‘Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past’ hosted by Arts & Ideas

By Francisco Omar Fernandez Rodriguez Arts & Features Editor On Sept. 30, Arts & Ideas hosted “Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past” in the McCarthy Center’s Alumni Room. The speaker was Renée Ater, a visiting associate professor from Brown University. She coordinates the “Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past” database, which is a digital humanities project. She said it’s a “digital repository and archive.” At the beginning of the lecture, she said that she recently “lost about a third of the data in the database.” She added she had uninstalled something improperly. “It was amazing how one plugin could actually impact a project on that level,” she said. Ater said she started the research for this project in 2010, and the database was put together in 2018. But the COVID-19 pandemic put the project on hold, she added. She said, “The project really was stopped, and we’ve restarted it with the team at Brown, and with hiring.” She used to be an assistant curator at Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., before it went defunct and closed, she said. She used to “walk by culture every day,” she added. After finishing her dissertation she left the job and decided to focus more on scholarly work, Ater said. The dissertation was on Meta Mark Fuller, she added. She couldn’t figure out one of Fuller’s sculptures, “Ethiopia,” she said. It was unclear why Fuller made the sculpture, she said. During her research she found an old source that discussed what public monuments do, she added. “This book was written in 1916 but it is clear that [the author] really had the long view about public space and public monuments,” she said. The author contemplates how Black people had been represented since emancipation, especially in sculptures, she added. She said he also asks and tries to answer an important question, “What is the meaning of monuments in the public space?” She said his answer is statues usually have more purpose than mere portraiture, and “these commemorative and speaking groups generally stand in the open at the intersections of the highways, in the most conspicuous places.” The quote led Ater to thinking about how monuments do take on their own lives once they’re made. After the dedication ceremony people interact with the statue and come to their own understanding in the public sphere, she said. Images of the Harriet Tubman Memorial were shown, focusing on the statue “Step on Board” by Fern Cunningham. But there is another statue in the square, “Emancipation” by Fuller, pictures of which were also shown. Ater was interested in what she saw as an awkward relationship between the two pieces. “What do we do with kind of semi-nude bodies on the left [‘Emancipation’], as opposed to this kind of fully-clothed freedom seekers on the right? [‘Step on Board’]” she asked. “Step on Board” is about what Harriet Tubman was doing, leading people to freedom, while Fuller’s work is focused on the concept of emancipation, she said. They’re both part of reclaiming Black history in Boston, she added. She frequently thinks about what we see and don’t see when it comes to sculptures. When you’re passing by a monument in a roundabout again, we’re usually not paying attention to the statue, she explained. “So there’s this notion that monuments both can do work, or also sometimes they fail tremendously, or that we kind of forget them in that space,” she said. Ater said a colleague once asked her “Are there other monuments to slavery in the United States?” To find out, she started collecting information on these monuments, she added. Before going digital, she used a folder for each state and made a new paper entry every time she found one. An important question she said she asked while researching was “How are we supposed to deal with what I perceive as an unreconciled past, the harshness of slavery, the horror of it, the trauma of it?” she asked. There was an eight-year gap between when she got the idea and when she decided it would be a digital humanities project, she said. She wanted to start a digital repository to see how many monuments were there, she added. They came up with about 166 monuments, she said. Then she decided to make the project a global database, instead of focusing on the United States, Ater added. “We have monuments from Europe, monuments from West Africa, from Brazil, and the Caribbean … and actually Mexico,” she said. The project is on its third iteration, Ater said. The first version was “a hot mess,” where they didn’t use organization standards and couldn’t find anything in the database, she said. This version was eventually deleted and “completely destroyed,” Ater added. The second iteration ran into copyright problems with the University of Maryland, she said. Any digital content she owned was copyrighted by the university because it was on their servers, she added. “It meant that they could go in there and edit the content to their power, and there were literally all these disclaimers,” she said. She took it off the servers and now hosts her own site, she added. “It was the easiest thing to do. It costs me 50 bucks a year, and I can manage all of the files myself.” In May, they held two focus groups, she said. They focused on both the usability and the content of the site, she added. Ater has already rearranged the website based on the findings of the focus groups. Not everything is up-to-date though, she admitted, and said they’re in the process of changing several names to work better. “Exhibits will become stories. Collections will become groupings, or thematic groupings, and items will become monuments,” she added. Something at the core of the project is geolocation data, she said. Every monument is geolocated and shown on a global map. This data is especially important to Ater because it shows where the monuments exist in space and time. Many of the monuments are about emancipation, she said. Many are focused on the Underground Railroad, while others are about the history from slavery to civil rights, she added. Universities are attempting to use monuments to address that legacy, Ater said. “Brown has, quite frankly, an unsuccessful monument on campus. And I say that because students really dislike it. And so in my mind, if people can’t identify with what that monument is doing, then it’s not doing its work very well,” she said. In the database, there’s only one exhibit left after the data loss, she said. It’s heavily focused on Harriet Tubman, who is also the most represented person in the database and the third most represented woman in the United States, she added. Ater said there’s a difficult issue when it comes to Harriet Tubman, “about who she really was as a woman. “‘Oh she led 500 people out of slavery!’ No, she did not. She led about 60 family members, right? … She is made more of a myth through monument making in the landscape,” she said. Ater wants the database to function as a “public history education site,” so there is a section that explains related terminology and ideas. The focus groups showed her that people spend a lot of time in that section, she added. “It turns out lots of us don’t have sculpture vocabulary. You’ve never taken a sculpture class, you don’t know what the terminology is,” she said. When documenting a monument for the database, they collect photos of the site, of the statue, and of any signage on the monument or on the ground, she said. Instead of having someone else build the database for her, she decided to get training on how to use digital tools, she said. It’s important to know how these systems work, she added. For the metadata she uses Omeka and Scalar, she added. She spent a couple years getting trained, and she feels the need to go back because of how much everything’s changed already, Ater said. From 2015 to 2018, she worked in a department that fully embraced “digital art history and public humanities,” she added. One of the challenges she faces in her project is hypertext links dying constantly, she said. They might stop hypertext linking entirely because of how much of an issue it is, she added. Another problem is the Library of Congress’ subject headings when it comes to race, she said. It’s difficult to work around them, and they’re still using terms such as “negro” which is problematic in our day and age, she explained. She keeps data outside of the system too, she added. There are “expansive files of written text,” and every single monument is in an Excel spreadsheet, she said. During the Black Lives Matter movement, there was a shift from lowercase “black” to uppercase “Black,” she said. They’re currently updating that language in the database, she added. It’s also been changed at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, she added. One aspect she’s learned is that “failure is part of doing digital public humanities,” she said. She learned a modeling software that doesn’t exist anymore, meaning she had to learn another platform, she added. Ater said the reason why monuments to the slave past are and need to be made is because it is part of an “unreconciled past. “It is an acknowledgment that this is indeed part of American history, but also part of the American landscape,” she said.