Paper Monuments combines public education and collaborative design to expand our collective understanding of New Orleans.
Read Paper Monuments’
Final
Report
Paper Monuments was a public art and public history project designed to elevate the voices of the people of New Orleans, as a critical process towards creating new narratives and symbols of our city that represent our collective vision, and to honor the erased histories of the people, places, movements, and events that have made up the past 300 years as we look to the future.
Project Values:
The core values of Paper Monuments were equity, integrity, and collaboration. We envisioned the role of our team as coordinating the efforts and supporting the visions of a broad collective of residents, scholars, artists, and activists.
In centering equity, we set an honorarium for artwork that recognizes the value of our local visual artists, often overlooked in discussions of New Orleans' cultural economy and we worked to ensure that both the content and the creators of all our pieces reflect the diverse populations of our city.
In centering integrity, we committed to honor all public proposal submissions, and to include them in archives and maps, knowing that some may be offensive or abusive. We provided opportunity for all community members to speak at our events.
In centering collaboration, we built relationships with small business owners throughout the city to distribute posters while helping to drive new customers to their stores. We partnered with public institutions such as the University of New Orleans and the New Orleans Public Library to provide research and archival support locally, and are part of an emerging cohort of organizations and projects across the country working to reconsider the role of public art and public history in our cities.
Ephemeral Installations
Over the course of the Paper Monuments project, we have created several different types of installations for public spaces around New Orleans. You can see two of them, Framing Histories and Re:Present New Orleans, in the streets today.
Paper Monuments Posters
Our team, a collective of designers, artists, urbanists, and educators, has been working since July 2017 to pair scholarly narratives and locally commissioned artwork in telling the stories that are too often lost or obscured when New Orleans history is recounted.
Public Proposals
Public proposals are the core of Paper Monuments’ process, a continually expanding pool of prospective monuments, memorials and public art that range from the intimate to the epic and tell the stories that are important to New Orleans’ residents.
Our team
Colloqate Design/Paper Monuments Co-Directors:
Sue Mobley
Bryan C. Lee Jr.
Paper Monuments Core Team
Nic Brierre Aziz
Katie Wills
Isabella Siegel
Colin Fredrickson
Shoshana Gordon
John Ludlam
Chris Daemmrich
Brittany Lindsey
Press Contacts:
Sue Mobley sue@colloqate.org
Bryan Lee bryan@colloqate.org
Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
Follow the Paper Monuments tour at New Orleans Historical
Email us at info@papermonuments.org
Paper Monuments Mapping
Check out a few sites of importance in our city.
A People’s Process
Telling overlooked stories of the people, places, events, and movements that have shaped the 300 year history of New Orleans.
Follow The Stories
Follow us here for event updates as well as continued conversation through videos and written posts.
Where can I pick up posters?
Tubby + Coo's Mid City Book Shop
631 N Carrollton Ave,
New Orleans, LA 70119
Material Life
2521 Bayou Road
New Orleans, LA 70119
Community Book Center
2523 Bayou Rd
New Orleans, LA 70119
Crescent City Books
124 Baronne Street
New Orleans, LA 70112
New Orleans Public Library
Main Branch
219 Loyola Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70112
Studio Be
2941 Royal St,
New Orleans, LA 70117
Octavia Books
513 Octavia Street
New Orleans, LA 70115
Video Series: Stories at the Crossroads
In case you weren't able to join us at Stories at the Crossroads, filmmaker Luisa Dantas beautifully captured the spirit of the event in the first of many videos documenting the process behind Paper Monuments.
We want to give a huge shoutout to the storytellers who spoke their monuments that night, including Sunni Patterson, Nic Aziz, John Hankins, Rebecca Snedeker, Phoebe Ferguson, and Tilman Hardy, as well as our awesome MC, Chris Lane.
This video is part of Surdna Foundation's ongoing video series on community engaged design. Paper Monuments is made possible through the generous support of the Surdna Foundation.