Monuments + Memorials

Reframing Public History and Collective Memory Through Artist-Led Monuments and Memorials

Forecast is a leader in reshaping the commemorative landscape. We engage in artist-led, community-driven projects that elevate untold and suppressed stories. We help communities tell inclusive, complex stories of place. Through partnerships with artists, tribal nations, cities, and grassroots organizations, Forecast helps create new monuments and memorials that reflect diverse histories and honor silenced voices. Recent initiatives like Midwest Memory and our Monuments issue of FORWARD exemplify our growing commitment to fostering a more inclusive understanding of history and public memory.

Our team offers technical assistance, resources, cohort opportunities and healing-focused facilitation to help rural communities address the complexities of public memory. By working with local governments and cross-sector collaborations, we ensure that these commemorative efforts lead to meaningful and lasting change.

New Program

a text graphic for the Midwest Memory Grants for Rural Communities initiative from Forecast Public Art, Mellon Foundation, Justice + Joy and The Outside, with logos for all four partners

Midwest Memory Grant Opportunity

In response to the need for more inclusive monuments in the rural Midwest, Forecast launched Midwest Memory. This grant is supporting Midwest communities in creating, recontextualizing, and preserving monuments and memorials that honor important untold local histories and stories.

Eight communities were selected to receive funding and support for existing monument or memorial projects. This opportunity aims to help these communities take their projects to the next level by providing:

Funding for the production of new monuments or memorials.
Training and technical assistance.
Connections with other grantees for shared learning.

The goal is to foster cross-sector collaboration in rural communities, enriching their efforts to tell more complete and accurate stories about the Midwest’s diverse and often-overlooked histories.

Through this grant, Forecast is committed to helping rural communities in the Midwest reclaim their stories, elevate marginalized histories, and create monuments that reflect a fuller, more inclusive understanding of our shared past.

Midwest Memory

Advancing Policy for Monuments + Memorials

on a report cover titled San Francisco Monuments and Memorials Advisory Committee Final Report and dated May 2023, a bustling city street is lit at night at a paved brick corner featuring Lotta's Fountain, a bronze-painted cast-iron fountain with lion's head spigots, with a blurry trolley speeding past and background buildings glowing from lit windows

San Francisco Monuments & Memorials Advisory Committee Final Report

San Francisco, CA. Population 809,000

In 2020, following the national reckoning with racism and police brutality sparked by George Floyd’s killing, communities across the U.S. began reassessing their public art collections, especially monuments and memorials that upheld racial injustice or colonial histories. San Francisco, with one of the longest-standing public art programs in the country, experienced this shift when demonstrators removed three statues from Golden Gate Park, prompting city leaders to respond.

Mayor London Breed tasked the City’s Monuments and Memorials Advisory Committee (MMAC) with reviewing its collection “from a stance of racial equity.” To guide this process, the city turned to Forecast for its expertise in listening to diverse voices, managing stakeholder groups, and making policy recommendations based on community input. Forecast’s work included:

Facilitating community and stakeholder sessions
Acknowledging public harm caused by certain monuments
Providing recommendations for policy and guidelines changes

Led by Mary Chou, Director of Public Art and Collections for the San Francisco Arts Commission, with Allison Cummings and Sandra Panopio managing the project, the initiative was supported by the Mellon Foundation’s The Monuments Project. Through community input, “nuanced conversations looking at history from different points of view” took place, said Chou. The process raised essential questions: “Do we tear down all of the offensive monuments and memorials? What do we need to remember? How much do we contextualize?”

Forecast’s final deliverables included updated policies and an action plan for analyzing San Francisco’s monuments and memorials case by case. The project helped elevate San Francisco’s role as a national leader in rethinking monuments and memorials.

Our process + MMAC final report

Expanding the Commemorative Landscape

Forecast bridges the gap between grassroots commemorative efforts and government systems, helping communities overcome obstacles and achieve their vision for inclusive monuments. By providing technical support, resources, and relationship-building expertise, we help communities create spaces that reflect a fuller, more just history.

