Historical landmarks and monuments are symbols of myths, pride, dominance, war, terror, and cultural identity. This panel examines diverse narratives and embodied stories of identity in relation to space, geography, museums, and religious landscapes. Examining spatial contestation of American collective memory and history as a disruption of narratives of power, the Black religious performance of resistance in Carrie Mae Weems’ Roaming and Sea Island Series in dialogue with Tracey E. Hucks and Dianne M. Stuart, and the recently expanded Lilly Endowment Inc.’s Religion and Cultural Initiative concerning Latinx Living Religion, Jain and Sikh Engaging Lived Religion demonstrate how changes in cultural and religious landmarks and monuments foster shifts in cultural narratives and religious landscapes. These shifts present new and liberative understandings of diversity in religious and cultural art and architectural landscapes.
Through an exploration that brings Weems’s *Roaming* into conversation with her earlier series of photographs, entitled *Sea Island Series* (1992), this paper will take up the critical task put forth by Tracey Hucks and Dianne Stewart in their groundbreaking essay, “Africana Religious Studies.” By reading both series, I contend that Weems uses her body in her work to interrogate and challenge logics of space, race, power, domination, and religion as they are evoked through architectural edifices and landscapes–while also offering a poietic alternative in line with what Hucks and Stewart calls “legitimate locales for generative religious reflection.”
Expanding on the Lilly Endowment Inc.’s Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative, which was “designed to foster greater public understanding about religion and lift up the contributions that people of all faiths and diverse religious communities make to our greater civic well-being,” two religion curators will outline the religion curatorial process. Natalie Amador Solis, Latinx Curatorial Assistant, will highlight the 2023 Smithsonian Folklife Festival program, *Living Religion: Creative Encounters in the U.S.*. Syona Puliady, Assistant Curator, will overview the Fowler Museum’s *Engaging Lived Religion in the 21st Century* program exhibitions, *Visualizing Devotion: Jain Embroidered Shrine Hangings* (2022-2023) and the forthcoming show on contemporary and modern Sikh art. In this co-authored paper, Natalie and Syona will share their curatorial vision on the changing religious landscapes of museums.
My proposed paper attends to these spatial contestations of American collective memory and public history, and their role in shaping and transforming how we understand and approach practices of memorialization. These monuments have acted as a way to spatially and symbolically enact the power of the white American sacred and dominate the landscape of American history, memory, and identity. In refusal of this claim to immutability, I argue we are experiencing a shift in how public history is spatially constructed, from narrative claims of discursive and structural permanence – through stone, monuments, and state records – to narration which embraces more ephemeral, creative, and composite ways of knowing, being, and remembering – through soil, protest art, detritus, and defacement.