Inaugural Sara Shallenberger Brown Symposium, Center for Cultural Landscapes

Charlottesville, VA — The Center for Cultural Landscapes is proud to announce the Inaugural Sara Shallenberger Brown Symposium, titled “Race and Public Space: Commemorative Practices in the American South,” which will take place March 24-25, 2017 at the University of Virginia School of Architecture.

“Race and Public Space: Commemorative Practices in the American South” investigates the intersections between scholarship and practice around race, memory, and commemoration. These issues are current in Charlottesville, with the creation of a Commission on Slavery at the University a few years ago that has been doing much to research, document, and commemorate the contributions and experiences of enslaved people at the university. This spring, the City of Charlottesville appointed a Blue Ribbon Commission to make recommendations about how to deal with the varied proposals for Jim Crow era statues in our public parks and squares. The symposium will feature Dell Upton as a keynote speaker on Friday, March 24 in partnership with the Virginia Book Festival. Upton, a Professor of Architectural History at the University of California Los Angeles, will discuss the research behind his 2015 book What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South.

There will be a workshop program on Saturday, March 25 with Mabel O. Wilson (Associate Professor of Architecture, Columbia University; Senior Fellow, Institute for Research in African American Studies; Co-Director, Global Africa Lab), John Mason(Associate Professor, UVA Corcoran Department of History; Vice-chair, Charlottesville Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces), and other speakers on contested sites of commemoration in the southeastern United States. The workshop program kicks off the UVA Institute for Environmental Negotiation’s initiative to develop guidance for communities and institutions seeking to tell a more complete racial history and change their narrative through the representation of their past history, identity, and values. The symposium concludes with a site visit to spaces featured in the work of Charlottesville’s recent Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces, including two highly contested statues to Generals Lee and Jackson.

This two-day event is sponsored by the UVA School of Architecture Sara Shallenberger Brown Cultural Landscapes & Sites Initiative. All events are free and open to the public, but registration is requested. For more information and the symposium schedule, visit the website.

Media Contact:
Carly Griffith
Program Director | Center for Cultural Landscapes
UVA School of Architecture
[email protected] | 434-924-7946