The Monument as Living Memory

Public Art

The Monument as Living Memory

A Collective Architectural Intervention led by Caleb Duarte |

October 12, 2020–April 18, 2022

As COVID-19 forced us inside, arts institutions were tasked with the challenge of creating socially distant art experiences for communities to engage with outside of their shuttered galleries. Beyond the institutions, artists flocked to the new streetside canvases of boarded up businesses to paint images of essential workers, reclaim public spaces to call out for equity and liberation in the name of George Floyd and so many others, and to attempt to create some sense of community as bodies continued to be forced to distance.

The boards, meant to remove access and close up, have become spaces to open—open for dialogue, for creativity, and for public voice. This creative action is synonymous with the aesthetics of revolt, a colorful celebration of resistance, endurance, beauty, and community self-determination. Inspired by this movement, artist Caleb Duarte brings together artists and collectives from across the Bay Area to build a reflection of ourselves, of this moment, through an architectural intervention that is as ever-changing as the world we live in.

The Monument as Living Memory illustrates the closure, dismantling, and restructuring of institutions, the toppling of monuments, and the uprising of a palpable collective spirit across our country. Taking form as a larger-than-life board in the public space, this work echoes the simultaneous temporary closure of YBCA’s galleries and opening of a platform for public voice. Within the board lies a distinct cut out in the shape of a monument, asking audiences to question what is behind the shadows, what is haunting us, and how can art and art institutions work towards its dismantlement.

For eight months, Duarte invited Bay Area artists and collectives to bring new revisions, additions, and cover ups every two weeks. Now in the work’s second chapter, invited artists will continue to transform this evolving artwork through 2021.

The iterative nature of the work allows for artists to respond with the same urgency, responsiveness, and passion that we see within the communities marching in the streets, creating murals, and demanding for a better, more just world.

The Monument as Living Memory is one of the many YBCA initiatives reimagining how we can safely bring our community together in-person once again. Experience the work 24/7. Always free. No appointment necessary.

Essay

Inside the Aesthetics of Revolt

Caleb Duarte’s The Monument as Living Memory

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Caleb Duarte and Urgent Art, The Monument as Living Memory, 2020, installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2020. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photograph by Tommy Lau.

Caleb Duarte and Irene Shiori, The Monument as Living Memory, 2020, installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2020. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photograph by Tommy Lau.

Caleb Duarte and David Petrelli, The Monument as Living Memory, 2020, installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2020. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photograph by Martin Strickland.

Caleb Duarte and Pancho Pescador, The Monument as Living Memory, 2020, installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2020. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photograph by Tommy Lau.

Caleb Duarte, Fred Alvarado, and students from Bessie Carmichael Elementary, The Monument as Living Memory, 2020, installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2020. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photographs by Tommy Lau.

Caleb Duarte, intervention from previous with Fred Alvarado, and students from Bessie Carmichael Elementary, The Monument as Living Memory, 2020, installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2020. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photographs by Martin Strickland.

Caleb Duarte, The Monument as Living Memory, 2020, installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2020. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photographs by Martin Strickland.

Caleb Duarte and Stela Ones, The Monument as Living Memory, 2020, installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2020. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photographs by Tommy Lau.

Cece Carpio, Tina Bartolome, and Caleb Duarte, The Monument as Living Memory, 2020-2021, installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2021. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photographs by Tommy Lau.

Rivka Louissant, Kee Romano, Sarah Siskin, and Caleb Duarte, The Monument as Living Memory, 2020-2021, installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2021. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photographs by Tommy Lau.

Caleb Duarte, The Monument as Living Memory, 2020-2021, installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2021. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photographs by Tommy Lau.

Cheyenne Concepcion, Triumph of a Woman, 2021 as part of Caleb Duarte’s The Monument as Living Memory 2020-2021, installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2021. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photographs by Tommy Lau.

Cheyenne Concepcion, Triumph of a Woman, 2021 as part of Caleb Duarte’s The Monument as Living Memory 2020-2021, installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2021. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photographs by Tommy Lau.

