Public Memory and Our Passing World

As our global community develops solutions for the climate emergency and begins to adapt to a warmer planet, how can we best memorialize the world we are leaving behind? Public memory is a community’s shared sense of events and histories. Monuments and commemorations express public memory and what we consider as part of our collective past.

What can robust and just public memory work do to empower us to preserve and remember what is being lost to a changing environment and to galvanize us to move forward with courage and a spirit of innovation for the world we are creating?

Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander and artist and designer Maya Lin held a discussion that drew on the insights of American commemorative history and the Mellon Monuments Project, as they explored the power of the arts and public memory in a time of climate change.

Watch this video with ASL interpretation