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Your CartSouthern Symbols: Remembering Our Past and Envisioning Our Future
A Public Conversation at the Speed Art Museum
This convening took place on Friday, October 13, 2017. Click on the links below to access video footage of the speakers.
Cities throughout the United States are removing public statues, flags, and monuments associated with the Confederacy. As a nation, we are revisiting how we remember the legacy of slavery, the Civil War, and our history of racial discrimination. In association with the exhibitionSouthern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art, the Speed Art Museum hosted a public conversation led by prominent artists and historians exploring the South’s complex history and its symbols. How should we mark historical sites? Who do we commemorate? What do we want to say?
Dr. W. Fitzhugh Brundage
William B. Umstead Distinguished Professor; Department Chair of History at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Presentation title: “Civil War Monuments and Contested Memories: North Carolina as a Case Study”
Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens
Assistant Professor, Department of History at Queens College, CUNY
Presentation title: “Of Monuments and Men: Confronting the Historical Legacy of James Marion Sims”
Sonya Clark
Distinguished Research Fellow in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University and Visiting Artist-In-Residence
at Amherst College
Presentation title: “Monumental Cloth”
Dr. Jason Johnson
Assistant Professor at Trinity University, San Antonio
Presentation title: “‘Stumbling’ towards memorialization: Germany and the victims of the Holocaust”
Jessica Ingram
Assistant Professor in Graduate Fine Arts and Undergraduate Photography at California College of the Arts
Presentation title: “Road Through Midnight: Civil Rights Memorial, activating the relationship between memory, site and community at unmarked sites of atrocities”
Nari Ward
Artist based in New York, whose work has recently been exhibited at Socrates Sculpture Park, the Barnes Foundation, the Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston, and the High Line in Chelsea, New York.
Presentation Title: “Proposal Process – (T)race Turf”
Keynote Lecture: Dr. David Blight
Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University
Lecture title: “Lost Causes and Causes Not Lost: Confederate Memorials, Then and Now”
Dr. Blight’s lecture focuses on why the Confederacy in its various memorial manifestations never seems to go away. He also examines why nearly all debates or struggles over monuments and memorials are about the present.