Episode Description

A conversation with Monument Lab Director and Co-Founder Paul Farber. Monument Lab is an organization of artists and curators that have spent more than a decade working to research, document and aid in conversations about the tens of thousands of monuments across our nation. The organization wants to ensure that inherited monuments accurately reflect the past and that future monuments (in whatever shape they take) are in conversation with the communities in which they reside.

https://monumentlab.com/

https://www.instagram.com/monument_lab/

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/monument-lab/id1437302452

Transcript

Craig: [00:00:09] This is Art Sense, a podcast focused on educating and informing listeners about the past, present and future of art. I'm Craig Gould. On today's episode, I speak with Monument Lab Director and Co-Founder Paul Farber. Monument Lab is an organization of artists and curators that have spent more than a decade working to research, document and aid in conversations about the tens of thousands of monuments across our nation. The organization wants to ensure that inherited monuments accurately reflect the past and that future monuments, in whatever shape they take, are in conversation with the communities in which they reside. And now a discussion about the past, present and future of monuments with Monument Lab's Paul Farber.

Craig: [00:01:06] Paul Farber thank you so much for joining me this week on the Art Sense podcast. Paul, you are the Director and Co-Founder of Monument Lab. For those who don't know about Monument Lab, how would you describe the work you do and kind of how it got started?

Paul: [00:01:24] First, I want to say thank you for having me on the program. Really glad to connect and honored to be on here with you. Monument Lab is a nonprofit public art and history studio. We're based in Philadelphia, but we work around the country and beyond on the past, present and future of monuments. Along with Ken Lum, who's another Co-Founder, about a decade ago, we started what would become Monument Lab and a series of classroom projects we were teaching and respective courses at the University of Pennsylvania in Fine Arts and Urban Studies. And we were asking questions with our students about monuments, monuments that existed in a city that deems itself historical, like Philadelphia, but also the monuments that may not yet exist. They may be sites of cultural memory, sites of struggle, sites of protest, sites of expression. And in this city, looking at monuments in an expanded framework that was to see monuments as bronze and marble symbols on high, but also murals and mosaics and poetry and protest, and really trying to look at the range of ways that cultural memory is living in this space, both sanctioned and unsanctioned, especially the kind of narratives that challenge the status quo. From that classroom project, we did our first discovery exhibition in 2015 in the courtyard of Philadelphia City Hall.

Paul: [00:03:07] We were really fortunate to work with the late artist Terry Adkins right before he sadly passed. And we worked with him and a big team of researchers and scholars and educators to put on an exhibition that featured a prototype monument by the artist Terry Adkins, and a research lab where we would ask across all of this a question. We'd like to put questions in our work that we want to know the answer to. And I think part of that that spirit that cuts through our work in and out of the classroom is a spirit of knowledge building that is mutual. It is not finite. It is not necessarily about reinforcing kind of Eurocentric visions of a top down form of authority, but really about hearing and meeting people where they are understanding different forms of knowledge, rethinking expertise. And always at the core of it is art. From that, that really opened up our practice, that really pushed us and that set a template from things that we would do for many years forward, which is working with artists to build prototype monuments in public, to do collaborative research and participatory research, and increasingly kind of allowed us to really grow on an arc.

Paul: [00:04:28] And that arc has brought us to through many iterations. So today we're now a nonprofit for most of our our time as a collective, we're really a passion project. And it's only over the last few years, in large part thanks to some catalytic support from the Mellon Foundation's Monuments Project, we've been able to grow into a larger entity. And last thing I'll just say on this answer, because there's many more directions to go, but just to kind of give you a sense as that, I think. When we started our work back in 2012, we felt like we were late to the monument conversation because already by then you have at least years, if not a generation or more, of artists, activists, educators who are calling attention to the discrepancy between our public symbols and our systems of democracy. And I think that spirit, rather than just thinking like, okay, this is a product of something that's just happened this year, or this is just this one project we tried to read the past, present and future together and use our work as artists and with artists as a guiding force and principle for change.

Craig: [00:05:45] Can you maybe talk about how the summer of 2020 changed the size and scope of your organization? And I imagine in your mind you always had the past, present and future. Did you anticipate a future where the dialog would come so much to the surface in the public discussion? It's not just domestic. It was it was around the world. Right?

