Category: PVDFest-Ideas-2021

When ACT published the City of Providence Art in City Life Plan in April 2018, our team was excited and challenged by the call from Via Partners to refrain from lumping consideration of memorials and monuments together with public art works. The Plan, nearly 35 years in the making, recommended that we should create a separate body in addition to the recommended Art in City Life Commission that would determine the “social and merit” of newly proposed and existing memorials and monuments – the public expressions of our city’s legacies. So began our work developing the Special Committee for Commemorative Works.

As we learned from our work inaugurating the Art in City Life Commission, the creation of a new civic body requires that a new ordinance be approved by the Providence City Council. To present a policy proposal to the Council and Mayor that built from promising practices adopted by other municipalities, we had some significant research ahead of us. Fortunately, under the direction of ACT Cultural Affairs Manager and resident policy wonk Gina Rodríguez-Drix, we collaborated with a fantastic young scholar who collated case studies from across the country while examining our hyper-local context and limitations.

Emma Boast’s fall 2018 practicum research yielded a suite of policy recommendations and a number of thorny questions that will inform our work in years to come:

• Who decides what should be commemorated and memorialized in public space?
• How do we move beyond bronze statues and granite memorials to commemorative forms that are better suited to difficult histories and contested forms of public memory?
• What would it mean for a monument or memorial to invite public participation or to become a site of ritual?

ACT began drafting an ordinance based on Emma’s research in the summer of 2019. Once a lead sponsor was identified (Councilwoman Rachel Miller from Ward 13) the ordinance passed its first legislative hurdle in November of that year. Before it could pass out of the Council ordinance committee for final review, the pandemic hit.

That fact that City Council, and an amazing group of our colleagues, all of them passionate, brilliant bureaucrats, brought ORD-2020-21 over the finish line in June of 2020, during one of the most challenging years our City has faced in recent memory, shows the enormity of our communal commitment to taking Providence’s commemorative landscape seriously. As our Downcity neighborhood erupted with exhortations to protect Black lives, our City officials affirmed that we would have a mechanism to determine who and what will be honored in our shared public spaces.

Now, nearly a year later, we invite you, our community, to reflect on the thorny questions posed above, and others, with us. As you consider your own perspectives on “commemoration and legacy,” we hope you will be inspired to bring your experiences, expertise, concerns, questions and big ideas to a public forum in a way that suits you – we only ask that you take it all seriously.

Stephanie Fortuanto
Director
City of Providence Department of Art, Culture + Tourism

 

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 For more on Emma’s process, see her ACT blog post here.

 For the full text of the ordinance, see the City of Providence’s Code of Ordinances website here.

The traditional uses of commemoration in America are various—but often include a nostalgic reaching for a perceived “better time.” In recent years the RIHS has viewed commemoration as a chance to complicate our understanding of the past, to explore (and to fill) the silences which have been hitherto elided or ignored. We have also tried to make more connections between the achievements of people in the past and the achievements of present influencers. This effort only increased in 2020, with the sharpening focus on national and global issues of social justice, public health, and the environment.

In the Fall of 2020 the Rhode Island Historical Society and the Newport Historical Society collaborated to publish a combined issue of their respective scholarly journals to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the 19^th Amendment. The articles examine the diversity of participants, the anti-suffrage movement in Rhode Island, and the struggles for leadership between those in the nascent Rhode Island Woman’s Suffrage Association and the national women’s suffrage convention held in Newport in 1869.

In an effort to make “legacy” relevant, our social media efforts for Women’s History month have included a series of posts with the themed pairing of two individuals, one who is a high-achieving woman presently, paired with a past figure who relates to the present one in some parallel way. For example, we featured a story pairing Morgan Nathan (age 17), recently named the first female Eagle Scout in Rhode Island, with Providence-born mountaineer Annie Smith Peck (1850-1935), who sailed from New York to Peru in May of 1906 to begin her 2nd attempt to climb Mount Huascaran. Another example is award-winning actor and producer Viola Davis, paired with Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones (1868-1933), who gained international fame for her soprano opera singing.

In terms of collecting, a new process of commemoration was the launch (with the Providence Public Library) of our online COVID Archive, an effort to collect history as it unfolds through the voices of its participants. We quickly found ourselves in the midst of a national effort, with each institution or collecting entity approching the theme in their own way.

