What does it mean to re-chart the landscape of collective memory? In this essay, Sue Mobley offers a new way of navigating history through Re:Generation —one rooted in community, place, and the power of shared stories. Across ten projects and nearly eighty collaborators, artists and communities challenge inherited narratives of erasure and imagine new ways to remember, gather, and build toward a more pluralistic future.
Monument Lab: Re:Generation presents case studies that travel across America, highlighting local commemorative campaigns dedicated to advancing public memory. Featuring articles and artwork from the country’s leading monument makers, each project includes a framing essay that provides insights into the varied contexts of location, culture, form, and subject matter.
Blending history, personal reflection, and cultural memory, Can I Grow a Witness? reimagines trees as living monuments to Black memory, resilience, and ancestry. Weaving together the histories of Monticello, Robert Hemmings, and the Declaration House project with personal reflection, this essay explores how memory takes root across generations.
During the drafting of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Thomas Jefferson and enslaved valet Robert Hemmings spent several months at 700 Market Street in Philadelphia. The editors and contributors to Declaration House reflect on the history of this site and illuminate the entangled legacy of freedom and enslavement at the core of our nation’s founding.
This conversation between Declaration House lead artist Sonya Clark and her close friend Gayle Jessup White, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s first public relations and community engagement officer, and the first descendant of Jefferson and the families he enslaved to work for the foundation, was recorded on Tuesday, December 19, 2024, on Zoom and moderated by Yolanda Wisher, senior curator at Monument Lab.