Overview

American Monument is an artwork that prompts consideration of, and response to, the cultural circumstances under which African-Americans lose their lives to police brutality. 

In recent years, evidence of police violence has reached a new level of exposure, allowing increased public access to formal investigations of police brutality. In 2014, artist/cultural organizer lauren woods began to examine police records and court transcriptions in cases where a police officer killed an unarmed black civilian. She focused on officers’ claims citing “fear for their own lives,” ultimately used to justify the killings as lawful. This work grew into American Monument. The artwork is participatory, nomadic, meant to move across the country year-to-year, expanding along the way, “unveiling” at universities, museums, storefronts, community centers, and churches. Led by woods and Kimberli Meyer with key collaborators, the work acts as a vehicle to analyze relationships between the construction of race, state violence, and structural power.

Physically, American Monument is a sound sculpture, an archive, a network, a reflective space, a transformation of place. Discursively, it is a public research project that delves into ideologies and details around anti-Blackness, policing, and the law in the United States of America. Initially inaugurated at the University Art Museum at California State University, Long Beach in September of 2018, it was paused there by the artist in an act of protest. The second installation at the Beall Center for Art and Technology in October 2019 was the first full iteration of the project, and was on view until the pandemic closed it in March, 2020. The accompanying think tanks brought together scholars, lawyers, community activists, civil rights leaders, students, artists, and the general public to process and discuss issues raised by American Monument. 

As part of the Beall Center’s ongoing commitment to American Monument, it is hosting this website, which will grow in functionality. Here you will find documentation of the physical and programmatic iterations, and a developing platform for research and communication on project cases and their contexts. 

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Project Team

lauren woods, artist, initiator, and project co-leader

lauren woods is a conceptual artist whose hybrid media projects—film, video and sound installations, public interventions and site-specific work—engage history as a lens by which to view the socio-politics of the present. Challenging the tradition of documentary/ethnography as objective, she creates ethno-fictive documents that investigate invisible dynamics in society, remixing memory and imagining other possibilities. She also explores how traditional monument-making can be translated into new contemporary models of commemoration, substituting the traditional marble and granite for new media. Recently, woods unveiled Drinking Fountain #1, a new media monument to the American civil rights movement, past and present activists/organizers, and the spirit of resistance, located underneath the remnants of a recently rediscovered Jim Crow “White Only” sign. Part sculpture, part intervention, located in the Dallas County Records Building in Dallas, Texas, the installation is part of the larger public artwork, A Dallas Drinking Fountain Project.

Born in Kansas City, Mo. and raised in Texas, woods holds a B.A. in radio, television and film and a B.A. in Spanish with a sociology minor from the University of North Texas. In 2006, she received her Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally, including Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Dallas and Miami, as well as Puerto Rico, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Mali and France. She has been the recipient of grants and awards from numerous institutions including the Creative Capital Foundation, The Tribeca Film Institute, College Art Association, Alliance of Artists Communities and The San Francisco Foundation.

Kimberli Meyer, cultural producer and project co-leader  

Kimberli Meyer is a curator, writer, architectural designer, and cultural producer. She has led the University Art Museum at Cal State Long Beach, and was the director of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, for fourteen years. Major projects there include initiating and co-curating, with Gloria Sutton, Lisa Henry, and Nizan Shaked, How Many Billboards? Art In Stead, an exhibition in which 21 artists were commissioned to make new work for a Los Angeles billboard (2010); co-curating and co-authoring, with Susan Morgan, the exhibition and publication Sympathetic Seeing: Esther McCoy and the Heart of American Modernist Design (2011); and organizing myriad projects with contemporary artists and architects. She was the Commissioner for U. S. Presentation at the 11^th International Cairo Biennial, and the recipient of numerous grants and awards. She has been working with woods on American Monument since its conception.

Key Collaborators

American Monument is collaborative work, and the team is elastic. Key members include:

Sara Daleiden (iterations 25/2018 and 22/2019) is an artist and facilitator who focuses on civic engagement within developing landscapes, exercising cultural exchange strategies. With bases in Los Angeles and Milwaukee through her initiative MKE<->LAX, she encourages local cultures to value neighborhoods, public space, civic art, entrepreneurship and racial and gender equity.   

David Familian (iteration 22/2019) is Artistic Director and Curator at the Beall Center. He has curated and organized the majority of exhibitions at the Beall Center for Art and Technology at UCI over the past decade, and developed the Black Box Projects Initiative there. He has taught studio art and critical theory at Otis College of Art and Design, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Santa Clara University, San Francisco Art Institute and U.C. Irvine.  

Catherine Scott (iteration 25/2018) is a change facilitator, educator, ethnologist, scholar, and artist. Her early training as a dancer, combined with her coming of age during the 1960s socio–political shifts, helped shape her lifelong participation in the advancement of equity and quality of life for her community and for all. Art-making, (dance and music first and now performance) is her pathway and vehicle to confront Issues of social justice, environmental concerns, and the politics of access and inclusion. For over twenty years she has worked in urban centers in the USA, New Orleans, Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, and Brazil providing support during crisis, researching  cultures, and participating in community advancement.

Carol Zou (iterations 25/2018 and 22/2019) is an artist, writer, educator, and cultural organizer who has worked for over a decade on the relationship between arts, culture, community, and activism. Her work has spanned various collaborative modes with: Yarn Bombing Los Angeles, Michelada Think Tank, Trans.lation Vickery Meadow, Asian Arts Initiative, U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, Imagining America, American Monument, and currently as the Enterprise Community Partners Rose Fellow with Little Tokyo Service Center. She believes that we are most free when we help others get free.

Collaborators

Special thanks to Sora Han, Professor of Criminology, Law and Society, UCI; Simon Leung, Professor of Art, UCI;  Kaaryn Gustafson, Professor and Associate Dean, UCI Law; Director, CLEAR; and John Spiak, director, Grand Central Art Center.

Supporters

The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, a founding and continuing grantor to the artwork; the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the University of California Humanities Research Institute; UCI Advance Program for Equity & Diversity; Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous; and the Beall Family Foundation. Key partners include Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana; and UCI Law’s Center for Law, Equality, And Race (CLEAR).