Location : New Orleans, Louisiana

Client: The people of New Orleans

Year : 2017-2019

Status: Completed

Collaborators: Foundation for Louisiana, New Orleans African American Museum, UNO Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies, The Historic New Orleans Collection, the New Orleans Public Library.

Paper Monuments was a public art and public history project designed to elevate the voices of the people of New Orleans, as a critical process towards creating new narratives and symbols of our city that represent our collective visions, and to honor the erased histories of the people, events, movements, and places that have made up the past 300 years as we look to the future. 

Paper Monuments combined public pedagogy and participatory design to expand our collective understanding of New Orleans, and invited our citizens to imagine new monuments for New Orleans.

the context

The removal of four Jim Crow monuments in the spring of 2017, the result of generations of organizing by Black New Orleanians revealed deep-seated divisions in our communities. It also sparked important conversations: about the ties between symbols and systems, the links between the present and the past, the differences in how we experience our built environment, and what stories we tell and remember.  

We view a community-driven, participatory process for the redevelopment of these sites and for the expansion of public art in public spaces throughout New Orleans as a critical means to continue and expand those conversations, and to ensure that when future generations question the intentions behind and the purpose of future monuments, the answers are ones of which they can be proud.

Project values

The core values of Paper Monuments were equity, integrity, and collaboration. We envisioned the role of our team as coordinating the efforts and supporting the visions of a broad collective of residents, scholars, artists, and activists.

In centering equity, we set an honorarium for artwork that recognizes the value of our local visual artists, often overlooked in discussions of New Orleans' cultural economy and we worked to ensure that both the content and the creators of all our pieces reflect the diverse populations of our city.  

In centering integrity, we committed to honor all  public proposal submissions, and to include them in archives and maps, knowing that some may be offensive or abusive. We provided opportunity for all community members to speak at our events.

In centering collaboration, we built relationships with small business owners throughout the city to distribute posters while helping to drive new customers to their stores.

We partnered with public institutions such as the University of New Orleans and the New Orleans Public Library to provide research and archival support locally, and are part of an emerging cohort of organizations and projects across the country working to reconsider the role of public art and public history in our cities.

Poster Campaign 

Commissioned artwork that celebrates people, places, events and movements in New Orleans history. Artists and writers are paired up to create a poster that will be put up around the city. Posters will be distributed at bookstores and libraries throughout the city.

Events + Pop-ups

Tabling and storytelling events around the city, regular community canvassing, open artist calls, and more...

Public Proposals

Public proposals for prospective monuments submitted by people living in New Orleans. Proposals answer the question “What is an appropriate monument for the city of New Orleans today?” through drawings and written description.

Markers + Monuments

Based on the themes provided from hundreds of community proposals, public artwork was commissioned to reflect the voice of the people.