The Wall of Respect, a 1967 public artwork, depicted black heroes and heroines in the areas of music, art, literature, politics, and sports. No sign indicates its existence today, but the wall sparked a nationwide mural movement, platformed community engagement, and was a seminal work of the black arts movement. While the wall needs to be marked, this new publication, Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect, argues against making a monument of the original site. Instead, editor Romi Crawford asked a range of artists, designers, and architects—each with differing degrees of proximity to the wall's legacy—to realize antiheroic and unstatic strategies for commemoration. The result is a collection of “fleeting monuments” that invite readers to enact these gestures, either in mind or real time. Using the intimate and portable book format, Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect commemorates the wall while proposing new strategies for embodied public memory.

Romi Crawford, is professor in the Visual and Critical Studies and Liberal Arts Departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research revolves primarily around formations of racial and gendered identity and the relation to American visual arts, film, and popular culture. She makes regular contributions to publications on African American art and culture including, Theaster Gates, Black Archive (Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2017); “Do For Self: The AACM and the Chicago Style” in Support Networks (University of Chicago Press, 2014); and “Ebony and Jet On Our Minds...In Our Homes. On the Wall” in Speaking of People: Ebony, Jet and Contemporary Art (Studio Museum in Harlem, 2014). She is coauthor (with Abdul Alkalimat and Rebecca Zorach) of The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (Northwestern University Press, 2017). Crawford was cocurator (with Lisa Lee) of the 2017 Open Engagement Conference, themed “Justice.”

Fulla Abdul-Jabbar (project manager, Green Lantern Press) is a writer and artist living in Chicago. She presents thought in the form of language and presents language in various forms. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is assistant editor at The Green Lantern Press based at Sector 2337. She has performed or exhibited at SPACES, Defibrillator, Woman Made Gallery, the 55th Ann Arbor Film Festival, and St. John University in York. Her writing has appeared in Bad at Sports, DIAGRAM, and is forthcoming in Bombay Gin.

Caroline Picard, is a writer, publisher, and curator. Her writing has appeared in Artslant, ArtForum (critics picks), Flash Art International, and Paper Monument, among others. She is the executive director of The Green Lantern Press—a nonprofit publishing house and art producer in operation since 2005—and codirects its headquarters, Sector 2337, a hybrid artspace/bar/bookstore in Chicago.

Additional artist confirmed contributors include: Miguel Aguilar, Wisdom Baty, Mark Blanchard, Bethany Collins, D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem, Julio Finn, Maria Gaspar, Wills Glasspiegel, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Kelly Lloyd, Faheem Majeed, Nicole Mitchell, Naeem Mohaiemen, Amus Mor, Karega Kofi Moyo, Robert E. Paige, Kamau Amu Patton, Jefferson Pinder, Cauleen Smith, Rohan Ayinde Smith, solYchaski, Norman Teague, Jan Tichy, Mechtild Widrich, Bernard Williams, and Lauren Berlant.

Founded in 2005, The Green Lantern Press is an artist-run, nonprofit organization dedicated to the production, integration, and dissemination of contemporary art, literature, and philosophy. Headquartered at Sector 2337, the press produces noncommercial works: experimental art exhibits, critical print publications, and free public programs that facilitate the growth and development of select artist projects, while engaging the surrounding community. In a world where the humanities must often defend themselves, The Green Lantern Press offers intimate examples of creative thought, demonstrating the value of artistic and intellectual pursuits in the public sphere.