Rebecca Zorach, "Temporary Monuments: Art, Land, and America's Racial Enterprise" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
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Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Rebecca Zorak about her book titled Temporary Monuments, Art, Land, and America's Racial Enterprise, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2024. This book takes us through a number of interesting, well, specific pieces.

pieces of art, but also thinking about the way that art has played a role in constructing how all sorts of different people understand and imagine the United States, especially through like big things that are land related, are in big pieces of land or about big pieces of land. You know, we're not talking here about tiny little figurines that maybe only one person sees at a time. We're thinking

thinking about kind of how all sorts of things interact with each other, museums, but also parks and gardens and ideas of the wild. There's all sorts of things intertwined here, which I think makes a really interesting conversation about art, about history, about politics. So Rebecca, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast to tell us about your book. Thank you so much, Miranda. I'm very happy to be here. Would you mind starting us off, please, by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?

Sure. So I'm an art historian. I teach art history at Northwestern University. I've lived in Chicago for a very long time. And so Chicago kind of forms a kind of center for

center of gravity for the book. But I've also been in lots of other places. I started out as an early modern art historian. So I worked on the European Renaissance, sort of 15th to 17th centuries. And I still do, but I've also expanded into 20th and 21st century art. So thinking about more contemporary issues in relation to art and art history. And I,

The reason I wrote this book, I had written a book about the Black Arts Movement in Chicago that was very focused on artists working in the 1960s and 70s. And along the way, I had kind of thought about and seen a lot of work by contemporary artists working in Chicago, kind of in that tradition of the Black Arts Movement, but also in other ways as well.

And had started to develop some ideas and some kind of, you know, sort of what, what seemed like maybe one-off talks and lectures and essays. And at a certain point it's around 2020, around the time of the onset of COVID and the Black Lives Matter movements kind of gaining ground in the U.S. I, I,

started to see these different, what had been kind of disparate projects coming together into something that could be a book. And I kind of wrote some more kind of connective tissue that summer in kind of a fury, sort of responding to current events, and then sort of took a step back and thought about it

in terms of kind of what really connected the topics that I was thinking about, and they were all relating to art and art history and its engagement with land in the kind of settler colonial situation of the United States through its history. And

It sort of, it develops through a series of symbolic spaces you alluded to them. And some of them are actually very sort of specific physical spaces and some of them are more conceptual, but they all have a kind of, I think, symbolic resonance in the American imagination. And they serve as sort of clusters of, or spaces where different clusters of topics sort of settle and develop in the book. Yeah.

Hmm. Always very interesting to hear the origin stories of books. You know, sometimes it's all one idea from the beginning, but quite often it is this sort of, ooh, different things are happening. And then you're like, oh, wait, here's how they go together. And obviously the title. I'm sorry, I should say, I should say that one of the really big things about that summer of 2020 was the issue of monuments and the taking down of monuments. And that so that was sort of what propelled the kind of monument idea to the forefront of the project. That was one piece that I left out.

No, that's definitely helpful to know because, of course, it's literally at the forefront of the project. It's part of the title, Temporary Monuments, which in and of itself is a really interesting phrase because in some ways it seems like an oxymoron, right? How can monuments be temporary?

Yeah, so I mean, I think that there's a whole kind of genre of contemporary art that is sort of the temporary monument, and it's maybe part of a broader category of counter monuments that are really engaged critically with the whole idea of a monument. So

Criticism doesn't just happen through the writing of criticism. It can also happen through what artists make of the legacies of genres and ideas in previous art. So there are some works in the book that I talk about in the book that are really kind of conceived as counter monuments or as monuments that respond to other monuments. And many of them are temporary. And that's a kind of intervention to kind of think about

creating a sort of temporary occupation of space that relates to the ways in which monuments mark landscapes, but doesn't mark that landscape permanently. Instead, you know, really kind of critiques the whole idea of a permanent monument. And, you know, kind of thinking about

What what monuments do and how they mark the landscape, how they create a kind of an illusion of permanence or an illusion of.

kind of unbroken legacy. I mean, I think one of the things that I'm really concerned with in the book is the idea of this sort of implanting of a European view of art in the land that now constitutes the United States. So thinking about how monuments started to be erected early in the history of the

