UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Felecia Davis, associate professor of architecture in the Stuckeman School of the College of Arts and Architecture at Pennsylvania State University, is contributing to a mobile art installation that helps commemorate the liberators of Black Americans as part of her involvement as co-founder of the Black Reconstruction Collective (BRC).
The installation, titled “Unmonument,” consists of a matte black industrial steel elevator and made its New York debut on August 8 at the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn. It will travel to Syracuse, New York, in October and Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, in December before moving on to Los Angeles and Atlanta in 2025.
In addition to Davis, BRC co-founders Olalekan Jeyifous, Amanda Williams, Mitch McEwen, Sekou Cooke, J. Yolande Daniels and Emanuel Admassu are also participating in the traveling exhibition, which not only honors trailblazers of black history – such as Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner and Toussaint Louverture – but also aims to challenge preconceived notions about what monuments should look like.
The BRC focused on the use of the humble industrial elevator because of its “inherently and intentionally unspectacular structure” and because it is “flexible, ignoble and movable.” The group described it as an infrastructure “to acknowledge the community that surrounds it, a beacon for celebration, gathering and coming together.”
The BRC’s multi-site approach is inspired by the surrealist ‘Exquisite Corpse’ game popular in the 1920s, in which each participant took turns writing or drawing on a piece of paper, folding it to conceal their contribution, and then passing it to the next player who made another contribution. Thus, ‘Unmonument’ is transformed at each installation site it comes into contact with, engaging visitors in a ‘call and response’ exercise.
“By adapting a refurbished maintenance elevator as a mobile site of intervention and then passing it on successively from one Black artist to the next – from place to place – the industrial object is transformed into a powerful yet accessible symbol of resilience and ingenuity,” said Jeyifous, who organized the installation in Brooklyn.
