threat to New Orleans due to climate change.

Challenges of the Form Monumental The environmentally oriented “mitigating monuments” can also be read as an extension of another thread in the proposal data, which relates not to the envisioned content of the proposed monuments, but to a pattern of modes of representation that challenge monumentality. Many of these proposals, regardless of subject depicted, envisioned some sort of interactive component incorporated into the design. These ranged from fully kinetic sculptures and playable gramophones to responsive statues arrayed on the steps of City Hall, ready to play recordings of the most recognizable taglines of activist elders whom we have lost. While not always playful in subject matter, they nonetheless presented a counter to the aloof formality of the monumental form, and a welcome relief from the rigidity of “man,” “man on horse” and “allegorical woman” as monumental norms.

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Tivoli Circle Initially, Paper Monuments had envisioned some portion of the work of collecting public proposals to take place in coordination with the Arts Council of New Orleans, landscape firm Spackman Mossop Michaels, and the Foundation for Louisiana. That approach reflected the goals of the Landrieu administration, which had hired Spackman Mossop Michaels to focus their efforts on the redesign and development of Tivoli Circle immediately after the removal of the statue to General Robert E. Lee. Our involvement would have provided community engagement in support of that redesign effort; with specific outreach at Tivoli Circle proposed in a combined effort with activist groups Take ‘Em Down NOLA and Indivisible NOLA, and as a small part of Paper Monuments’ broader city-wide engagement process. While that project never came to fruition, the removal of four Confederate monuments from their locations created high-profile lacunae in the built environment of the city, and shaped our process in a variety of ways. Similarly, an ongoing focus on Tivoli Circle, from the political establishment and the press, worked to define public perceptions of the project as being specifically tied to that site.

We received 115 proposals specifically naming Tivoli Circle as the site of the respondent’s proposed monument, albeit under a variety of names: Lee, Tivoli, The Circle, St. Charles circle, Free Circle, Lee Dorsey Circle, Leah Circle, Domino Circle. Interestingly, of those proposals only 53 were for a singular person, a rate similar to the larger proposal pool and not our expectation given the extant standing pillar. Those individuals were an epic collection, however, with multiple proposals for Martin Luther King Jr., and Muhammad Ali (Muhammad Ali Circle being an additional name given for the site) along with proposed monuments to Theodore Roosevelt and Napoleon Bonaparte.

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Locally rooted figures of epic proportions were also suggested, including Louis Armstrong, Dorothy Mae Taylor, Jerome Smith, Ruby Bridges, Tootie Montana, Archbishop Phillip Hannan and Irma Thomas. The preponderance of proposals for Tivoli, amongst a variety of other locations proposed for these individuals, were for Antoine “Fats” Domino Jr., Tom Benson, Allen Toussaint, Leah Chase, and Dr. John; all of whom passed away during the Paper Monuments process and all of whom were heavily represented as part of a pattern in which we received waves of proposals of those who were recently deceased, a pattern which seemed to have a male bias.5 New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees, while happily still with us as of this writing, also received several proposals.

Other themes within the Tivoli Circle proposal sample included Culture as covered above, with specific emphasis on popular music and musical figures, including Master P and DJ Jubilee, rather than the parading, masking, and street-based cultural variants that were prevalent in the cultural theme, writ large. Similarly, race and specifically Blackness remained a strong theme, but with an element of vagueness, proposals to “Black role models” or “honoring our ancestors” rather than to specific individuals, events, or movements. Proximity to the WWII Museum was given as a reason for creating veterans memorials or specific monuments to Andrew Higgins on the site, while the locations’ use as a gathering spot for day laborers after Hurricane Katrina and its relationship to the streetcar line prompted proposed monuments to day laborers and streetcar drivers as everyday heroes.

The proposals for Tivoli were occasionally creative: a gramophone with a musical library of New Orleans, several oak trees, and two proposals for mirroring the extant pillar to literally reflect the city, and one for restoring the carousel to the site.6 On the whole, however proposals for this site tended to be far more anodyne in content than the pool of proposals at large. We suspect that one of the challenges for the respondents selecting Tivoli Circle is that the scale, centrality, and importance of the site tended to unduly influence the proposed monument. If it was perceived as necessary that whatever was proposed must be somehow representative or universal, that may have created a pressure that chills the creativity and intimacy so abundantly present in the overall pool of proposals. The Tivoli Circle proposals as a body commemorate and command, but they do not, on the whole, mention love.

The Truly Monumental As mentioned above, many of the public proposals we received were more strictly memorials than monuments, in that they invoked that which has been lost or which is at risk of being lost or forgotten. The distinction between the two forms is relatively subtle: both may be positioned in public spaces, may be made of stone or metal, may be placed on a pedestal; the built forms share so many qualities as to be virtually indistinguishable on first sight. To focus on those physical similarities, however is to treat monuments as mere objects, rather than as the physical manifestation of the values, policies, and social practices of those who control the levers of power.

