In this episode, Anna Gasha and Shuyi Yin, Ph.D. students in GSAPP’s Historic Preservation Program, speak with Kirk Savage, the Professor and Chair of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. Professor Savage edited The Civil War in Art and Memory, an anthology that explores the themes of race, militarism, heroism, and domesticity. He has also written Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (2009), which reconsidered public monuments and spaces in the capital of the United States within a narrative of nation-building, spatial conquest, ecological destruction, and psychological trauma, and Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (first published in 1997 and reprinted in 2018), which investigated the themes of slavery and emancipation in monuments produced following the American Civil War.
Savage discusses the issues of public monuments in relation to identity and collective memory. Savage speaks on how monuments inherently exclude balanced or complex representations of many groups, and the tensions between populism and elitism embodied in monuments. Savage also discusses how changes in public space and the relocation of monuments affect the monuments’ historical context and public perception, as well as the relationships between those monuments and other sites of memory.
Source by Columbia GSAPP