Paul: [00:06:08] And this will be a both and response, right? Yes. We saw a conversation growing over the course of a decade led by memory keepers and artists and educators that was rising to what felt like a crescendo and the reckoning with state violence and systemic racism, especially in the summer of 2020, brought about this profound kind of cultural rupture and moment that feels like it drew a line. And I think in some ways, like seeing a kind of a world ignited in uprising and a calling out of a status quo, it was not surprising to us that monuments were places of activation because monuments are kind of the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. You see them on the surface and they connect to something more profound symbolically underneath. But the level of reimagining, I think it would be disingenuous to say that our team saw that coming to that level. Right? It makes sense as as monuments were sites of struggle. But to see Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, be remade by local activists where you cannot tell the story of Richmond, Virginia, without the kind of re-imagining of Marcus David Peters circle and the sustained activism where you think about the work in Los Angeles and other sites out in the Western states and the reckoning with colonialism, and then just seeing that level and seeing the both the opening of the conversation and the repressive pushback, the criminalizing of an attempted repression of attempting to intervene in the monument landscape, it was jarring, I think, for our team at that point.

Paul: [00:08:26] We had been doing work at that point for almost the better part of a decade, but still were really a passion project, a very small studio, and all of a sudden our collaborators, our team, the people that we had been working with, were in the midst of a lot of these struggles and also a lot of heads were turning toward them and toward us saying what comes next? And so that is both an exhausting proposition, like shout out to all of the people who've been doing their work. And in addition to wanting opportunity and resource, would love a sabbatical and rest. And it's the kind of thing that pushes you because you say, "okay, well, we've we've been a part of these conversations before. We believe in the power of art to push. Now is the time that we get to work".

Craig: [00:09:15] It just seems like your undertaking is just so complex. For example, trying to remove a monument that maybe represented a power structure that for the most part we don't believe in anymore. But that monument has been deemed itself something of historical value and is protected under some state act of historical significance. How do you go about asking for change for something that is "protected", even though it doesn't reflect the values of the people group in the community where it is anymore?

Paul: [00:09:53] So it's a great question, and I kind of have a nice complex, but I'll try to break it down a bit. I think the word monument. Is so central to our zeitgeist, to our understanding of power and of art and a presence. And it is...and is not just central to our culture, is central to our cities, our towns, our prominent civic spaces. At the same time, monuments are a field...let me say this in one other way. Monuments are curiously a category that doesn't mean any one thing in and of itself. In American culture, to talk about a monument, you may be talking about a statue or plaque...I'm sorry, you may be talking about a statue, you may also be talking about a plaque, a historic site, an ecological formation, an archeological trace. You may be talking about monumental artwork, monumental architecture. You may even be talking about unintentional monuments. And in the work that we've done, we keep seeing that there is a common misperception that there is some agency out there that is in charge of all the monuments, they're in charge of all of those monuments. And when they went up and who paid for them and who keeps them.

Paul: [00:11:18] And there's if we could just like go to that system and go to that agency, we could figure out a way to protect our monuments or to make new ones. I will tell you, it's the opposite of that, because actually the monuments we've inherited on a federal, state, local, tribal, regional level are largely the byproducts of systems that people who have time, money and official power could exert their statements on the landscape. And thankfully, we're living through a new moment where people with different levels of time, money and unofficial power, because everyone has power nonetheless, are building their own monuments or gathering around monuments that exist with new levels. And I think that, again, how do we hold that complexity, that monuments are central to our cities and central to our conversation, But they remain an enigma, in part because we have things that we call monuments. But there is nothing really inherently that is or is not a monument because it's ultimately in not just the eye of the beholder, but in the systems of upkeep. Right? No monument is permanent in and of itself. Each monument requires money, maintenance and mindsets to keep it up.

Craig: [00:12:40] Well, that's really interesting. Monument Lab undertook the National Monument Audit. And so again, that's an undertaking that seems like it would have been far easier if there was one organization that kind of oversees all these monuments. But, you know, my question for you is, again, I'm using the word size and scope, but the size and scope of trying to gather that data just seems overwhelming. How do you even start to identify and categorize something that has such a wide variety of definitions and in no one place that's recording it?

