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The black herstory monumental landscape system is located in St Louis Missouri, and honors local Black women whose contributions span political, social, and cultural spheres. The proposal is the result of a collective, community based interdisciplinary design approach. Our goal as memory-workers in this project is generational change through place-making and preservation.

The memory marker system is a city-wide monumental landscape stitching together a historically, racially divided city. The memory markers consists of three parts of a reparative landscape. First, conducting a public nomination process that researches and inducts “classes” of Black Herstory Honorees, called “Queens”. Second, raingardens of repair located at street intersections throughout the city, each highlighting a Black HerStory Honoree. Third, a new Griot Campus of Black History and memory marker.

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In the heart of the Griot Campus rests a thirteen-foot eye-catcher, a sunlit circular steel-polished reflective-pool that is scooped out of the ground and tipped 60-degrees south-facing. On the backside of the pools surface is a steel bowl fabricated from standard steel tank head that acts as a map of St. Louis. Like the approach to the Farnese Hercules at Vaux-le-Vicomte, visitors have to physically turn around to understand the whole urban spatial story context. On the soft orange weathered steel patina bowl, circular mirror polished plates geo-locate each Black Herstory Honoree’s raingarden of repair in the city. Scaled down versions of this eye-catching memory marker are also located around the city in raingardens positioned at intersections that have some special geographic significance to the Honoree they represent.

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Every element of the monumental landscape is an opportunity to experience a local story and to address climate equity through memory making .The memory marker is a cinematic memory making device that grounds the sky and helps us attend to where we are. The marker is positioned at a vanishing point where two memorial compass paths intersect, one path running true north-to-south along the meridian line and the other east-to-west. Building materials and plantings draw connections between the physical characteristics of flowers, colors, scents, seasons, echoing characteristics of the Black women as interpreted by the design team and Honorees.

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Around edges of the Griot Campus, meandering allées of wild cherry trees are also planted. In our proposal, the street just west of the Griot Museum is decommissioned, breaking free of plots and legal grids, and softly occupying the street for Griot Campus programming. Purple Lilies, Bee Balm, Hyacinth, and Saucer Magnolias softly reinforce the cinematic axes. A rhythm of circular gates and flower trellises inscribed with names, stories, QR codes and set into stainless steel polished plates create colorful seasonal scent tunnels and telescopically generate episodic memory experiences. This soft ceremonial approach offers perceptual cleansing and prepares visitors for arrival into the inner marker memory circle. Rammed earth memorial benches embrace visitors as they enter the inner circle. In order to see yourself in the monument’s reflection, you must bow, offering a light salutation, connoting reverence, respect, and gratitude to the legacy of Black women whose lives help shape the cultural landscape of St Louis, Missouri.

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I am involved in the public research process and nomination process, but do not play a primary role there. My primary role and responsibilities in this project are leading the collective design process, and constructing landscape representations, models, and texts that support the Griot Museum's vision. I continue to lead a design team through the third phase of this project which is to see the installation of the central memory marker, a memory trellis, a memory bench, and a raingarden and wayfinding signage prototype in another part of the city.

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The images I co-produced are now being used in applications for funding and community buy-in. We anticipate the first reflective pool marker, a trellis, and the interpretive center to be installed in the spring of 2024 and help seed the larger Griot Campus vision. To help share responsibility for building project budgets, I organized and worked closely with a team of professional fabricators to budget and strategize material options, processes, times frames, budgets, local labor, and legal questions regarding public installations. On the one hand, constantly being in conversations with fabricators and craftsmen put our team’s ideas in a dialogue with reality, gravity ,dynamics of slope, seasons, and material costs. This is what I teach to my design students, a process I frame as poetic pragmatics. The poetic forms are generated in relation to pragmatic constraints. Importantly, my aim in guiding and generating the collective design process in a new approach. The designer does not just present the community and partners with good options to choose from, but rather to design the conditions out of which new collectively generated design options emerge.

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I continue to be central in a design conversation that envisions a large collectively designed outdoor Griot campus/park. The park brims with bees and other pollinators. Every element of the Griot campus is an opportunity to experience a story, and to address climate equity. Beyond the memorial near the north edge of the Griot Campus is the Black Herstory Interpretive Center, a purple toolshed and café-kiosk that has a mural on one side. The mural is a map of the city and is being commissioned with a local artist. The mural geo-references each of the individual Honorees and memorial raingardens across the city. These gardens proudly connect the north part of St Louis to its cultural legacy, and offer a new approach for finding our way through our city and navigating our historic legacy with the stories of Black women as our guides. I designed and built the first instantiation of the BHI InterpretiveCenter for a summer exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis. In the Black Herstory that toolshed is transformed, rebranded, and its interiorredesigned to support public events, block-parties, outdoor forums, as wellas store tools. A large mural – a map of St Louis, is painted on the outside ofthe interpretive center and is updated with the location of wayfinding raingardens located throughout the city.*

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On August 29th, 2022, marked the end of Phase 2 of the awarded funding. Our team presented the Black Herstory monumental landscape to thepublic at a large, ticketed, fund-raiser event called “The Queen’s Tea”. Nearly all thirteen of the Honorees attended the tea, including a representative ofthe mayor of St Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones. I desired to remain behind the scene during the first public launch, but the leader of the Griot Museum voluntold me to give a 7-minute presentation and it was my honor to oblige.

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