Public Art Now: Monuments & Memorials

Join Forecast Public Art‘s FORWARD series for a conversation between Public Art Now guest curator Anna Lisa Escobedo and artists Edra Soto and Charmaine Minniefield, exploring the relationship between public art and monuments and memorials, through an artist's lens. 

Featuring:

• Edra Soto, artist, educator, and co-director of outdoor project space The Franklin
• Charmaine Minniefield, artist-activist
• Moderated by Anna Lisa Escobedo, FORWARD7 Public Art Now guest curator, artist

This is part of our conversation series for our new digital publication, FORWARD 7: Monuments & Memorials, which was guest edited by New Monuments Task Force. Forecast Public Art offers this program free of cost, but donations are appreciated. Forecast Public Art is a nonprofit organization.

Read the FORWARD publications:

• FORWARD issue 6: Climate
• FORWARD issue 5: Housing
• FORWARD issue 4: Redefining Sustainable Design in Indian Country
• FORWARD issue 3: Community Safety
• FORWARD issue 2: Transportation
• FORWARD issue 1: Public Health

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BIOS

Anna Lisa Escobedo

Anna Lisa Escobedo is a multifaceted artist, encompassing roles as a visual artist, muralist, artivist, event producer, cultural worker, and networker. As a cofounder of the Calle 24 Latino Cultural District, she chaired the Cultural Arts and Assets Committee, leading a team of more than 20 active members. Anna Lisa's most fulfilling accomplishment lies in her direct engagement with the community and fellow artists. Having contributed to numerous art projects and collaborated with community-based organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area, Anna Lisa is deeply rooted in the local artistic landscape. Her overarching goals revolve around supporting artists and creators, with a keen focus on nurturing the vibrancy of the arts and culture ecosystem in the Bay Area.

Edra Soto

Edra Soto (b. 1971) is a Puerto Rican-born artist, educator, and co-director of outdoor project space The Franklin. Soto instigates meaningful, relevant, and often difficult conversations surrounding socioeconomic and cultural oppression, erasure of history, and loss of cultural knowledge. Having grown up in Puerto Rico, and now immersed in her Chicago community, the artist has evolved to raise questions through her work about constructed social orders, diasporic identity, and the legacy of colonialism.

Soto has presented recent solo exhibitions at Comfort Station, Chicago, IL (2024); Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL (2023); Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA (2023); Abrons Art Center, New York, NY (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2018); Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA (2017); The Arts Club of Chicago, IL (2017). Her work has been featured in notable recent group exhibitions including Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA (2024); Entre Horizontes, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL (2023); no existe un mundo poshuracán, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2022); and Estamos Bien, La Trienal 20/21, El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY (2021).

She has been awarded the Joyce Award, 3Arts Next Level 3Arts, Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant; Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award; and US LatinX Art Forum Fellowship; and MacArthur Foundation International Connections Fund. Soto has received numerous public commissions, for Graft for Public Art Fund at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park (2024); Noor Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (2024); Now & There, Central Wharf Park, Boston, MA (2023); the Chicago Architecture Biennial, IL (2023); and Millenium Park in Chicago, IL (2019). Her work is in the collection of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Puerto Rico; and Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago.

Charmaine Minnifield

The work of artist-activist Charmaine Minniefield preserves Black narratives as a radical act of social justice. Firmly rooted in womanist social theory and ancestral veneration, her work draws from indigenous traditions as seen throughout Africa and the Diaspora, to explore African and African-American history, memory and ritual as an intentional push back against erasure. Her creative practice is community-based as her research and resulting bodies of work often draw from physical archives as she excavates the stories of African-American women-led resistance and spirituality and power.

Minniefield’s recent public works which include projection mapping and site-specific installation, insight dialogue around race, class and power. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, she incorporates other art forms to virtually bridge the past to the present. Recent projects include the mounting of "Remembrance as Resistance" during the 2018 Symposium on Race and Reconciliation presented by her alma mater, Agnes Scott College, which opened with the removal of two Confederate monuments from campus grounds and closed with the work as backdrop for the closing talk by Alice Walker on art and activism.

Minniefield’s work is featured in a number of public and private collections, and as a muralist, her walls can be seen throughout the City of Atlanta and beyond. She was honored by Mercedes Benz as a part of their Greatness Lives Here campaign. She and her recent mural in Brooklyn, depicting women who shaped the future, is featured in the 2020 US Census commercial. Minniefield currently serves as the Stuart A. Rose Library artist-in-residence at Emory through a collaboration with Flux Projects.

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Anna Lisa Escobedo photo by Alexa Treviño.

Edra Soto photo by Steph Murray.

Charmaine Minniefield photo by Jery Siegal.

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This event is hosted by Forecast Public Art.

Forecast Public Art is a non-profit arts organization founded in 1978 by and for artists working in public space. Forecast activates, inspires, and advocates for public art that advances justice, health, and human dignity.

www.forecastpublicart.org

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