Paul: [00:13:22] Yes, that is correct. It was quite a undertaking. And I want to give a big shout out to the co directors of the audit, Sue Mobley, Lori Allen, who I worked alongside with, and our team of about 30 researchers, data scientists, designers and others who never got to sit in the same room. Again, remember, this was done right in the midst of the pandemic lockdowns, but spent a year diving into this question of how do we how do we get a snapshot of America's monuments? We encounter monuments often as one off symbols in our city or town. And how would you see a panoramic shot? So I wanted to say upfront, because I think this is something that that we even had a sense of, and we hear from others like, Oh, could you give us a count of every monument that exists? Well, that's impossible because we don't even all agree on what a monument is or isn't. And I think if you magnify that in any one place and put that across the country, that's that is a process that if you're going to try to undertake it, you are steering resources in such a way that you've got to just listen to the people who have been engaging monuments, who feel the brunt of monuments, who've been organizing around them. And, you know, a lot of the answers you need. But for our study, which was Co-presented with the Mellon Foundation as a part of the Monuments Project, was to take the data that exists on monuments, the records kept by those federal, state, local, tribal and public entities that are often kept separately. There's never been a study that's brought many of these sources together to give us a composite take.

Paul: [00:15:07] So what we wanted to do was first understand what is the cultural heritage data out of which we could understand monuments? Because to be clear, there wasn't a monument data set. It was data sets about cultural heritage, about property, like depending on the state, you would get anything from statues to garages and historic markers, like people in different places in this country define cultural memory and cultural heritage differently. So we ended up pulling in close to a half million records from data that exists across the country, inclusive of territories. And from there our team worked to find a study set like enough of an example that we could remove the garages. Things are obviously not what people are thinking about with monuments, but to give us close to 50,000 conventional monuments, to actually give us something usable. So we ended up with 48,178, to be precise, across 42 data sources. We worked with the Harvard Cyber Law Clinic on data that we were allowed to use, and then we worked with a number of great people, including Brian Fu, our lead data artists, to create a single study set that we could ask questions of. And this the same studies that we asked questions of other people could too. Eventually, through our website, we also spent a lot of time kind of not only looking out for duplicate entries or data that wouldn't add up, but we also spoke to people who utilize this data all the time or who would. So that includes municipal workers, teachers, historians, scholars, so that by the time we were able to share our work, we had already kind of engaged and tried to learn with people along the way.

Paul: [00:17:11] So about a year ago, we're just coming up on a year later. September was released in late September 2021, and it was released as a publication that you can download for free on our website or you can order through monumentlab.com and a web interface that you can type in some of the same prompts that we were doing. I think that it's really important as we as we in this conversation, we'll talk about some of the findings that there are people who really not only thrive on having data as a source for understanding, but because the structures of power, people utilize data as itself an instrument for authority and voice. And so on the flip side, there are a lot of experiences as lived reality where. Do you need...data can be wielded. Harmfully data can be extracted. Data can actually stand against obvious lived experience. So it's important for us throughout this project as we looked at data to also call attention to its edges. You talk about the stewardship of data and also to really appreciate the work that people are doing outside of this. And so as part of the audit, we also commissioned essays from people who are gathering new kinds of understanding about the monument landscape more broadly. That includes LGBT plus activists and historians and New York City folks who have been doing film work related to indigenous Hawai'i, work on the US-Mexico border. Because the ultimate goal is that while this is a snapshot, we wanted to see how it would be a tool for people to use in their own contexts and their own ways.

Craig: [00:19:09] You have 48,000 monuments as part of a dataset, and again, the number could be much larger. But the data set that you decided to work with in terms of trying to come up with some key findings, the first key finding is interesting, which is monuments have always changed. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Paul: [00:19:30] Yeah. So, you know, this is one of those findings that may be obvious or apparent to many people in a certain way. But often we'll hear many public conversations that almost push that fact of life to the side. So our audit reminds us that monuments are not timeless, they're not untouchable, they're not permanent. They're always shifting and changing, and they're going to change with or without human contact. And so in that sense, like in the audit, just in records of monuments, we were able to see dates that they were dedicated, dates that they were altered, repaired, dates they may have been moved. And while the records aren't even in this, you can see some sources, especially those related to state or federal agencies, that they're constantly looking at both human and ecological impact on monuments. Likewise, when you think about all of the monumental materials that we have inherited, marble, bronze, granite, all of these are impacted by environment and these are monuments that will and can materials that require upkeep. So when someone says they are installing a permanent monument, what they are saying is that we're installing something that we hope will last long enough for someone in a future moment, whether that is in one year, five years, 50 years is going to have to deal with because the large majority of monuments, as we understand them across the world over time do not exist anymore.