United States as a way of forging a connection with Europe and European art styles and political art in particular, like the sort of official art in a way that created the illusion of a kind of unbroken line of continuity from European traditions to the traditions of this new country. And so I,

these are all temporary monuments. All monuments one day will fall, but they create this sort of sense of themselves as permanent. And that's a sort of ideological impression that we're supposed to get from them. And so I wanted to kind of make an argument both, here are some interesting things that artists are doing to critique the notion of the monument and its permanence, but also even the monuments that present themselves as permanent are actually temporary. And even something like

The monumentality of the United States itself is temporary, as you know, as we may be seeing with political events of the present, the kind of the sense of what what constitutes a sort of national identity itself, you know, can have a kind of monumentality that, you know, it turns out isn't as permanent as we might have thought.

ideas can also be not nearly as permanent as we may expect. And so I wonder if we can talk a bit about museums, because today, they're often seen as sort of liberal bastions. But a lot of museums in around sort of American art, or art in the US are not that old, and yet have really changed. If we're talking about them being sort of left wing now, that's not

a lot of the ways that they started. Can you help us understand that change? What was the kind of goal of the founding of these art museums in America? Sure. Yeah. I mean, it's still a complicated picture today. So, you know, we see, you know, the current administration taking out after museums and libraries and kind of, you

claiming that they're presenting a kind of liberal ideology. And there certainly have been lots of efforts in recent years on the part of museums to kind of rethink what they do and how they engage with the public and what kinds of stories they tell. There have been lots of what I consider to be really great stories

changes on the part of art museums and other kinds of museums, because I'm also thinking about natural history museums in the book. But they are also still really embedded with

you know, very, very wealthy donors and patrons. And so there's a lot of complexity, even in the sort of modern understanding of the liberal museum. But if you go back to the early years of the Republic, the founding of museums, even which, I mean, predated the founding of the Republic, but, you know, happening around a very kind of close, very close in time to the beginnings of the United States of America,

The early museums were very much embedded in the institution of slavery and in the kind of

presentation of the land of the United States as a kind of virgin land for European conquest. So the sort of erasure of Native American people and through the kind of art that was presented. So, I mean, there's connections to slavery in terms of who was founding museums and who was bringing art from Europe to put in those museums. There are definitely lots and lots of very close connections

connections in slavers were among the founders and among the early donors and

But then also, you know, I think some of that has been acknowledged before, but also very much the sort of ways museums presented themselves and their founders presented them as a kind of civilizing force. So something, a kind of institution that needed to be in this new land or, you know, understood as new land, right?

As a way of connecting connecting to European values and European civilization and and kind of staking a claim really what I argue for whiteness in, you know, as this sort of Civilizational center of the the early United States and

And so there, you know, I think that this is a history that we still really need to contend with in terms of what the legacy, what kind of legacy continues on from these early moments. And it's, you know, it's not necessarily an unbroken line from past to present, but it is something that still informs the way these institutions present themselves and the kinds of histories that are embedded in them. Yeah.

Another idea that also I think has obviously a historical aspect, but does still have these links to the present that I want us to discuss is the idea of the wild. What was the power of that idea then and now in imaginations of kind of what U.S. identity or U.S. nationhood was? Yeah, so I think the wild, it's, you know, it's one of my symbolic spaces that I talk about in the book. And it's something that was

I think, key to a certain framing of American identity, of settler colonial identity. So the idea that the land of this nation, you know, I referred before to virgin forests, so this idea of the sort of the wildness of

wildness associated with the land at the time of European, initial European invasion and further colonization, the wild was, you know, is always kind of an object of fascination and desire, something that

Europeans and then white Americans believe needed to be subdued, needed to be conquered, but also a real object of fascination. So something that kind of lived on in the imagination. I mean, you can see that with the

you know, Westerns of, you know, Hollywood in the 20th century. And there, you know, there's the, the, the idea of the frontier, the idea of the frontier is very much bound up with the idea of the wild, but the frontier as this kind of moving line crossing the West doesn't quite capture the, the idea of the wild and wildness and the sort of the sense of wildness is something that lives within people as well as being a kind of geographical entity and,

So it's something that, you know, gets in the, in the way that I talk about it in the book is I use, you know, sort of series of different art, artworks in different media to talk about it, but it's,

And it's very much bound up with ideas about gender and ideas about animality and ideas about race. And race is kind of throughout the book. And this is the chapter, the wild chapter is one where I deal most directly with ideas about gender and sexuality. And that has a lot to do with the sense of race.

the wild as an object of desire. So something that gets attributed to people or gets thought about in terms of, you know, some people being labeled as wild or labeled as savage, right? But also something that exists within those very people who are labeling others as wild are, you know, kind of living with the wildness in them. And it gets in some of the

artworks and cultural objects that I talk about, it gets kind of turned over and turned around so that we can see that there's this kind of anxiety about the violence, the violence that is actually being enacted by white settlers in the name of civilization, in the name of taming and domestication, but it's actually a kind of wildness in them that's being exposed by some of the artworks that I talk about.

