Noah Simblist and Lauren Woods converse with Dr. Max Krochmal

In this panel discussion, What Remains: The Legacy and Future of Confederate Monuments, curator, writer, and artist Dr. Noah Simblist and artist Lauren Woods converse with American historian Dr. Max Krochmal concerning the ways that communities tell the stories of our shared histories through art, scholarship, archives, and the built environment. A crucial element of the discussion is the yet unresolved issue of how we reconcile competing perspectives on the same moment in time, whether it is the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights era, or Black Lives Matter activism.

Dr. Noah Simblist’s work focuses on art and politics. He has contributed to publications including Art in America, Art Journal, Modern Painters, and Terremoto, and he is editing a book, to be published by University of Chicago Press, about Tania Bruguera’s The Francis Effect. In 2016, he was the co-curator and co-producer for New Cities Future Ruins, a convening that invited artists, designers, and thinkers to re-imagine and engage the extreme urbanism of America’s Western Sun Belt. He is also Chair of Painting + Printmaking and Associate Professor of Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.

lauren woods’s hybrid media projects in film, video and sound installations, public interventions, and site-specific work engage history as a lens through which to view the sociopolitical landscape of the present. Her 2013 work Drinking Fountain #1, a new media monument to the American civil rights movement, past and present activists/organizers, and the spirit of resistance, is located underneath the remnants of a rediscovered Jim Crow “White Only” sign in the Dallas County Records Building in Dallas, Texas.

Dr. Max Krochmal is an American historian, associate professor of history, and chair of the Department of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas Christian University. He won the Organization of American Historians’ Frederick Jackson Turner Award in 2017 and the Ramirez Family Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book from the Texas Institute of Letters for his book Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era. Krochmal is the founder and director of the Civil Rights in Black and Brown Oral History Project, a statewide collaborative research initiative and digital humanities website.

A video recording of this lectures will be available on the Modern's Youtube.