My research practice explores themes of place-based meaning making, memory, public space, community, and radical care. I contend that when art encroaches on public space it enters into a dynamic and unpredictable exchange with the built environment and everyday life. My case studies include exhibitions, performances, monuments, murals, sculpture, and community engaged projects. Through these instances, I reveal how cultural practices have the capacity to transform ordinary sites into spaces of collective memory and resistance. At the same time, I seek to unravel the ways that the sites themselves inform and lend meaning to artistic practice.
Place, Intimacy, and Radical Care: On the Indexicality of Stephen Hayes’ "Boundless"
Commissioned by the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, NC, Stephen Hayes’ Boundless (2021) stands in a lush, wooded area. The life-size bronze depicts eleven United States Colored Troops (USCT) marching at ground level, the native long leaf pine needles gathering at their feet. Boundless is located on the site of the 1865 Battle of Forks Road, a confrontation that led to the Union’s victory in the Civil War. Erected in 2021, this memorial honors the USCT while also explicitly celebrating Black history in a city marked by extreme racial violence and trauma. In 1898, Wilmington witnessed a white supremacist coup d’état and massacre in which Black citizens were threatened, killed, and forced to flee. This local history complicates the commemorative role of Boundless. While it is ostensibly a Civil War memorial, the project also participates in ongoing efforts to address a complex past that remains unresolved. This paper explores the site-specificity that underpins Boundless, and argues that the sculpture operates on two levels of indexicality: that of location and the collaborative, intimate process of casting undertaken by the artist. Drawing on theories of haunting and radical care, I posit that Boundless exemplifies a commemorative and restorative tendency in contemporary public art.
Article in preparation.
Unearthing Site: Locational Dissonance and the Latent Possibilities of Wilmington’s 1898 Memorial
The 1898 Memorial in Wilmington, North Carolina commemorates a white supremacist coup and massacre of Black citizens, one of the most tragic chapters of the city’s history. In the decades that followed, this episode of racial terror was obscured from the historical narrative until the 1990s when commemorative efforts began in earnest. This article explores the palimpsestic site specificity of the 1898 Memorial, arguing that despite its locational dissonance, the monument is a project of latent possibilities that has the capacity to stimulate new dialogues and community connections. My analysis shows that the 1898 Memorial is at once incongruous with its location, while also being transformative, recasting an ordinary place into a site that encompasses a multifaceted network of histories and temporal moments.
This article appears in History & Memory Volume 37, No. 2,Fall/Winter 2025. https://muse-jhu-edu.liblink.uncw.edu/article/969491
For Ukraine, with Love: Culture, Care, and Collaboration at the Sunflower Solidarity Center
The Sunflower Solidarity Center was founded in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Since then they have operated under the umbrella of the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art and their activity has ranged from providing direct humanitarian aid, to hosting language classes, arts workshops, lectures, and serving as a cultural incubator of artistic resistance. Rejecting traditional conceptions of the so-called “refugee,” this group instead articulates a dynamic vision of the displaced subject — one that is an active and creative agent fueled by, and invested in, a collaborative ethos. For Sunflower Solidarity the lines between aid, collaboration, and culture are continuously blurring. Thus, their practice embodies a radical aesthetics of care, opening up questions about the nature of this kind of cultural work. After all, how does one begin to understand a sandwich assembly line as an embodiment of culture? What is the role of art and culture in the context of war and displacement? And what does it mean for such an aesthetic undertaking to emerge in Warsaw; a city shaped by occupation, genocide, and resistance? Ultimately, this chapter argues that care, collaboration, and hospitality underpin Sunflower Solidarity’s work, foregrounding the potential power of the displaced subject and reformulating their status as an active agent and cultural producer. Sunflower Solidarity expands our conception of cultural practice through their implementation of a politics and aesthetics of care. This in turn asserts the vital importance of culture in the broader context of aid and resistance, underscoring the emancipatory possibilities of cultural practice in crisis.
This article has been accepted to Refugees Across the Arts: Global Cultures of Displacement in the 21st Century, Edited by Katie Brown & Peter Sloane, Forthcoming from Liverpool University Press.
Power, Play, and the Everyday: Akademia Ruchu's Cold War Street Performances
Founded in 1973, Akademia Ruchu (A.R.) was a Warsaw-based performance collective whose early work involved explorations of the body in motion. By 1975 the group had begun creating interventions in public spaces, transforming unsuspecting pedestrians into spectators and sometimes participants. Despite the simplicity of A.R.'s ephemeral performances, these actions were rich with political overtones. The group’s Warsaw interventions questioned and ridiculed the absurdities of life under communism at a time when public space was highly policed by the state. Pieces like Happy Day (1976), Red and White (1978) and Stumble (1977) used a methodology of play to interrupt the tedium of the everyday and re-imagine reality. This article examines the sites of these performances to demonstrate how conditions in Warsaw during the 1970s were instrumental in lending meaning to these works. By coopting the public spaces of Warsaw, A.R. undermined the official narrative of the capital’s ties to the government and used their chosen locations to amplify their own playful and critical messages. Their performances relied on what I call a practice of play that covertly mounted a critique of the status quo. For communist-era Poland, this was a remarkable reclamation of freedom and an affirmation of survival and resistance.
This article was published in Public Art Dialogue in May 2022. You can find the full text here.
Intervention, Memory, and Community: Public Art and Architecture in Warsaw from 1970-2019
Can a city’s built-environment and public art inspire contribute to societal change? How can cultural production help us make sense of the past? To what extent can art and architecture foster community? Can they function as a form of resistance? My book project explores these questions with sensitivity to the marks, erasures, and consequences of history in this post-socialist city. In four chapters, I consider the political, social, and cultural transformations of the last five decades in Warsaw, tracking how such changes are represented, omitted, and problematized in the urban landscape. No stranger to crisis, Poland’s capital has a longstanding history of existing at the edge of a precipice. Almost entirely destroyed during World War II, over the last fifty years Warsaw has witnessed a transition from a socialist system to one that is democratic, capitalist, and bound to very different notions of public space, privatization, and individual freedom. Beginning with the 1970s, I discuss a series of exhibitions, performances, monuments, and public art initiatives in relation to the broader context of Warsaw’s evolution from state socialism, to EU membership, and into the current phase of increasing and alarming xenophobic nationalism. My case studies illuminate the ways in which these art and design initiatives have the potential to activate an engagement with the urban landscape, raise questions about history and memory, and produce the conditions that allow for the building of community. At its core, this project explores how art and architecture can both promote and hinder the creation of a more inclusive and egalitarian city.
Book Project - Manuscript in Preparation
