New Monuments for New Cities
New Monuments for New Cities is the inaugural project of the High Line Network Joint Art Initiative, a new collaboration between infrastructure reuse projects in North America. This public art exhibition will travel across the United States and Canada throughout 2019. For the exhibition, five urban reuse projects that are part of the High Line Network invited five of their local artists or artist groups to create proposals (in the form of posters) for new monuments. Each participating location will produce an exhibition of the resulting 25 artworks specific to their site.
The 25 artists in the exhibition were each invited to respond to the following prompt:
“Imagine a monument for today, for your city, for your country, for your community. As monuments to a deeply embedded, singular, and imbalanced history of the Western world are torn down every day, what will go up in their stead on these empty pedestals and plinths, or in the open sky above public squares and urban plazas? What rises from the rituals of their removal? Who is figured on these shrines, who has chosen and installed them, and who walks and drives by them every day?
“As conversations expand beyond artistic and civic spheres to classrooms and living rooms about what it means to monumentalize a person, an idea, or a moment in time, who, or what, would you like to see on these empty pedestals? Would you leave the pedestals at all? What should these sites of honor look like? Do they require the bronze statues of public plazas, or can a monument take a more ephemeral or unconventional form? What does it mean to fix and enshrine a moment in time? Even more than creating reminders of the past, monuments create portraits of the present, reflecting back to us our values and the structures of power that give shape and solidity to those values.”
The artists in the exhibition have designed monuments, both possible and impossible to build, that question the format itself and envision its future. They span from proposals for traditional monuments, to revised historical statues, to newly imagined methods of public commemoration. They take the form of drawings, photographs, renderings, “missing” posters, Wikipedia pages, bold text-based statements, collages, and more.
These 25 artworks address questions around permanence, representation, public space and land ownership, and the writing and re-writing of history.
All artworks will be on display for viewing from trail and street level at the Damen Arts Plaza on Damen Ave. & the Humboldt Overlook at Humboldt Blvd. Every week a new piece will be on display along the trail. See images below for schedule.
To see photos of our opening event visit our Facebook page.
Title: Englewood Skateboarder
Artist: Tonika Lewis Johnson
Location: Chicago
May 06 to May 12
Title: Spaces
Artist: Teruko Nimura and Rachel Alex Crist
Location: Austin
May 13 to May 19
Title: Memoria
Artist: An Te Liu
Location: Toronto
May 20 to May 26
Title: Code of Ethics for Art Museums
Artist: Guerilla Girls
Location: New York
May 27 to June 02
Title: [A]part
Artist: Sin Huellas Artists
Location: Houston
June 03 to June 09
Title: The Importance of Slavery In the Construction Of
Artist: Xaviera Simmons
Location: New York
June 10 to June 16
Title: Mary’s, Naturally, 1976
Artist: Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin
Location: Houston
June 17 to June 23
Title: Land Acknowledgement Memorial
Artist: Chris Pappan
Location: Chicago
June 24 to June 30
Title: TwoThousand Seventeen
Artist: Vincent Valdez
Location: Austin
July 01 to July 07
Title: Missing Democracy
Artist: Coco Guzman
Location: Toronto
July 08 to July 14
Title: Captivating Not Captive
Artist: Denise Prince
Location: Austin
July 15 to July 21
Title: Broken Obelisk Elbows
Artist: Phillip Pyle II
Location: Houston
July 22 to July 28
Title: The Divide
Artist: Richard Santiago
Location: Chicago
July 29 to August 04
Title: Library of Unlearning
Artist: Quentin VerCetty
Location: Toronto
August 05 to August 11
Title: We (All) Are The People
Artist: Hans Haacke
Location: New York
August 12 to August 18
Title: Expanding Monuments
Artist: Regina Agu
Location: Houston
August 19 to August 25
Title: Angry Edit of Wikipedia Page
Artist: Life of a Craphead (Amy Lam and Jon McCurley)
Location: Toronto
August 26 to September 01
Title: Monument to Lucy Gonzalez Parsons
Artist: Eric J Garcia
Location: Chicago
September 02 to September 08
Title: Te Quiero Mucho
Artist: Daniela Cavazos Madrigal
Location: Austin
September 09 to September 15
Title: Public Noise
Artist: Paul Ramirez Jones
Location: New York
September 16 to September 22
Title: It’s All in Me
Artist: Jamal Cyrus
Location: Houston
September 23 to September 29
Title: Untitled (Land and Life)
Artist: Susan Blight
Location: Toronto
September 30 to October 06
Title: Power to the People
Artist: Zissou Tasseff- Elenkoff
Location: Chicago
October 07 to October 13
Title: Horizontal
Artist: Judith Bernstein
Location: New York
October 14 to October 20
Title: Reclaimed Water
Artist: Nicole Awai
Location: Austin
October 21 to October 27