Monument Lab

Paul Farber is Director and Co-Founder of Monument Lab. He is also Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Public Art & Space at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. Farber is the author or coeditor of several books including Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia (Temple). Sue Mobley is Director of Research at Monument Lab. She is a contributor to Empty Pedestals: Countering Confederate Narratives Through Public Design, Teachable Monuments: Using Public Art to Spark Dialogue and Confront Controversy, and Remaking New Orleans: Beyond Exceptionalism and Authenticity.

"Monument's Lab's groundbreaking Re:Generation functions as both archive and field guide. Through meticulous mapping of how the landscape of U.S. national history occludes and erases, Monument Lab developed Re:Generation to recalibrate our engagement with the past. The book's detailed case studies document how the creation of new monuments can function as a laboratory for new forms and forums of civic participation. Monument Lab: Re:Generation offers its readers a primer for twenty-first-century democratic action." — Mabel O. Wilson, Chair of African American and African Diaspora Studies, and Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University"Monument Lab's Re:Generation is a national treasure. This powerful book takes readers inside ten local collaborations around Black, Indigenous, Asian American, Appalachian, and Latinx histories that are making transformative change in how we approach, represent, and understand the landscapes of the past. In our present moment of state-sanctioned historical erasure, the imaginative visions and creative methods that infuse these marvelous co-created projects are even more vital if we are to truly come to terms with the diverse and complex dimensions of the nation's collective memory." — Mark Philip Bradley, Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Chicago, and editor of the American Historical Review"Monument Lab: Re:Generation is a living archive of resistance, joy, and reclamation. Each project honors stories that have been pushed to the margins and transforms them into monuments that breathe, speak, and move with their communities. This is the work of memory-keepers: artists, organizers, and visionaries who understand that the most powerful monuments are not made of stone but of relationships, truths, and acts of care. Together, they expand the commemorative landscape to reflect the complexity of our histories and the beauty of our survival." — Wendy Red Star, Artist and 2024 McArthur Fellow "Monument Lab: Re:Generation is many things at once: a beautiful portrayal of incredibly important work happening across the United States, a rich analysis of what we value in public space and how, and a welcoming invitation to learn alongside communities as they make art together in space. It will be enjoyed by anyone interested in public art and public memory. I'll glean something new each time I teach and read it in community with others." — Barbara Brown Wilson, Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia, and author of Resilience for All: Striving for Equity through Community-Driven Design"In Monument Lab: Re:Generation, editors Sue Mobley and Paul M. Farber have brought together insightful essays and real-world case studies to powerfully reveal how artists, organizers, and scholars are reshaping the nation's public monument landscape. It offers a fresh framework for understanding how the nation might reckon with its history and provides inspiration for building a fuller, more collaborative, and more just future for our past. For historians, public history practitioners, and memory workers of all kinds, Re:Generation is essential reading." — John Garrison Marks, Vice President of Research and Engagement at the American Association for State and Local History, and author of Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory"Mobley and Farber's excellent new volume Monument Lab: Re:Generation assembles an impressive collection of essays from a diverse array of collaborators and contributors. Collectively, these leading voices articulate urgent questions about whose stories are inscribed in the public realm. Building upon Monument Lab's National Monument Audit, this volume extends and enriches a longstanding American tradition of critical resistance through historical reinterpretation manifested in public space. It offers essential introductions and deeper considerations of the individuals and organizations working on the front line of spatial politics and public inscription at a time when these considerations could not be more relevant." — Charles Waldheim, John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and author of Landscape as Urbanism: A General Theory