That's very interesting to see how all of these different ideas are entwined together. Before we move on, do you maybe want to give an example of a particular piece of artwork where we can see all these threads or untangle them? Sure. I mean, I think in that chapter about a number of different things. So there's an essay by Henry David Thoreau called Walking, where he really muses on the idea of the wild and kind of thinks about

in relation to whiteness and to white women in particular as the sort of guardians of civilization. But there's this kind of undercurrent, there's always an undercurrent of fascination with the wild for him in this sort of sense of loss that the frontier has moved westward. So he in Massachusetts is no longer experiencing the, you know, the wildness that he sees as kind of generative of new cultural forms. But I think maybe the, I mean,

The place where I had the most fun in this chapter and thought about...

kind of all of these issues coming together was in looking at a pairing of two different videos, music videos that were made for this particular hip hop track called No Church in the Wild by Jay-Z and Kanye West. And there were two different videos because a group of kind of guerrilla filmmakers made their own video for it right when the track was released. And then

months later, the official video for it came out. And they're really interesting, I think, comparisons to be made between these two videos. They're quite distinct, and they deal with different issues. But kind of reading them together and thinking about the place of gender and the animal, because they both have a kind of central encounter between a human figure and a dog. And the dog is kind of this interesting figure that's

You know, kind of half tame, half wild. There's this sort of always kind of undercurrent of the idea that the dog could be a wolf or it could be, you know, could have some wildness to it. But it's also, you know, man's best friend. Right. So that the and these are encounters between, in one case, an escaping enslaved man who's actually the there's a racial conflict.

kind of reversal in the, in the, the one, the first video, the unofficial video where the, the enslavers are black and the enslaved person is white as a kind of, you know, I think they did it, the filmmakers did it as kind of a really interesting sort of thought experiment. And then the other video, which is taking place in a, in a European context, as opposed to an American context is,

the encounter is between an activist and a police dog. So there's, so the, so the, in the one it's an enslaved person and a, and a, you know, kind of slave catchers dog and the other it's a activist who's kind of part of a massive uprising that's happening in a European city and a police dog. And these moments, I kind of take these, these particular moments to think about the,

how in one case, and maybe I won't say which, in one case there's kind of a clear sort of opposition between the human figure and the animal figure, and the other there's more sort of potential for sympathy between them in the sense that the animal is also in a similar position such that there could be a kind of sympathy between the human and the animal.

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Those are definitely some very interesting examples to see how it's never just kind of one thing in the piece of art you discuss in the book. It's all, as I said, sort of intertwined and entangled. And this is true on a bunch of the pieces that you've mentioned already that have significance in terms of, as you said, what was happening in 2020 when you were writing. And obviously monuments are still very much a discussion across many places in the U.S.,

You also talk in the book, though, that this is true as well about some places that are specific to your family and family memories that you have that maybe aren't kind of famous ones that are on the news, but have a particular resonance for you. How is your thinking on all these questions of kind of monuments, temporary monuments on American histories of race and place interacted with those spaces that are specific to kind of your family and the memories you have of them?

Yeah, well, this was sort of the riskiest part of the book. It's part that I really hesitated about. It's something that I had actually written a draft of long before, well, several years before I started putting this together as a book, and I kind of hesitated on whether it should be included. But I really, really wanted to...

do something to sort of implicate myself in these stories. So I, you know, in a sense, I was implicating myself as an art historian, as part of a profession that's been kind of responsible for generating some of the ideological narratives that are, that I'm critiquing in the book.

