American Monument at UCI

Sora Han
Criminology, Law & Society / School of Law / African American Studies
UC Irvine

Simon Leung
Art
UC Irvine

This project will help develop and foster public programming and engagement, including a symposium, as a core component of lauren wood’s “American Monument” exhibit at the Beall Center for Art and Technology on the UC Irvine campus (October 2019 – February 2020). “American Monument” invites the viewer’s consideration of the cultural circumstances under which African-Americans lose their lives to police brutality. As a participatory, intermedia work of art, “American Monument” was conceived as a nomadic and continually expanding “monument,” moving from site to site across the country. The Beall Center will host the work in what will be its first full exhibition. This project encounters woods’ work through an innovative public engagement program that enables new forms of user involvement, discourse-making, and art-generated learning. These programs will take place at the Beall Center and elsewhere on the UC Irvine campus. The symposium – envisioned as the culmination of this process-based monument exhibit – will be a collaboration between various UC Irvine professors from School of Humanities (Sora Han, Bridget Cooks, Jared Sexton, John Murillo), the Claire Trevor School of Arts (Simon Leung), the Bren School of Information & Computer Science (Roderic Crooks), the School of Social Ecology (Simon Cole), and the School of Law (Kaaryn Gustafson).