UP CLOSE: PAUL FARBER

Ask Paul Farber to name his favorite monument in Philadelphia and his answer is instantaneous: Clothespin by Claes Oldenburg.

If you don’t really think of that as a monument, welcome to the club. What is it a monument to?

“I’m really intrigued by the idea of an ordinary object given a monumental scale and situated across from City Hall,” explains Farber, director and co-founder of Philadelphia’s Monument Lab, a nonprofit studio dedicated to reimagining and reconsidering who, what and how we memorialize. “Its size doesn’t distance you or make you small; instead, it brings you in closer. It says ‘I have the power to be this big.’ We all understand this object that our grandmother and mother held in their hands to hang laundry. It’s a monument to domestic work and household intimacy.”

But if you insist that Philly’s own Monument Man limit his selection to something less like a sculpture and more like a statue, then it’s easy to figure out which piece in town is, if not his favorite, the one that consumes his interest. That would be Rocky. He has created an entire six-episode podcast, “The Statue,” on WHYY and has guest curated an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the iconic figure. Opening April 25, “Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments” traces the story of the statue, placing it in the context of other monuments at the intersection of art, sports and popular culture through 150 works by more than 50 artists, including Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Carrie Mae Weems.

Sculpted by A. Thomas Schomberg in 1980, the bronze statue at the top of the museum’s famous steps “is a public altar that’s visited by almost as many people as visit the Statue of Liberty,” Farber points out. “It’s all about waiting on the line to pose with Rocky, and the ritual around it. Not only is it a quintessential Philly site, it’s [also] become an iconic pose that’s recognized and imitated around the world.”

That this particular pilgrimage involves a fictional character makes it all the more worthy of unpacking, he adds.

The Mt. Airy-born Farber traces his interests in public space and monuments to a high school internship at Philadelphia Weekly — the gig merged his pop culture obsessions with a chance to explore the city.

“I remember taking the train to work and seeing the skyline coming into view with one eye and graffiti-covered abandoned factories with the other,” he says. “Without really knowing it, my sense of Philadelphia as a historical but bifurcated place was formed. It really got me thinking about the layers of public space and why some received a spotlight, but others were sort of hidden from sight.”

He attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in urban studies. By the time he got to the University of Michigan for grad school, he says, “I wanted to write 10 different dissertations.” It was 2007 and the following summer, he visited Berlin, thinking a little distance from America might help him fine-tune his studies. “But I kept bumping into Americans trying to find themselves, and then-candidate Barack Obama spoke in Berlin, and I ran into street after street named for United States presidents and civil rights sites,” he recalls. “It seemed that every American writer and thinker I cared about had their own Berlin stories.” He encountered “monuments as big as a city block and as small as a cobblestone,” he adds, referencing, respectively, architect Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Stolpersteine or “stumbling stones” installed and inscribed by artist Gunter Demnig.

Back home, Berlin’s grip on him continued. He graduated with an M.A. in American Culture and landed a fellowship at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. There, he “could walk to several pieces of the Berlin Wall just blocks from the office,” he recalls. “Then, I’d go to a conference in Seattle and encounter a piece by the Space Needle or visit a friend in Chicago and find a piece outside the fudge shop down the block from his home.”

Returning to Philly, he decided to further explore the idea of monuments on the move —think, the AIDS Quilt or remnants of New York’s World Trade Center — for a class he created at Penn titled “Memory, Monuments and Urban Space.” He met a kindred spirit in faculty member and artist Ken Lum, with whom he would co-found Monument Lab. Their first project, Prototype Monument for Center Square, designed by artist Terry Adkins, opened in City Hall’s courtyard in the Spring of 2015. With it, Farber and Lum arrived at a definition of a monument — something that represents a public statement of power and presence — that would govern Monument Lab going forward.

As part of the month-long effort, hundreds of passersby and visitors contributed their ideas on what constitutes a monument, and proposed designs and sites for monuments across the city.

“When we mentioned the word ‘monument’ to people, many thought of marble or bronze statues of historic figures towering above them,” recalls Farber. “But they also brought up sites of significance or trauma or recalled favorite mosaics and murals. We realized that the word is a way to talk about the past, present and future at once — there’s no one definition or meaning. A monument can even be unintentional, like the Berlin Wall or a closed school.”

Two years later, the Lab followed up with a more comprehensive inquiry, launching a citywide initiative involving 20 artists, including Tyree Guyton of Detroit’s Heidelberg Project and locals like the video and lighting workshop Klip Collective and mixed media artist Michelle Angela Ortiz.

In late 2020, in the wake of the removal of Civil War monuments in places like Alabama, North Carolina, New Orleans and, most significantly, Richmond, Virginia, Farber and company partnered with the Andrew Mellon Foundation to conduct our country’s first National Monument Audit.

“For me, it’s still one of the most important projects that I’ve ever worked on,” he says. “It collected information on 50,000 conventional monuments — who built them, who paid for them — that had never been gathered in one place.”

Its key findings — that the monument landscape is overwhelmingly male, the most common themes reflect war and conquest, and the “story of the United States as told by our current monuments misrepresents our history” — confirmed what had been revealed during the tumultuous months following the murder of George Floyd.

For Farber, the question is not how many were torn down or where they will end up or whether too many remain, it’s “how do we live with the monuments that we’ve inherited and what kinds of visions and values do we want to project forward so we can make new and different histories come to life?”

“It’s important to remember that monuments have never stood on their own,” he continues. “They require money and maintenance — so if we can think of them as part of an evolving city and landscape then maybe we can think of ways other than the extremes of keeping them frozen in time or totally getting rid of them. I hope that by questioning monuments we can offer a candid and potentially profound way to live together in our shared public realm.”

JOANN GRECO is a Philadelphia-based journalist who frequently writes about the built environment.