But I also wanted to think of myself as a, you know, a white settler in the United States or, you know, a descendant of settlers. And to think about how I'm, you know, through my own life and through the kind of family history that I have experienced, implicated in these stories,

And I feel like sometimes this kind of thing, you know, white people talking about race in terms of their own personal experiences can get a little bit self-indulgent in a way that's actually not helpful to the conversation. So I worried about that a little bit. But I think because I had this kind of

to the thematic concerns of the book in my family history, it seemed to make sense to talk about it. So my great-grandparents were artists who were... I mean, one was actually an immigrant and the other was from California in the late 19th century, early 20th century. They went to Paris to study art. They met there and then they ended up...

living in New York, but going every summer to Maine, buying a house there, having their studios there and working there and kind of occupying, excuse me, occupying, you know, I think probably in a lot of ways, unwittingly, you know, a history that involved

you know, violence and settlement and the, you know, European, European arrival and the, on the coast of Maine being one that, you know, involved a lot of, a lot of violence. Right. So, so I, but they also, then my, my great grandfather in particular, William Zorak was a sculptor and took part in some pretty major commissions in, of, of public sculpture in the early to mid 20th century and,

Which some of which became very politically charged. And so there was a kind of resonance with the issue of monuments that I've been thinking about in other chapters of the book. So in a way, I mean, I think I didn't really talk about this much in answering your questions about the earlier chapters, but every chapter has some kind of.

connection to public sculpture. And in some ways, you know, because I'm thinking about monuments, thinking about the idea of the temporary monument, but thinking also about the ways that these other kinds of issues cluster around them. And so, you know, there was this really strong connection for thinking about how my great-grandfather ended up

embroiled in controversies having to do with his commissions and what those controversies were about. They were about a number of different kinds of things. They were, but often with a kind of artistic style being a proxy for politics, being a proxy for, you know, this sort of charge of leftist politics or of, you know, in some cases like indecency, with the

you know, kind of with controversies over nudity in public sculpture. And, you know, the sort of I think there was, you know, some some anti-Semitism involved in some of the controversies because he was Jewish and and he was a he was a Jewish immigrant as a child from Lithuania and

So there are a lot of things that were very kind of deeply connected to the topic of the book, but then also some ways in which, you know, and I guess I in certain ways want to be kind of a champion of him. But on the other hand, you know, there are sort of points of critique in terms of.

how the history, the kind of family history played out over time. So I think, I mean, one of the things that I was really thinking about in that chapter was the sort of monumental impact

idiom of sculpture that was actually on the grounds of the house of what was my great-grandparents' house in which I kind of grew up visiting. Not because I ever knew them, but because I visited my grandparents. There was a kind of

A sculpture in a sort of monumental public sculpture style that looked out over the water in front of their house that I kind of grew up playing on. And as I looked back on it later, I thought about it as you thought about how.

much in the light of other kinds of monuments, it could be seen as a kind of triumph of sort of European colonialism itself, even though it was made by my great-grandfather, who was, I mean, not exactly a leftist, but kind of on the left and very involved in different kinds of social causes and his being critiqued for his background as a Jewish immigrant.

And yet he, you know, he was producing work that kind of stood stood out on over the water as something that, you know, looked like this sort of European monument on land that had been indigenous land.

And I needed to kind of take that into account and kind of think through how to sort of deal with that legacy in the context of the other things I was thinking about. That sculpture is no longer there, actually. It now is in a museum's sculpture garden. And it felt like a kind of loss for me when it was first taken down.

But it came to seem appropriate to me as I kind of worked through the ideas that there's now a kind of empty plinth there rather than this sculpture of a woman. The Spirit of the Dance was the title, and it was actually a copy or a cast of a work that was commissioned for a Radio City Music Hall in New York. But it was something that just...

came to seem to me more appropriate for it to kind of be there by its absence rather than its presence. This is so interesting to think about kind of where things are and what we expect to see as well and what we then kind of adjust to as the title says, temporary monuments, right, as things change. And I wonder if we can talk about some of those ideas with the next sort of example

example in your book, which is the gazebo. I think this is quite an interesting example because it is something lots of, for example, parks have. But it's usually thought of more as kind of, you know, quote unquote, a piece of park architecture. It's not something you necessarily notice that much, even if it's there.

So what is the significance we might actually want to read into it? You have a whole chapter on the gazebo. What more should we be understanding? So the chapter is the garden chapter. So it's, you know, it's the gazebo understood in the context of the idea of the garden. And the garden is kind of a place, you know, in between the wild and civilization in our imaginary, right? A place for kind of cultivated nature.

The idea of writing about the gazebo in a more kind of historical sense really came from a very particular gazebo, which is the one that was the backdrop for the police murder of a 12-year-old boy named Tamir Rice in Cleveland. That gazebo was following the

kind of aftermath of the killing was going to be taken down from the park where it had been sighted in Cleveland. And the mother of Tamir Rice decided, you know, she wanted to have it kept as a kind of memorial to her son. And

And she eventually decided to donate it, at least temporarily. I think this might in fact be a temporary monument. My understanding is that it's kind of on loan to an artist in Chicago named Theaster Gates, who's quite a well-known contemporary artist who does a lot of work around race, a lot of work around public space and housing and kind of thinking about issues relating to labor and all kinds of issues that he takes up.