In sum, our aspiration in terms of commemoration and legacy is to ensure that the understanding of history among our audiences is more nuanced and more representative of everyone who plays a part in the course of human affairs.

Richard Ring
Deputy Executive Director for Collections & Interpretation
Rhode Island Historical Society

Hypothesis:
The experience of Providence is deeper and richer when it is connected to stories of the city’s history.

The theme of commemoration and legacy for PVDFest Ideas 2021 made me remember a friend’s greeting on his answering machine: “Human beings crave narrative. Tell me your story.” Cities are active places of engagement where stories of what is and what used to be are apparent to the people navigating streets, buildings, parks, and parking lots. Providence holds a multitude of stories, and what makes the city so interesting to me is how it has inspired many talented and knowledgeable people to interpret and re-interpret its legacies.

Stories can reveal the price of progress. Take, for example, the Rhode Island State House. It is a monument to the state’s intense economic expansion at the turn of the 20th century. Making way for the State House meant tearing down what that place had been–a poor neighborhood known as Snowtown. Is it possible to encounter the State House in its intimidating magnificence and also consider what that land used to be, who lived there, and their struggles? That is the question posed by the Snowtown Project. This collaborative project brings together historians, archaeologists, artists, educators, and citizen scholars to uncover and piece together its many stories. This project does not diminish the symbolic and architectural importance of the State House, the work of legislators that takes place there, or its placement as an anchor of the city. Rather, interpreting Snowtown makes visible the dynamics of class and race underpinning progress and encourages new perspectives on equitable change and development.

Far from passive, stories can be active agents of change. Residents of Providence’s West Broadway neighborhood often mournfully passed a huge, crumbling Victorian mansion known as the Wedding Cake House. Falling into disrepair nearly to the point of no return, there were many attempts to rescue the property. Providence’s distinctive combination of artists and scholars working together helped to preserve the building at last, in part by telling the story of the building’s past as a women-owned business. Through the reimagination led by feminist art collective The Dirt Palace, the Wedding Cake House is now an artists’ residency, bed and breakfast, and exhibition space, weaving together the ephemeral history of the women who lived and worked there in the past with bold interpretive acts by artists, writers, and historians.

Commemoration can inspire justice. Sissieretta Jones, a Black woman who lived in 19th and early 20th century Providence, attained enormous national and international popularity and fame as an accomplished operatic soprano. Among many, many achievements, Jones was the first African-American to perform at Carnegie Hall. Yet the city where she spent much of her young life and where she lived during her later years failed to honor her legacy when she died. As part of a multi-year project of researching and highlighting Jones’ life and times, the Black history organization Stages of Freedom discovered her unmarked grave in Grace Church Cemetery at the intersection of Broad and Elmwood Streets. In 2018, they raised the money to have a handsome headstone made and placed at her grave, unveiled during a joyous ceremony.

Stories provide context, inspire awareness of the complexity of a place, and impart new, sometimes surprising, knowledge. As partners of PVDFest Ideas, the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities is excited about the programming on the horizon for the coming months, which invites you to examine and re-examine commemoration and legacy at a moment of local, national, and international resonance.  Does this inspire you to feel more connected and involved? Tell us your story!

Elizabeth Francis, PhD
Executive Director, Rhode Island Council for the Humanities

As producers of live events, we at FirstWorks are inherently concerned with the memory of shared experiences; it is from the vantage of live arts that we approach concepts of legacy and commemoration. Commemoration has a connotation of finality which comes with being in the past, as if the event or occasion being commemorated is immutable because time exists between it and us. In reality, a commemorated event is not a static stake in the ground, but collectively created and constantly in flux, as the people interacting with its memory shape its impact and engage newly with its meaning. Commemoration, therefore, keeps a moment in time – or the impact of a moment – living, current, and directly affecting us in the “now.”

Commemoration’s true nature is misunderstood because divorcing events, objects, words, and actions from the larger arc of history is a tool wielded by white supremacy to control this country’s narrative. Whiteness attempts to fix history in place to be forever remembered in a way that maintains its primacy as the unspoken standard.

