Trust for the National Mall Reveals Exhibition, Six Participating Artists for Beyond Granite Initiative on the National Mall
The Trust for the National Mall, joined by Monument Lab, announces the six contemporary artists invited to create monumental scale artworks for the inaugural exhibition of Beyond Granite, a new commemorative program launching on the National Mall and around Washington, D.C. in 2023.
Beyond Granite is generously supported by the Mellon Foundation and is presented by the Trust for the National Mall in partnership with the National Capital Planning Commission and the National Park Service. Pulling Together will be curated by Dr. Paul Farber and Dr. Salamishah Tillet for Monument Lab, with public outreach by Justice & Sustainability Associates.
The Beyond Granite pilot initiative will create space to commemorate history, experiences, and stories not currently represented in the commemorative landscape in the Nation’s Capital. Its inaugural presentation, Pulling Together, is curated by Monument Lab and will feature works from leading contemporary artists that respond to a central curatorial question: What stories remain untold on the National Mall?
Beyond Granite builds out platforms for artist-led civic engagement, historical interpretation, and storytelling as a means for advancing what it means to imagine, build, live, and grow with monuments in Washington, D.C., and beyond.
"The National Mall is a commemorative canvas that offers a constant, but evolving, landscape upon which we tell the American story,” said Catherine Townsend President & CEO of the Trust for the National Mall. "The Trust is honored to announce the artists who will help bring Beyond Granite and these important stories to life on the National Mall," she added.
The artists invited for the inaugural exhibition are:
Derrick Adams (Brooklyn, N.Y.) – A Brooklyn-based artist whose work spans painting, collage, sculpture, performance, video, and sound. His oeuvre probes how identity and personal narrative intersect with American iconography, art history, urban culture, and the Black experience.
Tiffany Chung (Houston, Tex.) – A globally noted artist for her cartographic drawings and embroideries, paintings, sculptures, photographs, and videos that examine conflict, geopolitical partitioning, spatial transformation, environmental crisis, and forced migration in relation to history and cultural memory.
Ashon Crawley (Charlottesville, Va.) – A writer, artist, and teacher, exploring the intersection of performance, blackness, queerness, and spirituality. He moves in and out of multiple genres to sound out a critique of the normative world, to sound out the possibility for alternatives.
Vanessa German (Pittsburgh, Pa.) – A Black queer artist making sculpture, community ritual, love joints, immersive installation, and performance that take up space in the healing realms of intimacy, tenderness, social healing, and human wholeness as original and enduring human technologies.
Paul Ramírez Jonas (Brooklyn, N.Y.) – A practicing artist and educator with particular focus on interdisciplinary and socially engaged art, print, media, public art, and sculpture.
Wendy Red Star (Portland, Ore.) – An artist raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, her work is informed both by her cultural heritage and her engagement with many forms of creative expression, including photography, sculpture, video, fiber arts, and performance.
“These artists represent a set of vibrant and essential lived experiences,” said Dr. Salamishah Tillet, Pulitzer Prize winning professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University - Newark and the co-curator of Pulling Together. “We are thrilled to have the opportunity to collaborate with them — and we can’t wait for their brilliance to bring vital new meaning to our nation’s most iconic commemorative landscape.”
“It’s the rarest of privileges to join my visionary fellow artists for this project,” said artist Derrick Adams. “I understand the magnitude of Beyond Granite’s purpose, I believe deeply in its potential, and I am proud to offer my talents to such a wonderful project.”