Paul: [00:21:26] They've been melted down. They have been destroyed due to climate crises. So I think this one we wanted to highlight is the human and the environmental impact. And then also just shine a light on the fact that our monument landscape has a huge amount of deferred maintenance. And if the attention of those people who are focused on keeping the monuments the way they are and they don't want questioning and they don't want news stories, if they really want to care about our history, they can put attention to the billions of dollars of deferred maintenance in the National Park Service. They could put that toward other kind of upkeep. But that's not what the conversation is about. And so it is really important in this finding to just use the basic premise of the monument records to be able to talk about the fact that monument, reckoning and reimagining is not a new phenomenon. It is as old as the country itself.

Craig: [00:22:28] I feel like the audit also really shines a light on what these monuments reflect. Right. And I think one of the things that we find across several of these kind of key findings is that monuments are erected by people with power and the money to have a monument built. Right? And that doesn't always reflect all parts of society, it reflects...and this is the conversation we've been having on the podcast several times recently, is this whole notion of history being written by winners, right? Like there's a certain.

Paul: [00:23:12] Can I point out something with that? I've got to cut you off.

Craig: [00:23:14] But yeah, go ahead.

Paul: [00:23:15] This is something that blew blew us away in the audit. One of our findings is that the story of the United States, as told by our current monuments, misrepresents our history. So to put that into context, in our study set of nearly 50,000 conventional monuments, we had 5,917 mentions of the Civil War. And so that means that in approximately 6,000 of those monuments, 1% mentioned slavery. The Civil War was fought over slavery, full stop. So that just means that mention, that 1%. What that tells you is that the word slavery appears in the title on a plaque or maybe even in the metadata, like the records that are kept about how people in their own communities have described their monuments, It does not necessarily tell you the story of self emancipated black folk who fought for their freedom and fought for the country. It doesn't tell you the full story. It just says some word. And that is 1%. The when we looked at recorded monuments that mentioned Confederate, only 3% mentioned defeat. There's a whole framework in our audit about the use of the term "pioneer", where we're seeing that of the nearly 1,000 mentions of pioneer in our in our study set, 15% mentioned Native American Indian or indigenous as terms. And that does not include the pejorative ones. And that goes alongside the fact that over half of pioneer monuments were dedicated after 1930, meaning that's after the period of forced and violent dispossession of lands and militarized conflict. And it's right in the thick of the kind of making of a Hollywoodized frontier and West. And so, look, it is it is true that a monument that is newly built or a toxic monument that is removed can be really catalytic for a local city or town. But the fact remains that if you have these kind of discrepancies across the landscape, inscribed generation after generation, we have to do something about that. And I think that's why we called in our audit for engaging in a holistic reckoning with monumental erasures and lies and move toward a monument landscape that acknowledges a fuller history of this country.

Craig: [00:25:53] Well, you know, I grew up in Texas, and I know that on the county courthouse square where I grew up, they have a Civil War monument to the Confederacy. You know, you look at the history of that, and it was erected 50 years after the conclusion of the war by the Daughters of the Confederacy. And it was during this weird time, from what I can gather, from like 1910 to 1920, when there was like this growing sentimentality about Dixieland. And it was like a period when we actually saw the rebirth of the KKK. And  the inscription says something along the lines of valorous defense of state rights. Right? And it makes me think of a term that's really popular these days, which is gaslighting. Like, you know, Orwell would would say that that's rehistory, right? It's reframing the past and complete a narrative based on just one singular point of view. And whose point of view is that whoever had the money and power to erect the monument, right?

Paul: [00:26:56] Yeah, that's right. Those are great points. And I would just add, there is no single story of a place. And I would be very suspect of people who say there is a single story of a place. And in the case of Lost Cause Confederate monuments, one of the most pernicious parts of them is that not only were they dedicated across the country, including places that the Confederacy did not exist, right? In states that were not states.

Craig: [00:27:28] Wow.

Paul: [00:27:28] But that they coincided with efforts to build school curriculum, create public holidays, distribute materials, fundraise for lost cause political advocacy, and often work hand-in-hand with the kind of local as well as state measures that reinforce the system of Jim Crow. This is why you see Lost Cause Confederate monuments outside of courthouses, outside of schools, outside of town squares. And while they come across as something that was spontaneous in the one place, when you zoom out, you see it as an ideological attempt to whitewash the history of not just the Civil War, but enslavement and racial rule. And I just think about all of the people who over not just the last few years, but decades and decades, folks like Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Dubois, who wrote and spoke powerfully at the moments of the dedication of many of these monuments, calling attention to what not just what they said, but what they didn't say, what they inscribed in stone and inscribed into local understanding and system of who belongs, who is the citizen, and what are the rights of citizenship. They really are the signposts of of an apartheid country. And I think about how do we heed their lessons and do something anew?