Over the past year we have seen a continued grappling with commemorative objects  – statues, flags, named buildings and tracts of land. Whiteness tells us these objects exist to preserve historical truths, when in actuality they exist to reinforce white supremacist historical narratives. Meanwhile, because commemoration is an ongoing and constant process, these objects, and the narratives they spur, cause harm to our communities in our daily engagement and interaction with them.

Grappling with the impact of these objects’ existence in our public spaces is imperative. But FirstWorks has spent this year drawing closer to a different kind of commemoration: that of commemoration-by-doing. We’ve spent time producing, commissioning, and supporting artists and works that remind us that history is alive and evolving daily – just as we are as human beings. This type of work challenges whiteness’ claim on our relationship with our collective past, and subsequently, our collective future.

The artists we’ve spent time with this year understand that the connection between the past and the future is the present: Ana Maria Alvarez and Shey Rivera Ríos’ naming the ancestral technologies at work in their respective creative processes; Taylor Mac’s refusal to differentiate the queer from the spiritual in judy’s play with an age-old holiday; Orlando Hernández and Vatic Kuumba’s documentation of the unattributed labor of slaves in Providence through process and ritual; Daniel Bernard Roumain and Carlos Andres Toro’s encapsulation of a moment and a movement in their Requiem for the Living, In Color. These artists disrupt white supremacist ahistoricism with their commemoration-by-doing: drawing on history, whether shared, personal, embodied or narrativized.

This is the kind of legacy-making that FirstWorks will continue to support – the assertion of living history through living art; and the reminder, through art-making, that the past is not set in stone, as a monument may be, but living and breathing within each of us.

By Holly Taylor, Executive Coordinator, FirstWorks
With Kathleen Pletcher, Executive Artistic Director, FirstWorks

A library is a monument. For Providence Public Library this identity is both literal and figurative. Our building’s architecture itself is a combination of the Romanesque Revival architecture of Gilded Age progressivism and the Brutalist promises of strength and transparency; emblems and sentiments intended to stand eternally in stone. Figuratively, too, libraries have long functioned to exhibit what should be remembered and who gets to remember it.

Like all monuments, stone and institutional alike, the library carries a complicated legacy. It is our duty to uphold the ideals of universal knowledge and self-betterment while acknowledging the history of failures in their execution.

Monuments are markings. They mark the landscape to evoke the permanence of ideas.  By contrast, commemoration is a process, part of the cycle of ideas and of human emotion: something has marked us and we respond as a community in the way we must. As we, in this time, reflect upon the white supremacist monuments etched by our forbears, we see the hubristic and malicious motives behind illusions of permanence. No monument, nor time-bound ideal, should or will endure forever. We change, because knowledge and understanding can and must evolve. Monuments, too, are a process.

As a monument, then, the Library seeks to become a process, a question instead of an answer, a dance instead of a stone.  It is through endeavors like PVDFest Ideas that we can dance that path.  Reflection has proven an essential part of staying fluid, particularly in our experiences during the pandemic.

When the pandemic began, we at the Library took a moment to reflect on what programs without close contact meant, and we found ourselves driven toward the larger question: how do we even begin to process this moment? In the unimaginable month after the lockdown began in March 2020, we explored the possibilities and the paths through uncertainty with the emeriti of our Creative Fellows in a program series called Adaptive Practices. Through the guidance of artists, Adaptive Practices took many forms–sound-journey, speechless documentary, memory workshop, drawing marathon–but each embraced uncertainty in a way monuments never do.

Now we are working on Culture is Key, a Rhode Island Council for the Humanities project that pairs institutions and media producers to elevate civic outcomes. Lo Bell, Kenny Borge and Will James, our collaborating media producers, are gathering and disseminating the history of our neighbors — the skaters who gather at the Adrian Hall Way Skate Park. The project is, in and of itself, a process of discovery through the method of documentary storytelling. They are making a documentary, sharing the documentary, and documenting those results of the sharing in a beautifully iterative dance of reflection and expression.

As we look to PVDFest Ideas and think about our position as monument-as-process, we seek to fluidly embody the ideal of inquiry and the idea that communities are fostered and formed through inquiry. We look forward to enjoying, supporting and participating in programs and projects that see their own processes as a way to move toward further questioning and growth.

Janaya Kizzie
Event Coordinator
Providence Public Library