PMP SYMPOSIUM
CONVERGE 45 TEAM
BY CONVERGE 45 TEAM DESIGN: MICHAEL AL-JIBOORI
In 2020, five public monuments were toppled around the city of Portland during the social justice protests following the murder of
George Floyd. Converge 45 responded in 2021 with the celebrated initiative Portland Monuments and Memorials Project and Prototypes exhibition, co-organized by Mack McFarland and Jess Perlitz, and with support from the Converge 45 Curatorial Committee and the Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC), and The Specht Companies. The original project included a series of events, lectures, panel discussions, and open calls for new works to occupy empty pedestals, and the resulting Prototypes exhibition which was set to conclude with the release of the publication.
Converge 45 will present the Portland Monuments Project Symposium on October 11th and 12th 2024, as the City of Portland will begin to address how to fill the still-empty pedestals around the metro area. This Multiple day symposium will bring together voices from the community, regional public art administrators, and national leaders in public art and monument research at Portland Community College’s Cascade Campus in partnership with the Art Department.
The program will be centered around several panel discussions examining how communities decide what to commemorate in a monument; what
future monuments can or should look like; and why they should look that way. Alongside panel discussions, a series of small breakout sessions will be held to allow the broader community to dive deeper into certain topics, flag topics of interest for later events, and propose new ideas around public art and its purpose.
The Keynote Speaker will be Hamza Walker, Director of The Bric, a nonprofit art space in Los Angeles formerly known as LAXART.
Converge 45’s Portland Monuments Project Symposium will bring together community voices and national leaders to explore how future monuments can reflect our evolving values and history.
Since 2017, Walker has been working on MONUMENTS, an exhibition that features roughly a dozen decommissioned monuments to be shown alongside works of contemporary art. Slated to open in the Fall of 2025, the exhibition is being co-organized with The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and is co-curated with artist Kara Walker and MOCA’s Senior Curator, Bennett Simpson. This talk will use two earlier exhibitions that Hamza Walker curated (Black Is, Black Aint (2008), Several Silences
(2009) to discuss the theoretical and historical framework underpinning MONUMENTS.
Prior to joining The Bric in 2016, Walker was director of education and associate curator of the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, a non-collecting contemporary art museum. Recent exhibitions at The Bric include Nikita Gale, Takers, 2022; Kandis Williams/Cassandra Press’ The Absolute Right to Exclude (2021); and Postcommodity’s Some Reach While Others Clap (2020).
Converge 45 believes that as the City of Portland embarks on this larger project of deciding how to fill the denuded pedestals, it is crucial that these conversations be reignited so that Portland’s diverse communities are included in the process of deciding on art objects that potentially affect their neighborhood permanently. Art is an essential key to visualizing innovation and possible change in our community and there is no greater time than now to discuss and support work that looks towards a more equitable and just ways to live together in the future.
For more information and registration go to: Converge45.org
Portland’s Monuments Project is made possible by the Mellon Foundation, City of Portland Office of Culture, Portland Community College, and Other cultural partners.
