Making Public Art for Philadelphia

CANCELED This event has been canceled. Join us to celebrate the Temple University Press book Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia, a living handbook for vital perspectives on public art and history. Co-editors Paul M. Farber and Ken Lum will discuss their work on their renowned 2017 citywide exhibition with Mural Arts Philadelphia. They will be joined by others involved in the project to discuss and reflect on the crucial debates about monuments and public art today. About the panelists: Paul M. Farber is the artistic director of Monument Lab and senior research scholar at the Center for Public Art and Space at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of A Wall of Our Own: An American History of the Berlin Wall. Ken Lum is the chief curatorial advisor of Monument Lab and an artist and professor in and chair of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a co-author of Shanghai Modern: 1919 – 1945. Jane Golden has been the executive director of the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program for 30 years. Under Golden's direction, the Mural Arts Program has become the largest program of its kind in the United States. She is the co-author of Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell and More Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell and co-editor of Philadelphia Mural Arts @ 30. Karyn Olivier was born in Trinidad and Tobago and creates sculptures, installations, and public art. Her work often intersects and collapses multiple histories and memories with present-day narratives. She has exhibited at the Gwangju and Busan Biennials, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Whitney Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art's P.S.1, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, among others. Olivier is currently an associate professor of sculpture at Tyler School of Art. Ursula Rucker is a Philadelphia-born poet, mother, activist, and recording artist. She has been performing, recording, and releasing works for more than twenty years. Among her most recent rewarding endeavors are her Monument Lab collaboration with Emeka Ogboh and Voices of Kensington, a poetry series she curates through Mural Arts Philadelphia. The recipient of the Leeway Foundation’s Art for Change Grant and its Transformation Award, Rucker was named a 2018 Pew Fellow. Leslie Willis-Lowry, associate archivist at the Libraries’ Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, has worked for over 30 years in collections management and as an archivist, a researcher, and a consultant in several capacities for special collections, exhibitions, films, television, and publications, including the African American Museum in Philadelphia, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Museum of Afro-American History in Boston, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. Programs offered by Temple University Libraries are accessible to people with disabilities. Please contact Richie Holland, Director of Library Administration, at richieh@temple.edu or 215-204-3455 for more information, to request an accommodation, or with questions/concerns.