Frances Cathryn is a writer and curator who combines archival research, media theory, and social design to recontextualize American cultural narratives.

Photograph by Sarrah Danziger

Introduction

Several years ago, I started a campaign to remove three monuments from Academy Green, a public park overseen by a private preservation society in Kingston, New York. Originally cast by a bronze foundry in 1898 and installed on a bank facade in Manhattan, the statues were intended for scrap after renovations a half-century later. A local art patron, having read about the statues in the New York Times, purchased three in 1950 and gifted them to Ulster County, where they have stood in public view since.

The men memorialized there have historical ties to the city, but their presence in the park is circumstantial. Understanding the process by which the monuments arrived in Academy Green is not unproductive, however: It provides a critical framework for reinterpreting the ways in which history is written and retold. Much of my work addresses this process, what Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot called the “production of history”—or how we participate in history as both actors and narrators—especially as it relates to the ways identity and power intersect. By examining both the processes and the conditions of this production, we can understand, in Trouillot’s words, the “exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others.”