A lot of them involve repurposing objects or buildings or, you know, archives in a way that kind of thinks through their historical significance, but also does something new with them in the present.

And he, you know, along with, you know, various staff members and collaborators, had it situated in, placed in an open space outside of one of the, one of his buildings, the Stony Island Arts Bank on the south side of Chicago. And really developed it as a kind of memorial to Tamir Rice and thinking about police violence and violence.

Thinking about the idea of play, one of the big kind of key themes of the unveiling of the gazebo in its new space was the idea that children need places to play. And that is something that is part of the history of parks and how parks and gardens have been understood today.

I, you know, so something I think about in the chapter is, is the history of the way that open space and parks and gardens were thought about in Cleveland over the generations and how, how did that particular gazebo get to be in that particular space and how was it understood as part of a kind of space for recreation, which, you know, turned obviously to tragedy in this particular case.

I was also thinking about park architecture in a, in, in a kind of deeper history relating to European ideas about aesthetics in the, in the 18th and 19th centuries that kind of led to, you know, along, along with museums, right. And the, the, the, in the way I talk about the founding of museums in the United States, the founding of parks and gardens also is something that connects itself to European models. And, and so I think,

thought a lot about the ways in which ideas about race are embedded in those models as well. And interestingly, in ways that relate not only to race in terms of American divisions between black and white, but also ideas about Asia with the gazebo being a form that

is a kind of Orientalist form in the West or something that kind of alludes to historical ideas about Chinese park architecture. And I think one of the ways in which this deeper history is

comes into focus in the chapter is the collection of what are known as lantern slides that were in the collection of the Stony Island Arts Bank. So right next door to where the gazebo is installed, the Stony Island Arts Bank, under Gates's leadership, had developed a series of collections of materials that were, you know, things that might have been thrown away but were instead used

donated to his institution and include something, a collection of slides, lantern slides that were used in art history, education,

in the really in the mid 20th century and fell out of use with smaller 35 millimeter slides coming into ways that people taught art history. And then now it's all been kind of supplanted by the digital, but these larger lantern slides were kind of the new technology of the late 19th century and then kind of on into the 20th century and

And the thing that and I was asked to connect this collection to the gazebo in sort of the early days of the Arts Bank, thinking about what to do in terms of its presentation of the gazebo in relation to other existing collections that it already had.

They brought in a number of different people to try to think about the other collections that were already in the Arts Bank and how the gazebo could be, you know, how kind of narratives could be created that would help to link the gazebo. Because it might have seemed a little out of place in terms of the other kinds of collections that were already there. So the one that I was asked to talk about was this collection of lantern slides, which had come from the art history department at the University of Chicago, where I used to teach there.

And one of the things I noticed immediately that I had never really noticed before about this collection when it was housed at the University of Chicago was how much the collection emphasized landscape design and park architecture, actually. It was something that I would never have expected to be sort of central to the teaching of art history. We think of painting, we think of sculpture, we think of architecture, but landscape design

was really, really prominent within this collection of slides. And that really made me think a lot more about the history of how art history has been taught and also about how central ideas about gardens have been to the formation of Western aesthetics, you know, starting in the 18th and 19th century. So it was, I mean, that was really eye-opening for me and it allowed me to make some connections that I think kind of deepen the

The way we can understand the gazebo as connected to these very contemporary events and very contemporary concerns, but also this kind of deeper history that goes back to the early years of the United States and kind of even, you know, a deeper history than that.

Yeah, it's a great example of how something that might seem purely historical, right? Of course, it still very much has links to what's happening now. But you mentioned that the particular gazebo that kind of sparked your thinking on this was in Chicago. And so I'd like to stay there for looking at our next type of, I suppose, temporary monument. Specifically, you talk about a set of brightly painted houses on the south side of Chicago. And you talk about a set of brightly painted houses on the south side of Chicago.