My-Linh Le & Jeffrey Yip, The Origin Story of No Name, 2021 as part of Caleb Duarte’s The Monument as Living Memory, 2020-2021, installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2021. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photographs by Tommy Lau.

Caleb Duarte, The Monument as Living Memory, 2020–ongoing, installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2022. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photographs by Tommy Lau.

About Caleb Duarte

Caleb Duarte is best known for creating temporary installations using construction type frameworks such as beds of dirt, cement, and objects suggesting basic shelter. His installations within institutional settings become sights for performance as interpretations of his community collaborations.

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Installation view of The Monument as Living Memory

Caleb Duarte | January 14-17, 2022

DO NOT COME

Vice President Kamala Harris’s words to hopeful asylum seekers surround a silhouette of former President Andrew Jackson. Under his presidency, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 set off a series of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of approximately 60,000 Native Americans.

For his next transformation, Caleb Duarte collaborates with Arte urGente, a youth group founded in 2016 and composed of Central American unaccompanied youth that arrived at the border of the United States and Mexico.

Arte urGente has painted Vice President Harris’s words as a form of reclamation and a reminder of the violent interventions undertaken by the United States to destabilize Central America. The missing Jackson monument serves as a performative object. Duarte and Arte urGente will activate it as a mobile statue, taking it to museums and government buildings across the city.

The multidisciplinary medium Duarte and members of Arte urGente employ manifests itself within the body and the history bodies carry in public spaces. With the cutout, they exercise a collective and living memory open to public interpretation. Together, their collaboration speaks to the repetition of history, the folding of time, and the continuing evidence of human resistance and survival.

My-Linh Le & Jeffrey Yip, The Origin Story of No Name, 2021 as part of Caleb Duarte’s The Monument as Living Memory 2020-2021, installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2021. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photographs by Tommy Lau., 2021 as part of Caleb Duarte’s The Monument as Living Memory 2020-2021, installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2021. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photographs by Tommy Lau.

My-Linh Le & Jeffrey Yip | September 28, 2021

Dancer, director, storyteller, and YBCA 10 cohort member My-Linh Le collaborates with new media artist Jeffrey Yip to monumentalize a myth from the future, featuring a commissioned illustration by Kazu Tabu.

The Origin Story of No Name speaks from the future about the present, and explains how 1,000 years from now people came to speak the same language—one that relies less on the representational system of words and more on the emotional and spiritual resonance of sound, facial, and bodily expression; intuitive understanding; and the creative force inherent in the breath. The myth’s nameless deity is revered in the distant future as the god of communication and prayer. The deity swallows a world made of the buzzwords of our time. Its actions remind us that words can only ever serve as incomplete and unreliable representations that, when entrusted with the task of conveying an objective truth, mirror our distorted and impoverished perceptions of reality. Le and Yip work together to translate the myth using present-day methods of storytelling, including technology such as augmented reality (AR) and projection mapping.

Cheyenne Concepcion | June 15–16, 2021

Cheyenne Concepcion is a San Francisco-based artist and designer whose practice is centered on the politics of public space. For her contribution to The Monument as Living Memory, she builds on her recent work advocating for more diversity in form and representation in monuments and public art. Titled Triumph of a Woman, this soft, ephemeral sculpture uplifts a family story from her grandmother’s childhood in the Philippines. It is a story of her adventurous and playful spirit, characteristics that ultimately led to her triumph.

Triumph of a Woman flips the narrow, often totalizing narrative of traditional monuments on its head by making an intimate story publicly known. The textile sculpture makes use of an ordinary fishing net, handsewn bangus, paint, and the sun and wind to convey a softer, ephemeral, and personal testament of triumph. With this work, Concepcion speaks to the need to tell our own stories as a form of resistance, of activism, of place-making, and of changing the narrative.

Caleb Duarte | May 24–28, 2021

To mark the ending of The Monument as Living Memory’s first chapter, Duarte chose to wrap the sculpture in wood and plastic, as if purchased or exchanged as a valuable commodity. As movements are commercialized for capital gain, their intended impact is actively erased. Wrapping the sculpture acknowledges the both literal and metaphorical repackaging of culture through the materials used to protect artworks and move them across the world.

