Join us on Zoom for a book talk with editor Romi Crawford and contributors to Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect.

Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect, Edited by Romi Crawford, collects over thirty artistic responses to the Wall of Respect, a work of public art created in 1967 at the corner of Forty-third Street and Langley Avenue on Chicago’s South Side. The Wall depicted Black leaders in music, literature, politics, theater, and sports. It sparked a nationwide mural movement, provided a platform for community engagement, and was a foundational work of the Black Arts Movement. There is no longer any physical indication of its existence, but it still needs to be remembered. Romi Crawford proposes the concept of “fleeting monuments,” asking a range of artists and writers to realize antiheroic, non static, and impermanent strategies for commemoration.

Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect contributors include: Miguel Aguilar, Abdul Akalimat and the Amus Mor Project, Wisdom Baty, Lauren Berlant, Mark Blanchard, Bethany Collins, Darryl Cowherd, D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem, Julio Finn, Maria Gaspar, Theaster Gates, Wills Glasspiegel, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Stephanie Koch, Kelly Lloyd, Damon Locks, Haki Madhubuti, Faheem Majeed, Nicole Mitchell Gantt, Naeem Mohaiemen, K. Kofi Moyo, Robert E. Paige, Kamau Patton, Jefferson Pinder, Cauleen Smith, Rohan Ayinde, solYchaski, Norman Teague, Jan Tichy, Visiting Val Gray Ward, Mechtild Widrich, and Bernard Williams.

Click here to order a copy of the book.

Hosted by the Center for Black Visual Culture/Inst. of African American Affairs at NYU in partnership with the University of Minnesota Press, Green Lantern Press, and the Seminary Coop. Co-sponsored by 370J Project, Dept. of Photography & Imaging-NYU Tisch School of the Arts and NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts.

Romi Crawford, Ph.D., is a professor in the Visual and Critical Studies and Liberal Arts departments at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Her research and courses explore areas of race and ethnicity as they relate to American visual culture (including art, film, and photography). She is co-author of The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (Northwestern University Press, 2017). Additional publications include “Do For Self: The AACM and the Chicago Style” in Support Networks (University of Chicago Press, 2014); “Ebony and Jet on Our Mind” in Speaking of People (The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2014); and Theaster Gates Black Archive (with Thomas D. Trummer and Hamza Walker), published by Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2017. She was co-curator of the 2017 Open Engagement conference in Chicago and founding the Museum of Vernacular Arts and Knowledge (MOVAK), a project based platform for art making that is out of sync with museum and gallery values.

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