This may or may not be our kind of traditional centering of what we think of as art. What if it was, though? What if that's what we thought of as modern art? What might that do? Yeah, I mean, this is a kind of sort of thought experiment that I really like to do in thinking about what's important in art history. So

Within American art, the sort of center has always been pretty much all, I mean, for a very long time anyway, has been New York. And the idea of what's important contemporary art is always what's happening in New York and the art market is really centered there. And with some of my earlier work too, I thought, what would it mean to think about

Art that's being produced by very politicized black artists on the South side of Chicago in the 1960s or 70s as the center of what's going on in art in the United States. And, you know, I think there are a lot of different perspectives that one could take on what's important. And I tend to be less interested in the art that's kind of most prominent in the art market and think about other qualities that works have.

and that other practices that artists are involved in that might actually tell us more about ourselves, really. And so the art project that I talk about in this chapter is called Colored Theory. That's the sort of overarching title by an artist named Amanda Williams, who's trained as an architect, but has become a contemporary artist in a, you know, kind of

interdisciplinary sense. And she decided to make a kind of unofficial intervention into a neighborhood on the South side of Chicago, the Englewood neighborhood neighborhood,

where a large number of houses had been slated for demolition because they were bought up, in many cases were bought up by railroad with a view to developing a kind of larger rail yard in that area. And a lot of them were

And it's a low-income African-American neighborhood of Chicago. And so there are a lot of houses that had become abandoned because they had been bought up or eminent domain had been used to seize them. And she decided to gather some collaborators together and paint them different colors, bright colors that she, it was a kind of a whole palette that she developed and

based on kind of cultural resonances with institutions, businesses, kind of different sorts of like personal tastes of people in the South side of Chicago. And, you know, so there are things like, you know,

you know, Flamin' Red Hots Orange. And, you know, there's sort of, you know, different associations based on like food and cigarettes and alcohol, but also things like safety zones and Harold's Chicken Shack Red. And these, I mean, I think there's some, there's some

things that, you know, in some ways, I think some questions could be raised about whether there is some sort of self-stereotyping going on or some sort of negative associations that are being made with these particular colors that she used. But I think they're, you know, I think she saw them as, you

Sort of popular colors that, you know, popular culture of the South Side of Chicago that she identified with as, you know, someone, an African-American artist who grew up in on the South Side and and, you know, saw these colors as part of her sort of daily landscape growing up and.

And so she was kind of positioning this as a color palette that could, and a kind of, as she put it, colored theory. So with the E-D of colored in parentheses, color theory, colored theory, positioning that in opposition to the kind of traditional color theory that's taught in architecture and design schools, which she was actually teaching in. So she was teaching color theory in its more sort of European context.

tradition, but she was thinking about color theory in a more kind of local and culturally specific way in, you know, in the colors that she chose for these houses. And so I think that, you know, I think there was a lot that was really implicit in the, the, her, her kind of connection between the color palette for these houses, the idea about the,

Ideas about domesticity and about economic development and neighborhoods and the history of how demolition has been used in racially invidious ways in, you know, in the neighborhoods. Not just where she was doing the work, but also around IIT, the Illinois Institute of Technology, where she was teaching at the time and the sort of role of IIT itself in

clearing neighborhoods through urban renewal and doing it in a way that was kind of, you know, kind of thinking about the like plan of Chicago, Chicago streets, the grid of Chicago streets and,

sort of making these interventions that were very, you know, harmful. And I'm thinking about the early, earlier period of the mid 20th century at this point, this is part of the history of the institution clearing neighborhoods for development, you know, which is replaying in the neighborhood that she was working in with the railroad rather than an educational institution. But in the mid 20th century, IIT was,

clearing the neighborhood known as Bronzeville where it's situated and doing it in a way that kind of was, you know, caused a lot of harm to a lot of people who lived there, but also had this kind of aesthetic veneer to it that it was kind of creating sort of abstract art out of the grid of the streets that it was moving into and kind of demolishing housing in. And I mean, one of the big sort of

of IIT's sort of relationship to real estate and development is the Mecca, which was an apartment building that IIT purchased and eventually tore down to build Crown Hall, which is one of its sort of

considered architectural masterpieces on the campus. So that's a sort of, in a way, kind of part of the origin story of IIT is demolition and rebuilding and remaking in a way that's all about abstraction and modern art and about the sort of

you know, a kind of center of modern art in the United States in the mid 20th century. So that's, you know, that's one history and that does make it into textbooks and, you know, textbooks of architectural history and textbooks of history of modernism. Something like what Amanda Williams is doing or was, was doing in the, in the Englewood neighborhood is, you know, I relate it to that tradition and kind of think about how how

you know she's in a sense creating modernist abstraction through these monochromatic brightly colored houses in a way that is a is both embedded in the history of what iit did in bronzeville but is also a kind of critique of it and a way of drawing attention to different kinds of values that are part of that you know that that could be put forward as you know something to um

something to emphasize, something to hold on to. So their houses and they were people's homes. And by kind of making them visible in a new way, by kind of drawing attention to them in a new way with these monochromatic colors, she's kind of reminding us