Beneath its plastic covering, viewers can still see the words BLACK LIVES MATTER. This blurring speaks to the perseverance of the cultural and political movements that resist this erasure. These movements do not seek validation from arts institutions, and are regardlessly neglected by the gatekeepers of cultural preservation until they become digestible to a largely white audience through decontextualization. The suppression that occurs inside the white galleries of art institutions further removes the intentions of the movement from its objects, thus obscuring the aesthetics of revolt. What and who is remembered is filtered through the institution, leaving the broad public with a fragmented understanding of our collective capacity for revolution.

Caleb Duarte | April 26–28, 2021

Caleb Duarte with Anonymous; Lorenzo, Aurelio, Sebastian, of Ocosingo Chiapas Mexico, Maya Tzeltal.

Caleb Duarte recently returned to the Bay Area from Tijuana, Mexico where he created a performance and sculpture project with families living in refugee tent camps at the US/Mexico border. Upon his return to San Francisco, he drove to the Mission District to reach out to three “day labor” workers to help him paint BLACK LIVES MATTER over the existing work on The Monument as a Living Memory. Duarte uses a subtle dark black and grey hidden color palette to mark the words as disappearing or erased text. The faded colors suggest a softening of the movement, a subtle erasure created by not fully confronting the urgent paradigm shifts needed to address the harsh and violent histories of the United States.

This newest iteration serves as a reminder of how institutional structures use cultural movements and re-package them to reduce their impact, softening the urgent need for change. Whether through the commercialization of the aesthetics of revolt—the co-opting of these aesthetics by artist and art institutions or the marketing of the movement’s images for capital gain and attractive branding—the faded Black Lives Matter signage on a leaning wall painted by anonymous workers is a performative sculptural act that addresses one of the many causes of violence against black and brown indigenous bodies, the continued use of their invisible labor.

The Mounument as Living Memory, Caleb Duarte, 2021 - feature

Sarah Siskin, Keena Romano, and Rivka Louissant | February 11 — 25, 2021

Bay Area muralists Sarah Siskin, Keena Romano, and Rivka Louissaint bring their unique practices together in an overlapping and iterative process to The Monument as Living Memory under the theme of urgency. In the design process, these three artists particularly considered Point Five of the Black Panther Party Ten-Point Program in relation to museums as educational institutions: “We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.” This intervention challenges the linear path of art history, the historic exclusivity of art institutions, and the destructive means by which museums came to obtain artifacts.

Sarah Siskin, founder of the Bay Area Mural Festival, takes inspiration from the Zapantera Negra project, an artistic collaboration between Zapatista and Black Panther Party aesthetics, brought about by the participation of artists and once minister of Culture of the Black Panther Party Emory Douglas in collaboration with EDELO art collective and residency in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas México.

Following Siskin, Keena Romano blends urban experiences with historial, modern, and futuristic realities. She collages Duarte’s work with images of educator Septima Clark, congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, freedom fighter Winnie Mandela, journalist and activist Amy Jacques Garvey, abolitionist Harriet Tubman, Black Panther Party member Assata Shakur, and civil rights activists Mary Mcloud Bethune, Ella Baker, Queen Mary Mother Moore, and Coretta Scott King.

Designs from Madagascar and Ghana frame these figures to honor cultural Ancestral Reverence practices, along with an excerpt from Mari Evan’s poem “I Am a Black Woman”:

I am a black woman

tall as a cypress

strong

beyond all definition still

defying place

and time

and circumstance

assailed

impervious

indestructible

Look

on me and be

renewed

Lastly, Rivka Louissaint pays homage to the Poor People’s Campaign, the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast for Children Program, the Moms 4 Housing movement, and the nationwide call for the cancellation of rents. Rivka adds the figure of a youth to symbolize both the present and the future of advocacy. This figure holds up a scale in reference to Emory Douglas’s Justice, and echoes the people’s demands for a right to a job, food, and housing.

