With the recent launch of the Monuments Project— a significant multi-year commitment to rethinking our country’s commemorative landscape — the Mellon Foundation is broadening the national conversation about public monuments and memorials.
In our second panel discussion on the topic, Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander was joined by Paul M. Farber, director of Monument Lab, Viet Thanh Nguyen, USC professor, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, and author of Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, and Caroline Randall Williams, Vanderbilt University writer-in-residence and author of the noteworthy New York Times op-ed “My Body is a Confederate Monument,” to address provocative questions about the making of our commemorative spaces, what a monument is, how myth-making has shaped the process of memorializing, and why new commemorations will expand the American story.
