Memorial Culture in Public Art
Organization: Public Humanities
Public Humanities invites submissions for the upcoming themed issue Memorial Culture in Public Art, which will be guest edited by Rebecca Friedman and Alex Lichenstein.
The deadline for submissions is October 15, 2026.
Description
Memorial Culture in Public Art invites submissions that examine the role that art of all kinds – ephemeral public art installations, performances, sculptures, murals, or permanent state-issued monuments – can play in the public’s understanding of the past, present, and future. We ask contributors from a multitude of disciplines and from multiple global perspectives to consider how public arts can serve as collective mnemonic inspiration.
We invite contributions from academics, public scholars, memory activists, and artists and creatives of all kinds, to explore the role of public art as a form of resistance as it contributes to collective, place-based memory in the face of forces from political ideology and spiritual expression to gentrification and cultural obliteration. Submissions can consist of academic articles, artistic interventions, interviews, dialogues, or other forms. Regardless of format or genre, contributors should engage with questions that include:
How have regimes around the globe and across time, whether autocratic or democratic, created—or destroyed--narrative sites of collective memory in public spaces?
How can individuals and groups intervene to transform nationalistic, colonial, or dominant narratives through their re-telling and/or transformation of art in public spaces?
How can – and have in the past – individuals, groups, communities, neighborhoods, and even nations use(d) art, performance, and display to resist the power of erasure and cultural amnesia?
How can public art help usher in a more equitable future based on reconstituting social memory?
The current moment witnesses many struggles over memory, as emergent constituencies demand more accountability from public memorial culture while myriad regimes seek to obliterate it. This issue of Public Humanities seeks fresh and innovative approaches across time and spaceto consider these and other conundrums of memory activism and commemorative public art. The editors are especially interested in contributions from and/or about the Global South and the postcolonial world. By engaging the past through its present material and aesthetic manifestations, this issue of Public Humanities will use a host of disciplinary frames to explore how art and commemoration in public spaces open up a window onto how humans navigate space and time through artistic imagination, creativity and expression, and how collective remembering reflects and shapes our contemporary moment.
Submission Guidelines
Submissions should be written in accessible language for a wide readership across and beyond the humanities; see How to Write for Public Humanities. Articles will be peer reviewed for both content and style. Articles will appear digitally and open access in the journal.
All submissions should be made through the Public Humanities online peer review system. Authors should consult the journal’s Author Instructions prior to submission.
All authors will be required to declare any funding and/or competing interests upon submission. See the journal’s Publishing Ethics guidelines for more information.
Contacts
Dr. Rebecca Friedman | friedmar@fiu.edu
Dr. Alex Lichtenstein | alichtens@gmail.com
Questions regarding peer review can be sent to the Public Humanities inbox at publichumanities@cambridge.org.
Dr. Rebecca Friedman