What is placed on a pedestal reflects that which is deemed worthy of veneration. What is placed in public spaces defines who has the right to be present in them, it works to define the public and, in a putatively democratic republic, the demos To propose a monument, as opposed to a memorial, is to assert a vision for what the world should be and to render that assertion both public and permanent through materiality. It is in that mode of the imagined community, the world desired, that we have placed the proposals for the truly monumental. These are the proposals that asserted inclusion, empathy, and equity as the core values of our city, which envisioned monuments to “Keeping our Family Whole” where family is understood as the whole community, inclusive of its trees and natural habitat. These were the proposals, echoed in part by the themes of the historical corrective, Blackness, and the feminine, that would rewrite our social contract, our demos, to include those formerly pushed to the margins.

Many of these proposed monuments broke sharply with the normative monumental form, placing figures at ground level, evoking or creating shelter, centering communitarian representations rather than valorizing individuals. Others proposed to engage the viewer with mirrors and screens, prompts to see, hear, and identify with others. Amongst the truly monumental proposals were those that centered overlooked or forgotten/erased populations: the homeless, migrant laborers, undocumented workers, the mentally ill, victims of police brutality, victims of domestic violence, victims of gun violence, and incarcerated people. Several of these proposed monuments took the form of large scale physical shelters or refuges Online petitions for renaming Tivoli Circle and erecting monuments to recently deceased public figures were a recurring feature of 2017-2019. Petitions circulated for Tom Benson, Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, and Leah Chase all quickly received thousands of signatures from New Orleans residents, as well as people across the world.

5

6

The carousel may well be an urban legend, planned but never actually installed. Sorry!

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as well as monuments; safe spaces to protect those impacted which also served to draw public attention to the broader issues that require their presence. The strongest recurring visual theme amongst the truly monumental, however, was the conception of a circle; a group of diverse humans, often children, holding hands.

Within this category, there was a sub-theme of what we will term ‘activist monuments,’ those that proposed changes in policy, rather than physicality, as a mode of expressing similar themes. These proposed universal needs met by substantive solutions: a living wage, universal access to healthcare, equal voting access, and investment in marginalized communities.

In shifting from the paradigm of monumentality, in calling for active repair, rather than removal of harm, it is these activist monuments that offered the most comprehensive response to the confederate monuments whose removal prompted the Paper Monuments project and provided a compelling rebuttal to arguments for contextualizing, rather than removing them.

The reactionary movement that established the confederate monuments in our midst requires not solely the occupation of public and civic space in the name of representation and reparation, but also necessitates a counter-movement to confront the confederate legacy.

It is impossible to contextualize confederate monuments without framing them, not in reference to the individual men represented, or to the Civil War itself, but within the movement they embody, a cavalcade of reactionary politics stretching across the periods of their installation. Their context is the assertion of white supremacy through campaigns of legislative action that quickly worked to snatch back the political and civic gains of Reconstruction. A politics that established segregation in housing, transportation, employment, and public accommodations, ensured the segregation of schools and universities, and led to the near total disenfranchisement of Black voters in every state constitution in the South. It was a politics sustained by the Supreme Court under Chief Justices Waite and Fuller, enforced with frightening COLLOQATE DESIGN | PAPER MONUMENTS 41

regularity and thoroughness by state sponsored terror. That terrorism, unleashed when white police officers fired on Black Union veterans in Memphis and white mobs burned Black sections of the city down, turned a political gathering at New Orleans’ Mechanics Institute into a massacre in 1866, and bombed Tulsa’s Black Wall Street by plane in .7 The same white supremacist terrorism fueled over 4,000 lynchings8 across the country beginning in what Eric Foner describes as a “wave of counterrevolutionary terror that swept over large parts of the South between 1868 and 1871 [and which] lacks a counterpart either in the American experience or in that of the other Western Hemisphere societies that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century.”9 Standard histories of Southern memory and monumentality10 will put forth that the precursors to the Confederate monuments in town squares and in front of courthouses were memorials to the soldiers placed in cemeteries by the daughters and wives of the Confederacy, but we posit that their true precursors were the bodies of the murdered, left to hang rotting from trees or dragged through the streets of Black neighborhoods. How does one begin to offer contextualization of such vast injustice?

Over the past several years there have been a growing number of efforts to deepen American understandings of the histories of enslavement, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow: from the Legacy Museum in Montgomery to the 1619 Project in the New York Times, and innumerable projects driven by the work of scholars, journalists, citizen researchers, and students. All are working against a tremendous curve of national identity and Lost Cause mythology, which casts Confederates not as white supremacist defenders of enslavement but as noble warriors for ‘states’ rights’. From Susan Pendleton Lee’s 1895 textbook A School History of the United States to Texas textbooks scripting enslaved people as “immigrants” the work of miseducating Americans on our racial history has been a relentless endeavor. If the material imperatives of New Orleans tourism industry are strong as to render even recent events well within memory as romanticized official narratives; what measure can there be of the impact and reach of the vastly greater investments of racial capitalism in history-making as a political project, and how do we undertake the work to counter that paradigm?

