POETRY, PUBLIC ART, AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY
The first of three public conversations at The Embrace as part of Un-monument | De-monument | Re-monument: Transforming Boston.
Join the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture and The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University for a series of free public discussions on democracy and justice. The inaugural event will take place on Wednesday, July 31, 2024, at 5:30 p.m. at The Embrace (139 Tremont Street, Boston, MA).
This discussion, hosted by Professor Brandon Terry and featuring Professor Joshua Bennett and Professor Imani Perry, will center around “Poetry, Public Art, and the Politics of Memory.”
Poetry, especially since the great age of epic poetry, has been a profoundly important technology of communal memory and stories of peoplehood all around the globe. Our first event looks to this legacy and its present-day importance with Joshua Bennett, one of the country’s most celebrated poet-scholars, and Imani Perry, one of our nation’s most prominent public intellectuals, as they engage in a public conversation about the art and politics of memory.
Backdropped by the Embrace, Boston’s most talked-about work of public art in decades, these two extraordinary thinkers will reflect on hard questions about who and what we remember, the form and function of civic memory, and the ways that art may be able to facilitate a more inclusive and insightful practice of imagination.
Take part in the conversation as we learn about the nature of collective and civic memories and the different forms that human beings have experimented with to pass them down through generations.