The Monumental Project

How do monuments in the United States compare to other places of the world. Last summer, Toolkit associates Madeline Bonner and Noah Price traveled to Bergama, Türkiye to conduct sites visits and participate in the ICOMOS University Forum. Sofia Medina, an ICOMOS colleague from Colombia, joined us and shared her perspectives about how Colombian monuments compare to those in Türkiye and the United States. Today, we're recreating tha...

Last season, we met with the founders of Refusing to Forget to discuss La Matanza and the lack of monuments and memorials that recognize this historic tragedy. Today, we're continuing that conversation by speaking with Elsie Garcia, a descendent of one of the men killed in the Porvenir Massacre, a key event of La Matanza. Elsie's story reminds us of the importance of memorializing these tragedies and remembering how the past contin...

In our last episode, we met with Sonja Henderson, who discussed her work on the We Still Here monument as part of Chicago's Monuments Response Project. Today, we're meeting with Sadie Woods, the co-creator of this monument, so that she can tell us how sound and music impacted the narrative their work puts forth. Exploring the ways that music can act as a monument of it's own,  Sadie's insights share a powerful and unique way t...

Welcome to the 5th season of The Monumental Project! We're excited to kick off this season with a three-part series on Chicago's Monuments Response Project. This project commissioned a handful of artists to create their own monuments in the same space as controversial monuments on the city's lakewalk. In this first part, we meet with Sonja Henderson, co-creator of the We Still Here monument along with Sadie Woods who will be featur...

What happens when Indigenous researchers respond to a Western museum calling a codex a "living ancestor"? In this season finale and our first episode entirely in Spanish, Dr. Omar Aguilar Sánchez, Mixtec archaeologist and founder of Colectivo Nchivi Ñuu Savi, and Mtro. Gibránn Becerra Álvarez, archaeologist and member of Voladores de Cuetzalan del Progreso, bring the voices that Part 1 was missing. They speak from their communities...

When does an artifact in a museum reach "monumental" status? In this episode, we're exploring the concept of belongings as monuments, primarily focusing on the Amoxtli Tezcatlipoca (or the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer) with Meghan Backhouse from National Museums Liverpool and José Sherwood, an expert on the amoxtli. This will be the first part as the second part will be with Nahua scholars conducted in the spanish language. 

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What is creative extremism? Michelle Browder uses this phrase from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to describe her work as both an artist and activist in Montgomery, Alabama. In this episode, Michelle tells us about her company, More Than Tours, as well as the Mothers of Gynecology monument that she created in protest of the J. Marion Sims statue.

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Host: Noah Price

Interviewer: Noah Price

Production: Noah Price

Song Credits:

Mela...

In this episode, we're continuing our conversation about Freedmen's Town by turning toward some of the efforts currently happening to protect the infrastructure while also modernizing it as a livable community. We're joined by Sharon Fletcher, Executive Director of the Freedmen's Town Conservancy, who tells us why Freedmen's Town is a monument of worldwide importance. 

Credits

Host: Noah Price

Interviewer: Noah Price

Production: N...

In this episode, we're meeting with the folks of Freedmen's Town in Houston, Texas. Freedmen's Town is a historic neighborhood developed entirely by the formerly enslaved people of the greater Houston area after their emancipation. However, preserving the town has been a challenge due to ongoing developments and modernization. Joining us from the Rutherford B. Yates Museum, Catherine Roberts and her colleagues tell us all about the...

How does a historic site become a national park? In this episode, we meet with Kevin Levin, an educator and public historian who tells about the process of turning Fort Pillow into a national historic site. We discuss the history of Fort Pillow, how students are involved in the discussion on monuments, and the various methods public historians use to reach new audiences. 

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Host: Noah Price

Interviewer: Noah Price

Production...

This episode comes in a time of dire need for historical reflection and current action. Over the past few weeks, the Monuments Toolkit team, alongside the rest of the nation, has watched as anti-immigrant sentiments, deportations, and racial violence all reached new heights in the modern era. The events happening in Minneapolis today feel reticent of those in 2020 that led to the creation of the Toolkit and this podcast, including ...

The process of commemorating a site with complicated histories can be a challenge. Whether you're looking to memorialize a tragedy or highlight the hidden history of a site popular for other reasons, there are several steps of care necessary to consider. Ereshnee Naidu, Executive Director of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, joins us today to tell us a bit more about how these sites can be properly cared for as we...

Monuments are often designed by a single person or small team of people. The (Un)Set in Stone project defies that. Instead, the three initial creators of this monument pass the work onto the community of Montgomery, Alabama to define what monument represents them. Today, we're joined by Jose Vazquez and Ashley Edwards to talk about their work with this project and what it means for a monument to be community made.

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Host: Noah ...

As often as we discuss monuments that have stood for decades or centuries, we rarely find the opportunity to discuss a monument just recently erected. In our final episode of 2025, we're excited to share a conversation with Harmonia Rosales, the artist of a new monument in Boston, Massachusetts entitled, "Unbound." Harmonia shares with us her artistic vision for the monument, how the project came to be, and what her overall ethos i...

Statues of Christopher Columbus have been at the forefront of the debate on monuments in both the United States and all over the world. In the city of Columbus, Ohio, they launched the Reimagining Columbus project in order to determine what ought to happen with their statue and their city's legacy moving forward. 

Today, we're joined by Shelly Corbin, an Indigenous Knowledge expert and a member of the Reimagining Columbus proje...

The Hawaiian monuments landscape offers important differences to the rest of the monuments landscape known throughout the continental United States. One of their contentious monuments is the Captain James Cook Monument, an obelisk that exists at the site where Cook was killed. In this episode, we talk with Shane Akoni Palacat-Nelsen, the President and Executive Director of Hoʻāla Kealakekua Nui, who shares with us the history behin...

Today, we’re joined by Rivka Maizlish, Senior Research Analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center to talk about the center’s most recent edition of the Whose Heritage? report. The Whose Heritage? report documents the progress in Confederate memorial removal over the last two years and provides an interactive map documenting where these monuments exist and their current status. This is the third edition of this report th...

Many of our past episodes have focused on the South as the region with the most monuments of the Confederacy. However, the West isn’t immune from having controversial monuments as well. In this episode, we’ll turn our attention to the western United States, looking at Kit Carson and the controversial monuments that exist of him all around the wild west. We’re joined by Susan Lee Johnson, the Harry Reid Endowed Cha...

Monument removal, relocation, and reinterpretation is a process that has several means to its end. For some, this process involves work from activists in the community appealing to political leaders. In other cases, decisions to rectify an oppressive monument come from the top down with local and state governments working with their communities in order to create a consensus around how a monument might best be dealt with. In this e...