Politicize Louisiana’s successful 2018 campaign for Amendment 2, requiring those facing felony charges to have unanimous juries, drew heavily upon illuminating the intentions behind the Jim Crow law it sought to rectify. Connecting the 1898 Louisiana Constitution, which stripped Black citizens of voting rights along with establishing the first version of the split jury law, to the current highly racialized over-incarceration crisis, the campaign argued the throughline of history as an indictment of the present. Jalane Schmidt of the University of Virginia and Andrea Douglas of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center (JSAAHC) offer tours in which that city’s Confederate monuments are deeply grounded in Charlottesville’s social, legal, and political history at the time of their installation, denaturalizing and politicizing the physical landscape. Jordy Yager, Digital Humanities Director at JSAAHC, pulls that history into the present, working with students to map Charlottesville’s restrictive covenants which are the racist roots of current land use policy.

Contextualize New York City’s American Museum of Natural History approached their own institutional history through the contextualization of their 1939 diorama featuring a meeting between the Lenape and Dutch leadership. Rather than remove or renovate, the museum took the opportunity to engage in public historiography, creating an annotated overlay and explanatory text reflecting the decisions made, both initially and in the modern process of reconsidering. In addressing the intentions and biases of the original diorama, the role of these depictions in shaping public perceptions, and the forcible, repeated displacement of the Lenape from their lands by European and American policy the approach restores critical context to the scope and impacts of the history making project. By raising the many additional corrections possible, and the process through which selections were made, this approach also brings transparency to the ongoing, active role of researchers, scholars, and institutional power in decision making.

Surface A truly astounding number of projects address the ways in which historical synthesis of contested narratives erases subaltern histories, at a variety of scales and in a wide range of mediums. In her Familias Separadas public art series, Michelle Angela Ortiz uses interviews with detained and formerly detained immigrants to develop audio-video installations that are beautiful, immersive, and devastating. Andrea Roberts’ Texas Freedom Colonies Project has mapped over five hundred free Black settlements across the state, bringing oral histories and traditions to bear in writing these lost communities back into official narratives, while making the case for historic preservation. Freedom on the Move, a project based at Cornell University, collects and digitizes “runaway slave” advertisements, providing names and descriptions of the self-liberated, and a broad scope on the agency and determination of the individuals who sought their freedom. The 42 COLLOQATE DESIGN | PAPER MONUMENTS

latter two projects each have crowd-sourced components, a key element for many of the varied approaches to surfacing subaltern stories and histories.

On a larger scale, the past several years have seen investments by a number of cities in creating historical plaques to events, sites and populations once rendered invisible, along with initiatives such as New York City’s SheBuiltNYC which crowd-sourced nominations for new monuments to women for all five boroughs. Private efforts to correct historical erasure have manifested as well, in the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice which names, where possible, those lynched in each county or parish during the long arc of previous generations’ white supremacist terrorism. Likewise, leadership roles for scholars like Ibrahima Seck at Whitney Plantation and Niya Bates at Monticello are reshaping the narratives at those plantations, elevating the names and stories of enslaved people and their descendents while forcing other plantations to reconsider how they address the enslaved workers whose labor created the wealth traditionally on celebratory display.

We do not believe it a coincidence that this upswell in representative counter-narratives is occurring in this political moment. It is precisely the modern parallels of historical oppression, marginalization, and violence that call most strongly for their countering, for drawing upon the stories and strategies of those who came before us and challenged power by their actions or by the simple and incontestable fact of their existence. The singular and unassailable voice of historical authority will not whisper of state sponsored violence, it will not speak the names of those sacrificed to ensure its hegemony. In the face of intentional erasure, to remember is a radical act.

The monuments to white supremacy were a material and spatial expression of a politics that worked to reify the contraction of the demos and make permanent a specific political and cultural agenda. That political agenda worked to strip Black people of dignity, economic security, and democratic rights. It leveraged conditional whiteness to ensure maximum profits with marginal investments. It worked to rationalize empire building, resource extraction, and exploitation of indigenous Americans and immigrants through racial hierarchies across a continent and a globe. It is the interwoven political and economic project of white supremacy and racial capitalism that must be toppled from its pedestal, not merely the metal and stone manifestations thereof. The vast majority of proposed monuments counter this extant political agenda; through inclusion of the missing, both historical and current, and by undermining the singular narrative upholding a political project we must work collectively to counter. Those proposals that we have termed the Truly Monumental do so more explicitly, through the reparation of an intentional breach, and through the assertion of the future as an ever-expanding demos; one both inclined and equipped to care for the most vulnerable amongst us. That, finally, has been the most heartening part of the two years we have spent with Paper Monuments: that so many of you, of us, seek a better world and in doing so, turn towards each other to find it.

Messer, Chris M., Krystal Beamon, and Patricia A. Bell. “The Tulsa Riot of 1921: Collective Violence and Racial Frames”, The Western Journal of Black Studies 37, no. 1 (2013): 50–59.

7

8

Equal Justice Initiative, “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror”

9

Foner, Eric. 2005. Reconstruction: America’s unfinished revolution, 1863-1877. (1988) 425.

10

Johnson, Kristina Dunn. No Holier Spot of Ground:Confederate Monuments & Cemeteries of South Carolina. The History Press, 2009.

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