Project #3 – Design a Monument

Objective: Students will design a monument and reflect on how their monument intersects with systems of power in art. In Chapters 1 and 3 of your textbook, we explore instances of how power influences what we see, how we interpret images, and what is considered “valuable” in a culture. Monuments are created to establish an everlasting pubic memory. Monuments are often public sculptures or buildings that are intended to commemorate a specific person, event, or idea, but they can even be as simple as a gravestone. Over the past few years, there has been an escalated debate in America about monuments, specifically monuments of individual people linked to the confederacy and slavery, and whether they should be in the public space because of those individuals’ connections to racist systems of power in America. In this project, you are going to design your own monument as if you were an artist designing something for a public space. You are being asked to design something that is meaningful to you, but you will need to take into consideration the greater public and how your monument would be understood in American culture. Steps: 1. Plan out your idea 2. Visually represent that monument as a drawing, 3-D model, or computer generated design. 3. Complete a written reflection (guidelines below)