How are artists reimagining and responding to the sites, subjects, and formations of monuments and memorials today? In the wake of recent social and political revolt and the ongoing movements to contest a history of racist and colonial symbols - what forms are both emerging and reasserting their aesthetics and subjecthood to counter, transgress, and empower? Artists Karyn Olivier and Jeffrey Gibson offer notable contributions to this conversation with powerful emblematic works reflective of community, critical positions, and formal dynamism. This conversation will look at recent works such as Gibson’s Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House for the Monuments Now exhibition at Socrates Sculpture Park and his Brooklyn Museum exhibition When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks along with Olivier’s 2018 Monument Lab project The Battle is Joined in Philadelphia as well as her Witness, an addition to a contested mural at the University of Kentucky. Co-moderated by Peter Simensky, Chair of CCA's Sculpture, Individualized, and Community Arts programs, and Ebtihal Shedid, 2021 CCA MFA candidate.

Karyn Olivier is a Philadelphia-based artist who creates sculptures, installations and public art. Her work often intersects and collapses multiple histories and memories with present-day narratives. She has exhibited at the Gwangju and Busan Biennials, World Festival of Black Arts and Culture (Dakar, Senegal), The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Whitney Museum of Art, MoMA P.S.1, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), The Mattress Factory and SculptureCenter (NY), among others. Olivier has created large-scale commissioned work for Monument Lab, Creative Time, and New York City and Philadelphia’s Percent for Art program. She received a 2020 Anonymous Was A Woman grant and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. She was awarded the 2018-19 Rome Prize and has been the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, the New York Foundation for the Arts Award, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, the William H. Johnson Prize, a Pew Fellowship, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award and a Creative Capital Foundation grant. Olivier is currently an associate professor of sculpture at Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University.

Jeffrey Gibson is an interdisciplinary artist based in Hudson, NY. His artworks make reference to various aesthetic and material histories rooted in Indigenous cultures of the Americas, and in modern and contemporary subcultures. Gibson's previous exhibitions include, Jeffrey Gibson, LIKE A HAMMER, organized by the Denver Art Museum, and This Is The Day, organized by The Wellin Museum. Other notable solo exhibitions include: When Fire Is Applied To A Stone It Cracks (2019) The Brooklyn Museum; The Anthropophagic Effect (2019) The New Museum, New York; Look How Far We've Come! (2017), Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee; Jeffrey Gibson: Speak to Me, (2017), Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center, Oklahoma City; and A Kind of Confession (2016), Savannah College of Art and Design Museum, Savannah. Select group exhibitions include: The 2019 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum, NYC, Aftereffect (2019), Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; Suffering from Realness (2019), Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adam, MA; and Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now (2018), Crystal Bridges, Bentonville, AR. Gibson has upcoming exhibitions at Mass MoCA, The Aspen Art Museum, and deCordova Sculpture Park.  Jeffrey Gibson sits on the Andy Warhol Foundation Board and the Participant INC Board, he is a Governor for The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Gibson is also a member of the faculty at Bard College.

Images (from left to right): Jeffrey Gibson, Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House, 2020 Socrates Sculpture Park. Photo Credit: Brian Barlow
Karyn Olivier, The Battle is Joined, 2018, Monument Lab, Philadelphia.