Collaborations
Monument to Climate Justice
Feminist Seed Bank, with Artist, Activist and Feminist Melissa H Potter
The Feminist Seed Bank is the first project of our Monument to Climate Justice initiative and the first seed bank started to promote the continuation of plant-based practices in craft, medicine, and spirituality traditionally done by women internationally. These plant practices challenge us not only to consider the preservation of our biome, but also how women have been central to cultural identity and sovereignty through their traditions. It further considers how these practices are central to our survival socially and environmentally. The Feminist Seed Bank is more than a collection of seeds: it is a bank of transferrable knowledge restoring intergenerational communication and history while recording and interpreting lost and endangered practices. Through shared knowledge across diverse practices, the Feminist Seed Bank promotes an alternative social and ethical system based on ecofeminist principles revaluing our relationship to the land and our future.
Collaborators include:
UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage; Kelly Church, Pottawatomi/Ottawa/Ojibwe Black Ash Basket Maker & Seed-Saver, Maggie Puckett, co-author, An Illuminated Feminist Seedbank; Kansas City Art Institute; Spencer Museum of Art; Aida Bičakčić, Commission to Preserve National Monuments of Bosnia and Herzegovina; Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway; Bishkek Feminists, Kyrgyzstan, Land Institute; and many others across the Midwest Plains and beyond.
“Seeds and prairie roots are feminist monuments, doing the invisible work of sustaining the systems on which all life depends. For thousands of years, women have planted, tended, sown and saved seeds. Their acts have monumentalized women’s labor, craft, land, justice and medicine—knowledge all of us need to survive.”
— Melissa H Potter, Public Artist, Curator, Writer, Professor, Columbia College Chicago
The Play as Monument
M2M interprets monuments as evolving art forms that investigate, reflect, and engage inclusive histories with and in community. Similarly, theatre has always been an art of collaborative storytelling, created through relationship building, with the power to connect communities and ideas. Through this lens, we recognize the role of theatre-making in reflecting and illuminating collective action and its impact on society.
To learn more, watch our M2M SpeakEasy: The Play as Monument conversation
which featured Wyandotte artist / writer/ performer Madeline Easley, actor / playwright Kate Hamill, theatre artist / playwright / director Daniel Alexander Jones and playwright / lawyer, enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation Mary Kathryn Nagel.
The first project in this series is Trespassers Beware! Fort Conley and Wyandot Women Warriors. With our inaugural partners at Kansas City Repertory Theatre, we explore the power of the play in vital civic engagement. M2M is working with KCRep on the American Crossroads Residency program to collaborate on the new play commission by Madeline Easley that tells the story of the Conley sisters who saved their historic Wyandot Cemetery in Kansas City from urban development and erasure. M2M is producing a public art project with the Wyandot Nation of Kansas that will animate scenes, stories, themes and characters from Easley’s play.
“The premise you developed was wonderfully creative and powerful as it opens a conversation no one else is having or ready to have, yet. The result will be the emergence of beautifully layered tapestries of cultural work, the creation of new communities of extremely nuanced and meaningful experiences and movements.”
— Albie Sachs, Former Justice, South Africa Constitutional Court, ANC Lead Lawyer
Monument to Evolving Democracies
M2M Inaugural Initiative with Albie Sachs Trust for Constitutionalism and the Rule of Law (ASCAROL), South Africa
M2M is building a vibrant international exchange of art and ideas exploring evolving democracies. Our core partnership is grounded in South Africa - with Justice Albie Sachs (ANC Leader, co-author of the SA Constitution) and Vanessa September (architect, CEO of Constitutional Trust - because it is one of the newest democracies globally and a catalyst for innovative ideas. Collaborations will take place in various public environments including Vietnam, Lebanon, United States and South Africa. Artists and communities will develop new models to explore what democracy could be.
Projects will be collaboratively built and co-authored over a multi-year period. Formats will include site-based installations & projections, presentations, publications, exhibitions and workshops. Inaugural artist participants include Eric Gottesman, Kaneza Schaal, Christopher Myers and Black Monument Ensemble. The culmination will reflect the dialogues between collaborators and may appear in animations projected on Constitutional Hill in Johannesburg, performances at Chicago’s West Side Garfield Gold Dome, poems recited in Planalto Presidential Palace in Brasilia, and wherever democracy may live or needs to be supported.
Monuments to Movements:
The Archive
M2M Inaugural Initiative with Urban Art Mapping
Through this collaboration, M2M and Urban Art Mapping (UAM) created an archive dedicated to public art that commemorates movements and collective action. The M2M Archive marks the next edition for UAM, the only project of its kind that collects, archives and analyzes documentation of street art related to social and racial justice issues. The goal of this project is to locate, document, analyze, promote and elevate public art works—sculptures, street art, performance and beyond—that represent stories of movement-making and collective action. The works gathered in the M2M Archive support a shift in society's thinking away from monumentalizing "heroes" through statues and towards monuments to progress enacted through group action. The archive also explores public works that intentionally dismantle the dominant culture of white supremacy, colonialism and patriarchalism in our public spaces and which build and encourage a more inclusive, responsive culture.
To learn more about the project and some of the contributing artists, catch our program on the archive as part of our Let’s SpeakEasy conversation series.
“Monuments to Movements undertakes the crucial work of troubling deeply entrenched ideas about art, politics, and identity in public space. This is essential work as we labor together to tackle structural inequities and harness the power of art in public space to create a more equitable world.”
— Heather Shirey, Professor of Art History, University of St. Paul, Co-Director, Urban Art Mapping Project
Image captions: Screenshot detail of the interactive global map on the Feminist Seed Bank Padlet; KCRep's 2023 production of THE RIPPLE, THE WAVE THAT CARRIED ME HOME, written by Christina Anderson, Ph: Don Ipock; Portrait of Albie Sachs in South Africa Constitutional Court; Pavement stencil from George Floyd Square.