That they that they were people's homes and they may be slated for demolition. They're now they're they're now I think all of them are gone now. All of them have been demolished. But she's kind of yeah, she's drawing attention to the fact that they were places for people to live. And that in a sense, I mean, I think that I'm not sure that they would have.

that the demolition timeline would have been any different if she had not painted them. But I think there's a sense that she kind of lifts them up and holds them through the process of painting them in a way that slowed down, although it didn't stop the demolition and kind of captured them in a moment of attention to say something about the fact that they were homes. And I think that then takes me to

Thinking about the importance of the home and the idea of home for Black artists in Chicago, many of whom worked out of their homes because they weren't invited into institutions, the sort of primarily white institutions of the center of town in terms of galleries and museums. And so the home has this particular value.

resonance for artists who couldn't find their way into institutions and then kind of made something out of their home that turned their home, like for example, Margaret Burroughs, who founded several different museums and institutions, she made her home into an institution. And so that's a sort of connection that brings it back around to art, to think about Amanda Williams drawing attention to these

art pieces as homes, and then to think about, you know, this kind of deeper history in Chicago of homes becoming museums and homes becoming kind of works of art. Yeah, there's all sorts of things connected there. And of course, place is so central to everything we've been discussing in that example. And of course, throughout this whole conversation, and land has come in in some of them kind of more than others. So I want to sort of

highlight that particularly because of course the book is about art the book is about place and obviously that has ties to land but then towards the end of the book you actually talk about something directly called land art so what is land art and what are some examples of ways that artists have engaged directly with art and land yeah so so land art I you know I think it was it is something that

I wasn't necessarily sure was going to be in the book because in some ways, some of the biggest pieces of land art, you know, something like Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, a lot of other sort of large scale interventions in the landscape that artists have done often in the West, the Western United States. They've gotten a lot of attention as, you know, as, as, as, as art pieces have,

Earthworks is another kind of term that's often used for land art. They're, you know, this kind of sculptural approach to the land that kind of builds, you know, builds structures or builds, yeah, they sort of large scale interventions into landscape. And so they, those, you know, there's a certain set of artists who've kind of, who made a name for themselves as land artists and they've gotten quite a bit of attention from scholars and

And in some ways, I, you know, I sort of wanted to step back from that work and, you know, and just see in it, you know, some of the sort of problematic qualities of it, that it's kind of treating the West as, you know, what I referred to earlier, sort of virgin territory to be intervened in by these sort of heroic, often male, often white male artists, right?

But I was interested in other artists who are thinking about land art in a critical way, either by making work in other media that addresses land art or addresses landscapes and kind of different sort of interventions into the landscape that are

either made by artists or made by other people in ways that could be understood as a sort of a kind of form of art. So thinking about artists like Colleen Smith, who makes films about, and she does films and installations and performances, but she has a series of films that directly address art.

land art and land artists not i mean i guess i should say it's i mean not exactly direct in that in the works in these short films themselves she doesn't necessarily identify particular land artists or particular works of land art but she kind of provides analogies for it that are that are critical and thinking about like you know the the um

The demolition of a black schoolhouse in the South as a kind in the early 20th century, as you know, during the Jim Crow era, as a kind of analogy for what land artists do. And so she's sort of producing analogies that are in these very kind of traumatic histories that,

that through their resemblance to land art kind of cast a different light on what land art was doing and thinking about, you know, national parks as sort of monument. I mean, they're often thought of as monuments. And I think they're, you know, we're in a moment when we're in the United States having to defend our national parks against encroachment, you know, by the Trump administration, but in, in their sort of initial, you know,

They're part of settler colonialism. They're, you know, they're part of kind of kicking Native American people off of land in order to preserve land in a way that's really for settlers. So so there's sort of, you know, she engages in some really interesting critiques of ways in which land has been managed by by artists on the one hand and by people kind of intervening in landscapes elsewhere.

