Monument Lab works with artists, students, activists, municipal agencies, and cultural institutions on exploratory approaches to public engagement and collective memory. They cultivate and facilitate critical conversations around the past, present, and future of monuments through citywide art exhibitions, site-specific commissions, participatory research initiatives, a national fellows program, a web bulletin and podcast, and more. In this talk, Artistic Director and Cofounder Paul Farber discusses Monument Lab’s founding goals, their evolving approaches to process and justice, and timely debates and possibilities for public art.

Paul M. Farber is a senior research scholar at the Center for Public Art and Space at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. He is the author of A Wall of Our Own: An American History of the Berlin Wall and coeditor (with Ken Lum) of Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia.

Paul M. Farber is Artistic Director and Co-Founder of Monument Lab and Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Public Art and Space at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. He is the author of A Wall of Our Own: An American History of the Berlin Wall (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) which tells the untold story of a group of American artists and writers (Leonard Freed, Angela Davis, Shinkichi Tajiri, and Audre Lorde) who found refuge along the Berlin Wall and in Cold War Germany in order to confront political divisions back home in the United States. He is also the co-editor with Ken Lum of Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia (Temple University Press, 2019), a public art and history handbook and catalogue designed to generate new critical ways of thinking about and building monuments. @Paul_Farber

For more information, visit artsdesign.berkeley.edu