Grassroots Memorials

Grassroots Memorials
Author: Peter Jan Margry
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2011-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0857451901

Grassroots memorials have become major areas of focus during times of trauma, danger, and social unrest. These improvised memorial assemblages continue to display new and more dynamic ways of representing collective and individual identities and in doing so reveal the steps that shape the national memories of those who struggle to come to terms with traumatic loss. This volume focuses on the hybrid quality of these temporary memorials as both monuments of mourning and as focal points for protest and expression of discontent. The broad range of case studies in this volume include anti-mafia shrines, Theo van Gogh’s memorial, September 11th memorials, March 11th shrines in Madrid, and Carlo Giuliani memorials in Genoa.

Memorials as Spaces of Engagement

Memorials as Spaces of Engagement
Author: Quentin Stevens
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2015-08-11
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317600037

Memorials are more diverse in design and subject matter than ever before. No longer limited to statues of heroes placed high on pedestals, contemporary memorials engage visitors in new, often surprising ways, contributing to the liveliness of public space. In Memorials as Spaces of Engagement Quentin Stevens and Karen A. Franck explore how changes in memorial design and use have helped forge closer, richer relationships between commemorative sites and their visitors. The authors combine first hand analysis of key examples with material drawn from existing scholarship. Examples from the US, Canada, Australia and Europe include official, formally designed memorials and informal ones, those created by the public without official sanction. Memorials as Spaces of Engagement discusses important issues for the design, management and planning of memorials and public space in general. The book is organized around three topics: how the physical design of memorial objects and spaces has evolved since the 19th century; how people experience and understand memorials through the activities of commemorating, occupying and interpreting; and the issues memorials raise for management and planning. Memorials as Spaces of Engagement will be of interest to architects, landscape architects and artists; historians of art, architecture and culture; urban sociologists and geographers; planners, policymakers and memorial sponsors; and all those concerned with the design and use of public space.

Boundaries

Boundaries
Author: Maya Lin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2016-04-26
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1501146564

Renowned artist and architect Maya Lin's visual and verbal sketchbook—a unique view into her artwork and philosophy. Walking through this parklike area, the memorial appears as a rift in the earth -- a long, polished black stone wall, emerging from and receding into the earth. Approaching the memorial, the ground slopes gently downward, and the low walls emerging on either side, growing out of the earth, extend and converge at a point below and ahead. Walking into the grassy site contained by the walls of this memorial, we can barely make out the carved names upon the memorial's walls. These names, seemingly infinite in number, convey the sense of overwhelming numbers, while unifying these individuals into a whole.... So begins the competition entry submitted in 1981 by a Yale undergraduate for the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. -- subsequently called "as moving and awesome and popular a piece of memorial architecture as exists anywhere in the world." Its creator, Maya Lin, has been nothing less than world famous ever since. From the explicitly political to the un-ashamedly literary to the completely abstract, her simple and powerful sculpture -- the Rockefeller Foundation sculpture, the Southern Poverty Law Center Civil Rights Memorial, the Yale Women's Table, Wave Field -- her architecture, including The Museum for African Art and the Norton residence, and her protean design talents have defined her as one of the most gifted creative geniuses of the age. Boundaries is her first book: an eloquent visual/verbal sketchbook produced with the same inspiration and attention to detail as any of her other artworks. Like her environmental sculptures, it is a site, but one which exists at a remove so that it may comment on the personal and artistic elements that make up those works. In it, sketches, photographs, workbook entries, and original designs are held together by a deeply personal text. Boundaries is a powerful literary and visual statement by "a leading public artist" (Holland Carter). It is itself a unique work of art.