Craig: [00:29:13] How are you actively changing the landscape? I mean, do you guys come in and just help shine a light, inform, consult, or do you come alongside communities and talk about what new monuments look like, the replacement of monuments, new monuments in a new place that reflect the community? What are the tangible on the ground things that your organization is doing?

Paul: [00:29:37] We are a group of artists and curators and researchers, and again, our work has been evolving over the last few years, and we're really thrilled that we've been able to build out our body of work, not just in our hometown of Philadelphia, but in places across the country. And it depends project to project. But I'll give you an example of one that is really inspiring us. And we're right in the thick of right now, and it's called Regeneration, and it is supported by the Mellon Foundation. And the idea that we had that was an outgrowth of the audit project was while we study, the monuments we have inherited, who is doing the work of unearthing the next generation of monuments. We curated this project through an open call. An open call said, "Look, if you're a team of people who work in a local commemorative context and that can be an a city town, a watershed territory, a reservation, wherever that may be. Have you been doing something and what would it look like to be part of this community and this network and this coalition across the country?" So we ended up getting close to 250 applications from people in every U.S. state, most territories, numerous tribal communities, trans border collectives. And it was a tough choice. We had a great group of advisors and a jury that helped us narrow it down to ten teams. And regeneration is happening around the country. You can get a collectible map through monumentlab.com, and you can also increasingly see media about each of these places.

Paul: [00:31:19] And so you have teams in Los Angeles, Rapid City, South Dakota, Montgomery, Alabama, Saint Louis, the area of Teec Nos Pos in what is now called the Four Corners region, Puerto Rico, and of course Philadelphia and Queens. And across each of these sites there's a group of artists and storytellers who are approaching this notion of monument in different ways. I'll give us some examples. In Philadelphia, the project is led by two former poet laureates, Yolanda Wisher and Trapeta Mayson, who in this city, as they said, is known for a brotherly love and sisterly affection, that the story of black women and then poets is often both a force of democracy and also kind of some overshadowed by the cobblestone stories. So what they did first was gather data and stories from black women and fem poets to hear their experiences, past and present. They did an event called "The Clearing" that was like a reunion of sorts that was first catering, first and foremost to their community, and then they opened it up for others to come in. And they've been in the process of dedicating new kind of combination monument historic markers that will honor black women and fem poets in Philadelphia. You have the team in Los Angeles "Land Under the Plinth", there's a group of Tongva artists and organizers and others who have been working with the city of L.A. to take land that used to have colonial monuments on them, to turn them into (through easements) cultural sites of memory for Tongva people as a process a long term strategy around land back. The Tongva community is the first peoples of what would later be called Los Angeles are not federally recognized that have been doing fantastic work and the work of Joel Garcia, Mercedes Dorame and all of their collaborators. So they've been working first to address inward what they are asking for of themselves and their constituencies in order to then pivot and open up something for many others to attend. And that really culminates around Indigenous Peoples Day. So I just think like if you're if you're out there and you're like, "What's the future of monuments and where should we go?" I would say check out "Regeneration", because you're looking at ten examples that are not the only ones in this country, but are ten that are really led...people powered and that continues to inspire us. We do all kinds of other projects, like sometimes we work with a government agency, sometimes we work with a group of youth organizers. For us, it's about really being responsive to site, really understanding what are projects we want to initiate versus what are ones that we're invited into. And ultimately, who is the coalition of people who want to be a part of it. So that beyond the headlines, beyond the kind of spotlight like who's been doing the work and how will that work, sustain and continue over time.

Craig: [00:34:43] If I were an artist or a city manager or the head of a historical society in an area and I wanted to kind of think through or maybe learn about best practices going forward, do you have resources where if somebody were seeking, they could find help for them? Those folks that are looking to erect new things or transition and recycle what what they've inherited?

Paul: [00:35:15] Yeah, No, I mean, that's a great question. And I think it points me to there absolutely are and I'll name some of them. But I also want to just highlight how this is an issue that is hyper local and transnational, right? Because it's happening...like we at Monument Lab have heard from colleagues in Estonia, in Latin America, in numerous countries about how our audit about the United States has helped them and their work somewhere else. That being said, the best thing that a city manager or municipal art officer can do first and foremost is just pause for a moment and see what's already happening. Who are the people who've been doing this work? I'll tell you, if you have a monument that feels contentious, that's under the spotlight, so to speak, now, there's a good chance that there have been people who have been talking about this and whether or not they're still living, whether or not they're still active. Look in the archives of your city or in newspapers, talk to educators and activists, first and foremost, before you create something new or you turn to the institutions, actually take a look at what's going on on the ground. I think the next step is then to figure out how are you working with and learning with and not separating that out from the processes that are going on.

