PAD was founded on the premise that dialogue is the essential element in all effective public art endeavors. For those interested in learning more about public art in conversation with the Black Lives Matter movement, we would like to recommend the following publications and PAD conference panel:
- La Tanya S. Autry, "Fugitive Possibilities: The Black Image At Large," PAD Newsletter, Fall 2016
- Sarah Beetham, “From Spray Cans to Minivans: Contesting the Legacy of Confederate Soldier Monuments in the Era of “Black Lives Matter,” Public Art Dialogue 6.1 (Spring 2016) in the issue “The Dilemma of Public Art’s Permanence”
- Arielle Julia Brown, “Listening to the Land/Playing off the Crowd: Black Public Performance Interventions in Artmaking and Placemaking,” Public Art Dialogue 7.2 (Fall 2017)
- “Public Art in the Era of Black Lives Matter,” PAD-sponsored CAA 2017 panel co-chaired by La Tanya S. Autry and Jennifer Wingate (YouTube)
In addition, Taylor & Francis has kindly made Public Art Dialogue Vol. 8.2, "Public Art as Political Action" (Winter 2018) free access through the rest of 2020. This issue includes Evie Terrono’s article “Performance, Political Discourse, and the Problematics of the Confederate Flag in Contemporary Art,” and Baltimore photographer Chris Metzger's Whoever Died from a Rough Ride?, a project that responds to the April 2015 in-custody death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man arrested by the Baltimore Police Department.
We would like to point to the solidarity statement CAA issued on June 5. As an Affiliated Society of CAA, we wholly support their initiative.
Finally, for the duration of the protests ignited by George Floyd's May 25 murder in Minneapolis, we will be using the PAD Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook accounts to share public art responses to the ongoing crisis of institutional and structural racism, and to promote the visual discourse that has developed. We invite you to follow these accounts online, if you have not done so already, and to tag Public Art Dialogue in all posts you see that should be counted among these works.