Since 2010, Forecast has worked closely with cities, communities, and historians, and families to facilitate a Gordon Parks Memorial, Cesar Chavez Memorial, Paul and Sheila Wellstone Memorial and more recently designed and facilitated a more inclusive approach to the Larry Cohen Memorial Project in St. Paul, Minnesota. Recent examples include:

Nicky Buck (left), an enrolled Tribal member of Prairie Island, has been essential in building the relationship between Red Wing and Prairie Island.

three people sit around a table in a government meeting room. One of them is wearing a traditional ribbon skirt

He Mni Can Commemorative Project

Red Wing, MN. Population 16,700

From 2019-2022 Forecast worked with the city of Red Wing and the Prairie Island Indian Community. Nicky Buck, an enrolled Tribal member of Prairie Island, was an essential partner in building the relationship between Red Wing and Prairie Island. With Buck’s help, trails over burial grounds at He Mni Can, the Mdewakanton Dakota name for what’s left of a massive promontory between the Mississippi River and Red Wing, have been realigned. Bay Point Park, where Chief Red Wing was buried and then later exhumed, will soon include a commemorative public art project.

Our work in Red Wing

a monochrome image of a group of smartly dressed Black people standing in front of a wooden structure

Building Remembrance for Reconciliation

Hastings, MN. Population 21,000

Since 2019, Forecast has been supporting the storytelling journey of an interfaith community collaborative. These family and community leaders have been working for over four years to memorialize the story of Black settlers who built a thriving community in the face of loss and racial terror. Building Remembrance for Reconciliation is working to tell the story of Brown’s Chapel in Hastings, and secure funding for a community memorial commemorating Hastings’ early African Methodist Episcopal Church and its congregation. The memorial dedicated to Brown’s Chapel will help honor and remember the contributions of Hastings early Black settlers while addressing reconciliation in our community.

FORWARD Issue 7: Monuments + Memorials

The seventh edition of our FORWARD series, created in collaboration with the New Monuments Task Force (NMTF), delves into how artists are challenging traditional power structures in today’s shifting commemorative landscape. The issue features projects that explore new interpretations of history, public participation, and aesthetic innovation, with a focus on women, nonbinary, and trans artists.

Guest-edited by Claire Flanegin of NMTF, the issue includes an essay by NMTF founder Cheyenne Concepcion on the destruction of Confederate monuments, and Anna Lisa Escobedo curates five impactful public artworks that engage history and collective memory. The issue also offers a practical Toolkit for those working in monument- and memorial-related fields and includes a Dream Job description by artist Sen Mendez, imagining the role of a Cultural Vibe Rizzard.

FORWARD Issue 7

Practical + Tactical

WHO ARE THESE TRAININGS FOR?

Forecast customizes trainings and workshops for artists, creatives, culture bearers and producers, community leaders, and affiliated professionals. This includes Public Art Commissions, Arts and Culture Commissions, State Arts Councils, City Council Members, Arts Selection Committees, Arts Administrators, and anyone who works with artists and art in public space. Scroll down to find a sample list of workshop clients.

UNIQUE + CUSTOMIZABLE

We provide key knowledge about managing public art projects, facilitate sessions to help take ideas from formation to implementation, and work with community members to envision creative places and collaborate with artists.

Our staff specialize in creating unique, one of a kind learning opportunities and facilitate discussions that directly meet the needs of participants. We can also adapt and combine any of the experiences listed here to suit the needs of you and your community. Workshops or breakout sessions may be developed to address local challenges, build skills, facilitate collaboration and co-creation, or develop new plans. Our Team is adept in customizing presentations, workshops, and trainings based on a topic of interest to you and your community.

Hire Forecast to bring our expertise to your commemorative project in any location across the US.

Don’t see what you are looking for listed here? We can design and adapt action plans for you.

Other services

PLANNING + ENGAGEMENT | ARTIST SELECTION

CONTACT US

2380 Wycliff Street
SUITE 200
ST. PAUL, MN 55114

(651) 641-1128

INFO@FORECAST
PUBLICART.ORG