Memorials & Monuments: A Public Conversation about a Community Altar

Register here

Join A Long Walk Home’s art collective members – Scheherazade Tillet, Robert Martin Narciso, and Leah Gipson – for a virtual public conversation on the history of community altars.

There is a growing need for African Americans and other people of color to create culturally safe community spaces. This movement has grown out of our collective grief and trauma following the public deaths of Trayvon Martin, Rekia Boyd, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and many others, along with the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Following each death, and countless other less visible tragedies, our communities have used art to grieve and reclaim the public spaces, constructed altars, painted murals, and to spread the images of those who have died so senselessly, so that they would not be forgotten.

This spring, during its time as Art & Advocacy Resident at Weinberg/
Newton Gallery, the collective is working on Black Girlhood Altar Project, creating four spiritual altars as temporary monuments to Black girls who are missing and murdered. To learn more about this project, visit weinbergnewtongallery.com/residency.

The Chicago Monuments Project intends to grapple with the often unacknowledged – or forgotten – history associated with the City’s various municipal art collections and provides a vehicle to address the hard truths of Chicago’s racial history, confront the ways in which that history has and has not been memorialized, and develop a framework for marking public space that elevates new ways to memorialize Chicago’s true and complete history. To learn more and share your thoughts, please visit ChicagoMonuments.org.

Image: Black Girls Takeover Douglass Park: Memorial for Rekia Boyd, 2018; Courtesy of Paul Farber/A Long Walk Home