Monument Lab is a Philadelphia-based nonprofit public art, history, and design studio founded by Paul Farber and Ken Lum. Through research, artist residencies, public workshops, and civic partnerships, Monument Lab critically engages the monument landscape to question what these objects say about collective and historical memory. Their influential 2021 project, the National Monument Audit, was a first-ever survey of its kind. The Monument Lab team spent more than a year scouring almost half a million records of historic properties created and maintained by federal, state, local, tribal, institutional, and publicly assembled sources, looking for those sites and structures we most conventionally think of as monuments—statues or monoliths constructed of stone or metal and installed or maintained in a public space with the authority of a government agency or institution. This landmark study covered 48,178 conventional monuments, representing data collected from every U.S. state and territory. In the midst of this country’s monumental reckoning and reimagining, Monument Lab’s work seeks to imagine new pathways for fulfilling the potential of the commemorative landscape, and to bring history more fully to life in local communities.

Commissioned for MONUMENTS, An American Reflection revisits the National Monument Audit, using data-cloud visualizations to configure and reconfigure the raw information the audit gathered into formations that encourage reflection about this nation’s monuments. For Monument Lab, monuments are an interconnected collection of public assets rather than solitary landmarks. Each dot in these visualizations represents a conventional monument contained within the audit, coming together to form a stellar mass. Since the original audit in 2021, Monument Lab has updated its investigations and undertook original research on the occasion of this exhibition which prompted reflection on the monument landscape.