Cece Carpio and Tina Bartolome | January 20, 2021

For their contribution to The Monument as Living Memory, artists Cece Carpio and Tina Bartolome riff off Tim Blunk’s 1987 poem “for comrades who ask, ‘what is to be done?’ during this particular historical conjuncture, a (partial) list of practical things to do,” a riff itself of Vladimir Lenin’s 1902 collection of essays, What is to Be Done?

Blunk’s poem attempts to offer a practical list for everyday people looking to create change and sustain their spirit during an extended moment of crisis. Between Blunk’s lines, Carpio and Bartolome have woven directives by fellow freedom fighters from various historical moments who, despite different politics and tactics, share a lineage in the struggle for civil rights and freedom that extends into our current political moment.

Stela Ones | December 21, 2020

Stela Ones is an artist from the Bay Area who has worked with graffiti for over a decade. For her contribution, Stela uses The Monument as Living Memory to commemorate her brother Jesse, who passed away four years ago at the age of 23. Jesse deeply influenced both Stela’s artistic practice and personhood. When significant time has passed since the death of a loved one, fears of forgetting their memory seep in. Stela took Duarte’s invitation as an opportunity to paint Jesse’s name across the artwork to share his life loudly and publicly and combat the fear of forgetting. She adds a cartoon character and the phrase “forever young” to call upon the childhood they spent together and the positive memories she shares with Jesse.

Caleb Duarte | December 4, 2020

“There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art. That painting is autonomous, pure and for itself, therefore we habitually analyze its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is ‘impure’. It is the adjustment of ‘impurities’ which forces its continuity. We are image-makers and image-ridden.” – Philip Guston

As 2021 rapidly approaches, Caleb Duarte welcomes the new year with a celebration and contemplation of the human condition. Duarte has created a street replica of a Mark Rothko painting, a secular place of worship, contemplation, and ritual, intervened by the silhouette of leading political and cultural figure Stacey Abrams standing as a monument. Duarte understands this pairing as abstract art’s search for the divine and the aesthetics of revolt coming together.

This merging can be seen all around us. The empty void of plywood covering commercial storefronts in the era of Black Lives Matter and a global pandemic hints at the abstract expressionist attempt to find meaning without purpose. There is serenity in a secular, politically-detached form of art-making that pertains to the white walls of galleries and museums.

Now, artists have substituted the canvas for plywood and interior galleries for public spaces. Duarte’s homage to Rothko also mirrors city workers painting, often with slightly off-matched colors, over tagging and graffiti. In our public reality, we interpret the divine through the political and through our bodies. The extension of the collective body is visible in how we organize, how we mourn and celebrate. We reach for the divine that Rothko’s paintings searched for through our bodies and by participating in constructing our shared realities. We cannot detach the body from our experiences, it contains infinite nature in its totality.

Fred Alvarado and YBCA’s Community Hub Youth | November 20, 2020 | @frederickoalvarado

YBCA Teaching Artist Fred Alvarado and his 3rd-5th grade students at YBCA’s Community Hub from Bessie Carmichael Elementary examine how monuments create history in the latest contribution to The Monument as Living Memory. In preparation for their intervention on the sculpture, Alvarado guided students through examples of monuments focusing on figurative poses. The students then took digital pictures of each other in their workspaces at YBCA, creating different poses based on what they had studied. Their selected images were printed and wheat-pasted to form their own monuments on the surface of Duarte’s artwork. Together, these students have reclaimed who gets to be a monument and what a monument can stand for in the public space.

Fred Alvarado is an artist working and living in the Bay Area. His work centers around community building, collaboration, and social justice. Past projects have included mural paintings, comic books, video, and installation. Alvarado’s latest project “Future Relations: A Resource for Radical Teaching” is a booklet made up of lesson plans, writings, images, and other contributions from artists working in the fields of social justice, activism, and education. He has been a Teaching Artist with YBCA since 2015.

