23. New Monuments for New Cities on the High Line

Photo of current exhibition on The High Line, En Plain Air

On September 26th, a new exhibition on the High Line will showcase posters from 25 artists or artist groups envisioning monuments —both possible and impossible to build— that question the role of monuments and imagine the future of the built objects. According to the High Line, these proposals include new monuments in a traditional style, revisions to historical statues, new imagined ways to commemorate, and come in many forms: “drawings, photographs, renderings, ‘missing pet’ posters, Wikipedia pages, bold text-based statements, collages, and more.”

The submissions were sourced from a process that brought the exhibition to multiple cities that have repurposed rail infrastructure — Buffalo Bayou, in Houston, Texas, Waller Creek, in Austin, Texas, The 606 in Chicago, Illinois, The Bentway in Toronto, Ontario — and each location chose five local artists or groups to create proposals.