Press Release
Sheila Pree Bright, Protesting White Nationalists at the “White Power” March in Stone Mountain Park, 2016.
Monuments to the region’s charged past continue to be contested and removed from statehouse grounds, college campuses and the heart of the region’s downtowns. Meanwhile, galvanizing new markers speak to places and memories long forgotten by many, notably in Montgomery’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice and Charleston, South Carolina’s planned International African American Museum.
The Southbound symposium on Public Memory in the New South is concerned with what we remember and forget, and how we choose to frame our recollections to arrive at a collective sense of who we are in today’s South. It brings together exhibiting artists whose photographic projects document sites of memory ranging from the almost invisible to the forgotten, the ephemeral, the performed, and the, sometimes, hidden in plain sight. It also features scholars, educators, and activists who are challenging taken for granted memorialization of one vision for southern history, synonymous with the region itself for many here and further afield.
Public Memory in the New South advocates for more complex readings of the region to be central to public memory here.
The symposium’s purpose is to arrive at new understandings of how our collective memories ultimately reflect and inform how we experience this place and to take stock of ways in which our sense of ourselves is changing in the New South. The symposium kicks off on Friday evening with a keynote lecture by Southbound photographer Sheila Pree Bright, continues with a full day of sessions with Southbound photographers, historians, and scholars on Saturday, and ends with a keynote address on Saturday evening by Michael Arad.
FULL SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE Friday, January 11 + Saturday, January 12, 2019 Opening Keynote Address Friday, January 11, 7:00 PM Sheila Pree Bright #UNAPOLOGETIC College of Charleston Sottile Theatre 44 George St., Charleston, SC Free admission Saturday, January 12, 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM College of Charleston School of Sciences and Mathematics Auditorium 202 Calhoun St., Charleston, SC Free admission Dr. Adam H. Domby What Were They Supposed to Mean: Confederate Monuments in the Eyes of Their Builders 10:00 AM Dr. Thomas Brown Civil War Monuments and Photography 10:30 AM Jeanine Michna-Bales Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad 11:00 AM Jessica Ingram Visualizing Violence in the American South in Road Through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial 11:30 AM Lunch Break | 12:00 – 2:00 PM Dr. Thavolia Glymph Posing/Posed for the Camera: The Right to Look Back in Possession of One’s Self 2:00 PM Anderson Scott The Selective Memory of the South 2:30 PM Eliot Dudik Memory, Beauty, and Humor as Unifying Forces 3:00 PM Brenda Tindal K(NO)W Justice K(NO)W Peace: Reckoning & the Making of a Rapid Response Exhibit in a New South City 3:30 PM Dinner Break | 4:00 – 7:00 PM Closing Keynote Address Saturday, January 12, 7:00 PM Michael Arad Memory in the Public Realm: Making the Past Present College of Charleston School of Sciences and Mathematics Auditorium 202 Calhoun St., Charleston, SC Free admission
For further information, visit http://southboundproject.org