Pancho Pescador | November 12, 2020 | @panchopescador

For the newest contribution to Caleb Duarte’s evolving sculpture, self-taught visual artist, muralist, and activist Pancho Pescador creates a visual representation of the collective trauma and anxieties we have all faced over the course of the 2020 election. Pescador employs strategies from magical realism as he brings the image of an indigenous mother to life on The Monument as Living Memory. She is depicted emerging from two hibiscus flowers while cradling a breastfeeding child. Her hair contains intergalactic elements of our universe, with a galaxy swirling at her forehead. Above her head rests a red halo, signifying her presence as one of light and spirituality.

To Pescador, the mother is a conduit for trauma—channeling and healing our struggles while bringing life to something new. The mother’s presence simultaneously activates the audience’s critical thinking and sparks imagination through its mystical elements.

In addition to Pescador’s new contribution, Duarte has transformed The Monument as Living Memory’s center cutout. Originally taking form as a child with outstretched arms, now the silhouette depicts politician and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams. Duarte honors Abrams, Deborah Scott, Helen Butler, Nse Ufot, Tamieka Atkins, and the many organizations and volunteers who continue to protect and increase access to voting and voter registration in Georgia.

David Petrelli | November 5, 2020

Artist and activist David Petrelli contributes a quote to The Monument as Living Memory from political activist Yuri Kockiyama. Yuri dedicated her life to contributing to social change through her participation in social justice and human rights movements. Above all else, Yuri believed in energizing others towards action and activism, and held deeply the conviction that each and every one of us had the power and the duty to uplift ourselves towards the goal of racial and gender equality. We honor this quote and the memory of Yuri during this week of deep political and social division, and encourage you to keep her words and legacy close in the coming days and weeks.

Irene Shiori | October 23, 2020

Tattoo artist and activist Irene Shiori contributes a public message on the eve of the 2020 Presidential Elections. A short directive—Vote Now, Cry Later— reminds viewers that we all have an action to take in this moment of divisive political history.

Irene uses spray paint to create a colorful, pointed statement in a style that references Chicanx-style tattoo art that has inspired her tattoo and mural work for years.

Vote Now, Cry Later comes from “smile now, cry later,” a Chicano saying on seeing life as both a tragedy and comedy, originally taken from Greek mythology and popularized by incarcerated tattoo artists. Too often, communities in struggle and resistance have to choose to “smile” in order to move forward through difficult times; to hide our suffering until we are out of the systems of incarceration and in the arms of our loved ones.

To smile now is to say we have no time for despair, we must show up, we must vote, and we must be part of the cultural and political shift in our society. We can cry later.

Urgent Art | October 12, 2020

Formed in 2016, Urgent Art is a loose group of former immigrant refugee youth seeking asylum from Guatemala, now living in Oakland, California. They arrived to the United States as part of the influx of unaccompanied minors that arrived at the end of 2014.

Urgent Art has created public interventions, murals, and performance in and around the Bay Area using artistic tools for individual and collective expression in order to navigate through concerns related to living in an unfamiliar environment.

Urgent Arts’ original four members take on the first iteration of Caleb Duarte’s architectural intervention by painting interpretations of Maya textiles and embroideries that decorate Mayan traditional wear.

Inaugurated for Indigenous People’s Day (formally known as Christopher Columbus Day) Urgent Art demonstrates the continuation of Indigenous resistance, celebrating the original inhabitants of the Americas in Ohlone territory.

This lends to the idea of dismantling violent monuments for the imagination and creation of a living and growing memory through the use of the body, the painted image, and community engagement.

Lead image: Caleb Duarte, The Monument as Living Memory, 2020–ongoing, installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2022. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photographs by Tommy Lau.

The Monument as Living Memory’s presentation at YBCA is organized with the assistance of Martin Strickland, Associate Director of Public Life, Fiona Ball, Curatorial Project Manager, and John Foster Cartwright, Chief Preparator.

The Monument as Living Memory is supported by the Yerba Buena Community Benefit District (YBCBD) Grant.