1275 Minnesota St /
Catharine Clark Gallery / Project Atrium
Sandow Birk: Imaginary Monuments
Catharine Clark Gallery presents a special off-site exhibition at Minnesota Street Project, featuring a survey of drawings and gravures from Sandow Birk’s acclaimed series Imaginary Monuments. Originally conceived in 2007, the Imaginary Monuments series depicts historical texts housed within proposed monuments that honor or enshrine the text’s topic. Most of the monuments incorporate multiple documents, conveying in words and images the complex and sometime conflicting histories and opinions behind subjects such as the judicial system, incarceration, economics, capitalism, trade, immigration, slavery, freedom of speech, treaties, governance, social justice and civil rights. Birk’s most recent drawings and multiples consider how we define our most basic social contracts, while also revealing the ontological disparities that underpin recent attacks on how we define “truth.”
Included in this presentation is Birk’s most recent gravure, “Proposal for a Monument to the Declaration of Independence (and a Pavilion to Frederick Douglass)” (2018), co-published by Mullowney Printing and Catharine Clark Gallery. The gravure, like the Douglass speech it references, reflects on how freedom is unequally distributed to people of color. There are two structures represented in the image: one with the Declaration on Independence transcribed on a neo-classical building; the other with excerpts from "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?", the popular title given to an untitled 1852 speech by Frederick Douglass represented by Birk as a text on the surface of a rock-like structure. A third text, originally penned by Thomas Jefferson for the first draft of the Declaration of Independence but later redacted, decries the slave trade as “execrable commerce” and is reproduced on a hanging panel, suspended atop shackles casting a shadow on the monument that bears the final version of the Declaration.
Birk’s gravures and drawings will be installed on the 2nd floor walls in the Atrium of the 1275 Minnesota Street galleries. Birk’s presentation is organized by Catharine Clark Gallery in conjunction/response to Monument, a group exhibition at 1275 Minnesota Street organized by Julie Casemore, director of Minnesota Street Project.