Five years ago, nonprofit public art studio Monument Lab teamed up with Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania to ask important questions such as: What stories are missing from Bryn Mawr? How can and should the school reckon with its histories of systemic exclusion? Under the initiative Art Remediating Campus Histories, a series of symposia, lectures, student group consultations, and conversations with alumnae and community leaders followed, before culminating in a public call for proposals.
That’s when multimedia Washington, D.C.-based artist Nekisha Durrett entered the picture. Late last month, Bryn Mawr officially unveiled , a permanent public artwork for which custom pavers created pathways in the school’s iconic Cloisters courtyard.
From an aerial view, the intertwined paths are laid out in “the shape of a knot that cannot be undone, symbolizing interconnectivity, and making visual that Bryn Mawr is reexamining its history to tell all of its stories,” said Durrett in a statement. Two hundred and fifty of the 9,000 pavers are engraved with the names of Black staff whose work was critical to building and operating Bryn Mawr, particularly in its early years. Yet their contributions went unrecognized. In all, the project involves 26 pallets of brick, 211 tons of stone, 18 tons of sand, and 285 tons of soil.
Nekisha Durret, Dont Forget to Remember me lighting test, Bryn Mawr College, January 10, 2025. Photo: Steve Weinik
Perhaps it was not surprising that, after the request for proposals went out, Durrett’s inbox was flooded with suggestions from fans and friends familiar with her inquiries into historical narratives and monuments, encouraging her to pursue the Bryn Mawr project.
“I was fortunate enough to be chosen as a finalist,” the artist told me. “I’d been wanting to work with Monument Lab for years. Just the fact that they knew who I was, was really exciting.”
Even before she arrived on campus, Durrett learned in her preliminary research that there was a collection of ephemera related to Black life on campus that was contained in a random kitchen drawer. When she arrived on campus and saw it in person, she discovered “index cards that were burned around the edges. They were very fragile so I asked what they were.”
Nekisha Durrett, current students, and alumni collect soil from Perry House, ARCH Project, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA, 2023 (Maya Estrara).
Durrett learned that they were time cards of servants who worked at the college from roughly 1900 to 1930. The cards nearly burned in a fire that happened decades later, around 1960. “Someone had the good sense to rescue them from the fire,” she said. Now, some of those names are engraved into the stones on the new pathway.
Durrett also joined a special student-led tour, known as Black at Bryn Mawr, part of which is a walk under the Cloisters to see the underground “servant” tunnel. “These tunnels made a lot of the work that Black staff were performing on campus invisible,” she said.
In her research, she also learned a lot about Enid Cook, the first Black graduate of Bryn Mawr, in 1931. Although Cook was accepted to study at the college, she wasn’t allowed to reside on campus, at the decree of M. Carey Thomas, the college’s former president and trustee who had “a very powerful and persuasive voice at the college,” said Durrett. Cook ended up living off campus with a professor and walking roughly a mile to and from school each day.
Don’ t Forget to Remember (Me) lighting test, Bryn Mawr College, January 10, 2025. PhotoSteve Weinik
Upon learning this, Durrett printed out a map of the campus and the surrounding area so that she could trace the path Cook would have taken to get to school each day.
“I just started thinking about pathways, and also thinking about those hidden tunnels under the Cloisters, and I’m thinking about M. Carey Thomas, this woman whose whose presence and influence on the college, caused pain and exclusion for many,” she said.
Thomas’s ashes are contained in the Cloisters, which Durrett visited on her Bryn Mawr tour with two students of color. “We were standing there and I already felt this gloom, this kind of heaviness of the space. They described to me how they felt being in the space and how many students of color, or any students, did not feel comfortable participating in events that took place in the Cloisters.”
Durrett said she “knew at that moment that that needed to be the site of this project. Whatever it was going to be, it needed to be there. That space needed to be reclaimed.”
Her choice of a braid motif, she added, was inspired by one of the students she spent time with while touring the campus. “They came to me as this really powerful symbol, thinking about hair braids as a protective hairstyle. It’s called a protective hairstyle because all of those braids are stronger together than they are apart. I was also thinking about the Transatlantic slave trade and all of the mythology around hair related to the middle passage.”
Nekisha Durrett inpainting stamped names with a custom glaze made from the soil of the Perry House, a former affinity house for
Black students on Bryn Mawrs campus. Photo by Steve Weinik.
The names in the pavers are further filled with soil that was collected from the site of Perry House, the former Black Cultural Center on Campus, Durrett noted. There were a number of sites that had been selected as possible project sites, “but I felt that Perry House was a little bit removed from the center of the campus,” including having to cross a busy road. “What I decided to do instead of placing the artwork there was to bring a piece of Perry House to the Cloisters,” she explained.
The results of Durrett’s years-long, thoughtful approach speak for themselves. At the April 24 unveiling, she described the sense of reaffirmation sparked by the project and how it’s beginning to “heal this community… I heard it come out of the mouths of alumni who were there, and had tears in their eyes. They felt like there was a healing that was happening on campus. It’s been very reaffirming for me particularly in the times we’re going through now, witnessing these very blatant attempts to erase history and to alter the past.”
With the artwork’s unveiling, she added: “It feels like it’s the official turning over of this piece to the community.”
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