Not necessarily as artists, but in ways that create sort of analogies with what artists are doing. So I was thinking about that and then also about works like these sort of temporary sculptural installations,

by artists like Dylan Miner, who created sort of platforms or portals that were just sort of rectangular, kind of like plinths, like a, you know, like a rectangular, you know, board or a kind of platform that would be installed in the landscape that would be kind of

understood conceptually as a sort of jumping off point to some other space or some kind of connection, connecting Indigenous land across borders. So I think one of the things that some of the artists I look at are thinking about is the sort of cross-border connections where

the United States as a nation by setting up borders cut through indigenous land that didn't have borders or where people living on both sides of the border have a historical connection to one another. And when there wasn't a border there, it was undivided land. And so by creating these flat

temporary monuments. So they, right, they're not standing monuments, they're sort of flat platforms. You can stand on them and imagine, imagine connections that have been compromised or, you know, that have been, in some cases, violently denied politically. So I

I was, you know, in, in the, in the chapter where I deal with land art, I'm, I'm kind of dealing, I'm, I'm kind of circling around land art, thinking about artists who critique it and critique some of the, you know, the sort of ideological components of it. And then thinking about artists who are reinventing it. And, and a lot of them are indigenous or, you know, African-American artists, Latinx artists who are, you know, who are kind of thinking across borders and,

Thinking across, you know, through thinking about making borders permeable or making walls permeable as a way of sort of reimagining the space of the, you know, the settler colonial nation. Hmm.

These are some really interesting examples and lots of things to add to all the things that are entangled and intertwined that we've been discussing so far. So I think a really effective way to end our discussion on the book by making the picture even more complex and nuanced, which is, I think, a useful contribution that the book is making that we should, you know, we should be paying attention to things like brightly painted houses on the south side of Chicago, right? Thinking about what these things mean, what the gazebo is doing or not doing.

So now that you've given us lots of things to think about, can I ask what you might be working on at the moment? Any kind of current or upcoming projects that you want to give us a brief sneak preview of?

Sure. Well, I think I guess I would say a couple of things. One is, I mean, this this book, one of the things that it starts with is a sort of divide between art and nature and how that's been historically constructed and thinking about the I mentioned at the beginning, you know, I think not not only about art museums, but also about natural history museums and how those divide.

As institutions, as kind of broad institutions, they were divided at a certain point and some things were placed on the side of art, some things were placed on the side of nature. And then that's part of the sort of development of a particular kind of civilizational ideology in the U.S. that looks back to Europe.

I've also been working on an earlier project. So in a way, kind of a prequel to this one, which is, I think will be coming out in 2026 about the idea of nature as an artist in early modern Europe and kind of stretching into the Atlantic world in the 18th century. And so that's about sort of ideas about the creativity of nature and how human beings respond to that.

So nature kind of understood broadly as a sort of personified figure of Mother Nature, but also different kinds of non-human actors like animals and how do mollusks produce their shells and how do beavers produce their houses and kind of thinking about animals as architects, animals as artists, as well as this sort of...

you know, kind of this, this kind of earlier sense of mother nature, things like fossils that were understood as artworks of nature in, you know, say like the 15th or 16th century. So that's one project. That's a book that my tentative title is spontaneous objects, a natural history of art and its others.

And I'm, and I, I think that will, it is, it's in press with Penn State University Press and it should be out in 2026. And then another sort of direction out of this book actually is that's more contemporary is thinking about the law as a kind of a medium for art and politics and how artists have used sort of legal structures and legal arguments to, you

create artworks, either kind of performance art or installations that really try to make an intervention using the law. This project, I think, is

something that I think the whole premise of it in a way is being, well, both bolstered and called into question by things that are going on with the current U.S. administration, sort of thinking about how law becomes really malleable and flexible and maybe doesn't mean as much anymore in certain contexts. So I'm not exactly sure where that project is going, but I've been thinking about it both in kind of in the context of environmental art and artists who work with ecology and kind of

of trying to make change in a way that's part of a kind of ecological thinking. And also...

in relation to police violence and policing and kind of the abolitionist movement that was sort of part of my thinking in 2020 when I started working on this book. But that's kind of following a number of other directions. And I'm not really sure if it's a book yet, but it is definitely something that I'm interested in thinking more about.

Always very interesting to see what authors are thinking of working on, especially when they're in those kind of early stages. So thank you for sharing that with us. And of course, best of luck in developing both of those projects. Thank you so much. In the meantime, of course, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Temporary Monuments, Art, Land and America's Racial Enterprise, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2024. Rebecca, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.