Reimagining Monuments and Memorials in Vermont is a three-year, multidisciplinary working group initiated in Spring 2025 by artist and educator jen berger (Full-Time Lecturer), through a grant from the UVM Humanities Center. The group explores the cultural, historical, and political dimensions of monuments and memorials across the state, beginning with a critical inquiry: What stories of justice and injustice are told—or untold—through the monuments that shape our public spaces?
Bringing together artists, art historians, historic preservationists, and humanities scholars, the project investigates and reimagines the landscape of public memory in Vermont through an interdisciplinary and community-engaged process. Our working group is guided by the belief that monuments are not neutral artifacts—they are expressions of collective memory that both reflect and shape systems of power, inclusion, and exclusion. Over the course of three years, the group is researching, analyzing, and co-creating new forms of public memory that confront historical silences and amplify underrepresented narratives.
In alignment with the Humanities Center’s 2025–26 theme of justice/injustice, the working group will conduct a statewide audit (year one) and analysis of existing monuments and memorials in Vermont, interrogating whose histories are remembered and whose have been marginalized or erased. The project examines monuments as active expressions of collective memory, attending to how they function within broader systems of justice, injustice, representation, and erasure.
Community engagement is central to the process. The group will collaborate with community members, students, and faculty across disciplines, engaging community voices, to analyze the data from the audit and surface absences, share perspectives, and identify alternative narratives (year two). Through these collaborations, the project facilitates interdisciplinary exchange across the arts, humanities, and social sciences while fostering civic engagement and democratizing the creation of public knowledge.
Together, participants create artistic and scholarly interventions that call attention to injustice while imagining more equitable commemorative practices. Anticipated outcomes include a comprehensive audit report of Vermont’s monuments and memorials with attention to justice-related themes; a series of community engagement sessions and public events co-developed with students; and a culminating public-facing project, such as an art exhibit that artists on and off campus will create new artwork that speaks to the absences identified through community-engaged analysis (year three).
Within the broader national conversation about monuments and historical reckoning, Reimagining Monuments and Memorials in Vermont situates the state as an active participant in questions of justice, representation, and repair. By involving students and community partners throughout the process, the project offers an accessible and inclusive model for rethinking how we remember together.