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What to Do with a Smashed Statue from Antiquity and Today

ONLINE ONLY

This is a past event

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Hundreds of public statues have been toppled in recent years, with many more to come. What happens to these monuments next? Their afterlives can bring communities together – or drive them further apart. Art historians Erin Thompson, whose recent book examines controversies over American monuments, and Patricia Eunji Kim of New York University and Monument Lab discuss how the destruction and transformation of statues in ancient times can inspire creative responses to controversial monuments today.

Speakers
Erin L. Thompson is America’s only professor of art crime. She studies topics including art forgery, the theft of sacred art, and digital reproductions of cultural heritage. Her book Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments (Norton, 2022) traces the turbulent history and abundant ironies of monuments, and covers topics such as the history of protests against monuments and the legal barriers to the removal of controversial public art. She holds a Ph.D. in ancient Greek, Roman, and ancient Near Eastern art history from Columbia University, New York.

Patricia Eunji Kim PhD (she/her) is assistant professor/faculty fellow at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and associate director of public engagement at Monument Lab. Kim’s research, teaching, and curatorial projects use art historical methods to explore questions of gender, race, power, and memory in antiquity and in the present. She is writing the first-book length study on the visual and material culture of Hellenistic queenship from the fourth to second centuries B.C.E. and curating an exhibition on the same subject.