Paul: [00:36:43] And there are a lot of things that municipal art and history officials like really can't do. They're hamstrung. They are constantly facing budget cuts and undervaluing of art and history. But there are a lot of things they can do. They can create permits. They can have public forums. They can connect people to different city agencies. Oftentimes, there is not a department of monuments. It's like the Parks Department mixed with the Streets Department mixed with the art folks. So being a connector and being a relationship builder is the biggest thing. And then beyond that, I think there are great resources like monuments. Nbc.com are Bulletin, our podcast. There are great conversations with people doing this all around the country. And I think that that notion of like, you're not starting a conversation from square one, you're really trying to enter and grow. And if you can do that, then you also...look, you can do that work in big and small ways every day. I think the key thing that I want to point out here is I hear plenty of people want a different outcome.

Paul: [00:37:52] They don't always do a different process to get there. I think one of the biggest things that we say process matters as much as outcome. If you want a different outcome for your monuments, for your public art, if you use the same processes that you've used to get the ones that you have, you're going to re-inscribe that in many ways. And so I think that that process of learning in place will really help you determine what role you play. It might just be that you're the you're the number one cheerleader of a group that already exists that you may already have known or they're they're close to you or you might find out, "Wow, there was a big conversation in my city or town, but many of the people face hostility from a previous mayoral administration. Maybe I can do some work to really rebuild that relationship before there is even a project. I just will build the relationship". I would love to see more of that. I think so much beautiful art and so much powerful and meaningful work can happen from tending to relationships and following the lead of folks who've been on the front lines and been on the ground.

Craig: [00:38:59] And so if folks wanted to follow your organization's specific work, is it monumentlab.org?

Paul: [00:39:07] So you can follow us at monumentlab.com. You can follow us also on socials @monument_lab. You can support our work. You can subscribe to our podcast. But we also really want to learn with you. I think our work has taken really fascinating turns and we get to learn from what people are doing in this field. We do a lot of work of connecting, of bridge building, of coalitions, and we love to keep in touch. And so the best way to keep in touch and to support is to go to monumentlab.com or visit us on social.

Craig: [00:39:44] And so tell me about your podcast. Who are the voices that you're in conversation with?

Paul: [00:39:49] We've been utilizing the podcast form for kind of on and off for the last three years. Right now the podcast, the Monument Lab podcast called "Future Memory Monument Lab FM", it's co-hosted by myself and Lee Sumpter, a member of our team. And so we've spoken to folks like Lava Thomas, Hank Willis Thomas, Kirk Savage, Paper Monument. So folks around the country and beyond who are either building the next generation of monuments or helping us really critically unpack where we've been, and I think it's been really exciting that this is something that we started when we had zero employees and really a passion project, and we're learning now how to kind of expand and just to put in a plug, there's a really exciting project that is being led by our research director, Sue Mobley, that's coming out in early 2023. I can just give a shout out to the "Plot of Land Team", and it's a it's a special mini series from the Monument Lab team, and we've been for the last year, Sue has led alongside Jordy Yeager (a producer), a team of storytellers and journalists from around the country, telling the story of land, memory, housing and justice. Oh, wow. So these are all like, this is coming in early 2023. They're deep in the kind of like editing and final stages now. I think the big point to say is there's so much content coming through here and so many different voices, so many different artists. And so we're excited to expand and to grow and to learn along the way.

Craig: [00:41:33] Paul, I really appreciate your time and I have a lot of respect for the work that you're doing and just your ability to teach and do all the other things in life and lead an organization that is fighting on so many fronts and trying to be a thought leader. You know, I really appreciate you taking time out to have a conversation with me about your work.

Paul: [00:41:56] Well, thank you so much for this conversation. It's been really a treat to speak with you.

Craig: [00:42:05] That's all the time we have for this week. You've been listening to Art Sense. You can find the show on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher Radio, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. If you've enjoyed this podcast, be sure to subscribe. And while you're there, please rate the show and leave a quick review. Your feedback is the key to other folks finding us. And if you'd like to see images related to the conversation, read the transcript and find other bonus features. You can go to canvia.art and click on the podcast tab. If you'd like to reach out to me, you can email me at craig@canvia.art. Thanks for listening.