The Kentucky Monuments Workshop (RPA Pilot / Seed Project)

We seek funding for a pilot that is intended to serve as the formal catalyst for The Kentucky Monuments Workshop "Workshop" at the University of Kentucky, a collaboration between Professors Melynda Price and Zachary Bray. The project began in 2019, with an interdisciplinary symposium at the College of Law called Written in Stone: American Monuments and Monument-Protection Law spanning the fields of law, history, historic preservation, and gender and race studies. While the proceedings of the symposium were published, the event highlighted a larger community need. Since the symposium, we have continued to receive solicitations to advise or speak to the context in which monuments should be understood­particularly by groups without resources of their own, and particularly regarding monuments that relate to racial violence or the history of African Americans in Kentucky. Our long-term goal is to fund a larger Monuments Workshop through the Mellon Foundation, which has recently announced multi-million campaigns to fund monument-related work, and to which we have submitted initial letters of inquiry. Our short-term goal with this proposal and project is to demonstrate the feasibility of this work to external funders; to solidify our partner networks; and to generate products to illustrate the work of contextualizing projects. So many recent debates about monuments focus on the removal of statues, but the Workshop also will provide creative responses to existing monuments and expand the understanding of what counts-and what ought to count-as a monument. The requested support will fund collaborative community and academic research on the history of racially segregated patterns of land use and real estate transactions in Louisville, Kentucky, culminating in exhibitions of-photographs and artistic responses to the spaces of study, which in turn will spark development of temporary and permanent memorials envisioned by local historians and artists on this project.