Beyond Grief

Beyond Grief
Author: Cynthia Mills
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2014-09-23
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1935623389

Beyond Grief explores high-style funerary sculptures and their functions during the turn of the twentieth century. Many scholars have overlooked these monuments, viewing them as mere oddities, a part of an individual artist's oeuvre, a detail of a patron's biography, or local civic cemetery history. This volume considers them in terms of their wider context and shifting use as objects of consolation, power, and multisensory mystery and wonder. Art historian Cynthia Mills traces the stories of four families who memorialized their losses through sculpture. Henry Brooks Adams commissioned perhaps the most famous American cemetery monument of all, the Adams Memorial in Washington, D.C. The bronze figure was designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who became the nation’s foremost sculptor. Another innovative bronze monument featured the Milmore brothers, who had worked together as sculptors in the Boston area. Artist Frank Duveneck composed a recumbent portrait of his wife following her early death in Paris; in Rome, the aging William Wetmore Story made an angel of grief his last work as a symbol of his sheer desolation after his wife’s death. Through these incredible monuments Mills explores questions like: Why did new forms--many of them now produced in bronze rather than stone and placed in architectural settings--arise just at this time, and how did they mesh or clash with the sensibilities of their era? Why was there a gap between the intention of these elite patrons and artists, whose lives were often intertwined in a closed circle, and the way some public audiences received them through the filter of the mass media? Beyond Grief traces the monuments' creation, influence, and reception in the hope that they will help us to understand the larger story: how survivors used cemetery memorials as a vehicle to mourn and remember, and how their meaning changed over time.

Memorials and Monuments

Memorials and Monuments
Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. Subcommittee on Public Lands, Reserved Water, and Resource Conservation
Publisher:
Total Pages: 384
Release: 1986
Genre: Memorials
ISBN:

Memory and Memorials

Memory and Memorials
Author: William Kidd
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2017-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351918281

The twentieth century, perhaps more than any other, was shaped by war and conflict. In particular, the two world wars have had a profound influence on the development of world history, especially in western Europe. The aim of Memory and Memorials, however, is not to seek the effects war has had on the twentieth century, but rather to explore how societies chose to remember wars and manipulate this memory for political and cultural purposes. Tackling issues of actual memory, distorted memory and reconstructions of the past, the use and nature of the war memorial, and the reflection of all these points in selected art, literature and film, the main theme of Memory and Memorials is to stress both continuity and change in memory and memorial.

The Everyday Life of Memorials

The Everyday Life of Memorials
Author: Andrew M. Shanken
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2022-10-04
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1942130732

A timely study, erudite and exciting, about the ordinary—and oftentimes unseen—lives of memorials Memorials are commonly studied as part of the commemorative infrastructure of modern society. Just as often, they are understood as sites of political contestation, where people battle over the meaning of events. But most of the time, they are neither. Instead, they take their rest as ordinary objects, part of the street furniture of urban life. Most memorials are “turned on” only on special days, such as Memorial Day, or at heated moments, as in August 2017, when the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville was overtaken by a political maelstrom. The rest of the time they are turned off. This book is about the everyday life of memorials. It explores their relationship to the pulses of daily life, their meaning within this quotidian context, and their place within the development of modern cities. Through Andrew Shanken’s close historical readings of memorials, both well-known and obscure, two distinct strands of scholarship are thus brought together: the study of the everyday and memory studies. From the introduction of modern memorials in the wake of the French Revolution through the recent destruction of Confederate monuments, memorials have oscillated between the everyday and the “not-everyday.” In fact, memorials have been implicated in the very structure of these categories. The Everyday Life of Memorials explores how memorials end up where they are, grow invisible, fight with traffic, get moved, are assembled into memorial zones, and are drawn anew into commemorations and political maelstroms that their original sponsors never could have imagined. Finally, exploring how people behave at memorials and what memorials ask of people reveals just how strange the commemorative infrastructure of modernity is.

Patriotic Monuments & Memorials

Patriotic Monuments & Memorials
Author: Melissa Hart
Publisher: Teacher Created Resources
Total Pages: 50
Release: 2002
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0743935985

Describes America's most famous and lesser known monuments and memorials, as well as other landmarks, national parks, and preserves.

Mortuary Monuments and Burial Grounds of the Historic Period

Mortuary Monuments and Burial Grounds of the Historic Period
Author: Harold Mytum
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780306480768

This practical volume focuses on the study of historic burial ground monuments but also covers some below ground archaeology, as some projects will involve the study of both. It will be an incomparable source for academic archaeologists, cultural resource and heritage management archaeologists, government heritage agencies, and upper-level undergraduate and graduate students of archaeology focused on the historic or post-medieval period, as well as forensic researchers and anthropologists.