Jurors are reviewing project submissions for a competition that asks participants to reimagine Monument Avenue, and 20 finalists will have their work displayed at The Valentine museum throughout 2019.
“Monument Avenue: General Demotion/General Devotion”—a competition hosted by VCU’s mOb (Middle of Broad) Studio and the Storefront for Community Design—was made possible by a $30,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant.
The exhibition of the finalists’ work will open on Feb. 14. There is also a parallel youth competition, the results of which will be displayed in March at the Branch Museum of Architecture and Design on Monument Avenue. Camden Whitehead, an associate professor and mOb faculty member, hopes the competition and exhibition will reignite conversations that followed the mayor’s Monument Avenue Commission study.
After the competition—which aimed to attract a broad array of project teams encompassing artists, designers, urban planners, architects and others—Whitehead says he hopes that MoB will continue to find ways to facilitate conversations around race and the city’s history, legacy and future.
“Design just has [the] ability … to envision things that don’t exist,” he says, “and in some ways take risks with those things, to generate conversation that’s about design and about outcomes rather than about positions.”
Read more in Richmond magazine.
Image: Credit via Richmond magazine.
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