monuments to migration and labor: monument project

Monuments to Migration and Labor: The New Jersey Im/migrant Laborers' Monument Project

Request for Qualifications (RFQ) for Monument Artists

Opportunity

Monuments to Migration and Labor: The New Jersey Im/migrant Laborers’ Monument Project invites artists to apply to create one of three temporary Monument Installations that honor immigrants’ and migrants’ contributions to the state of New Jersey as laborers. Each selected artist will be assigned to one of the state’s three regions (North Jersey, Central Jersey, or South Jersey) and will create a temporary monument installation that is responsive to and inspired by extensive community dialogues that will be conducted by trained facilitators in each region. Each region’s monument will reflect that region’s specific histories, and address the unique concerns, perspectives, and stories that participants in the community dialogues have identified as relevant to the present moment.

Monument installations must have a physical presence in a publicly accessible outdoor location and must remain on view for at least four months.

Project Background

The Mellon Foundation has awarded Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, a multi-year grant for Monuments to Migration and Labor: The New Jersey Im/migrant Laborers’ Monument Project to support research, engagement, and public installations commemorating migration and the labor that immigrants and migrants perform. This grant is part of the Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project, a multi-year initiative, which aims to transform the nation’s commemorative landscape, ensuring our collective histories are more completely and accurately represented. The Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project supports efforts to express, elevate, and preserve the stories of those who have often been denied historical recognition, and explores how we might foster a more complete telling of who we are as a nation.

Monuments to Migration and Labor is led by a diverse team including Rutgers’ faculty, leaders from arts and cultural organizations from across the state. and the following Regional Partners: the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center and Noyes Museum of Art of Stockton University (Atlantic City site Noyes Art Garage) (South Jersey), coLAB Arts (Central Jersey), and Newest Americans (North Jersey).

For more information about the Project see: https://njmml.com/.

Project Context

In 2021, Monument Lab, in partnership with the Mellon Foundation, produced a National Monument Audit, which studied approximately 50,000 conventional monuments across the United States to assess the monument landscape. The audit’s key findings were that the subjects of monuments are overwhelmingly white and male, the most common features of American monuments reflect conquest and war, and the story of the United States as told by our current monuments misrepresents our history.

Data from the 2023 American Community Survey of the U.S. Census Bureau, shows that 24.2% of residents of the state of New Jersey are foreign-born. At a time when immigration to the United States is being questioned, and immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees, and visa holders face political attacks, deportation raids, family separation, and the denial of citizenship, we invite the public to ask questions and share stories, informed by historical evidence and firsthand accounts, about how migrants have contributed to New Jersey economically, socially, and culturally. Monuments to Migration and Labor aims to address gaps in the monument landscape and disrupt assumptions built into current commemorative landscapes about who deserves credit for economic progress and the production and circulation of goods and services more generally.

This project will promote dialogues about how progress gets defined in economic, environmental, and social terms, and encourage workers and migrants, in collaboration with project artists, to assign their own meaning and significance to their experiences and to sites of memory where labor occurred. Through this process, together we will work to make monuments to migration and labor that are visible features of New Jersey’s commemorative landscapes, and that challenge audiences to reconsider what they know about migrants and their labor.

The monument installations will celebrate immigrant and migrant laborers, past and present, while also interpreting their complicated stories and exploring what it has meant to face the hostility, exploitation, and exclusions groups migrating for work have historically encountered and continue to face. Ultimately, the Project will give the public the chance to confront art and history commemorating the unglamorous, often unnoticed, but essential labor that immigrants and migrants perform.

Process

Community Dialogues (prior to Monument Artist selections)

The Project will facilitate community dialogues in each of the three regions of the state (North Jersey, Central Jersey, and South Jersey). The dialogues will take place from March 1 through August 31, 2025. The Project is training im/migrants and second-generation members of those communities to serve as dialogue facilitators who will guide different publics in conversations about labor histories in their region, while also soliciting responses that feature personal narratives and perspectives. Community Artists, recruited separately from Monument Artists, will also be selected to participate in the dialogues and document the conversations and stories shared, ultimately creating smaller-scale artworks that will be displayed at partnering community organizations in each of the three regions and online.

Finally, dialogue facilitators are being trained to document themes, topics, and key perspectives shared during community dialogues, and will be synthesizing responses and comments from the dialogues so that they can be shared with the selected Monument Artists to draw on to develop their monument installation concepts.

Public Events (after Monument Artist selections)

The selected Monument Artists will develop their installations working in close partnership with community stakeholders over multiple stages, including a series of three Public Events for each region that artists will help plan.

The Public Events will take place from Fall 2025 to early Spring 2026. The first Public Event will introduce the Monument Artist to community and regional stakeholders and allow the artist to engage attendees in discussions about migration and labor. At the second Public Event, the artist will share an initial concept for a monument installation and receive feedback from community stakeholders. At the third Public Event, the artist will present their revised design for the monument installation, incorporating earlier feedback, and receive final comments and suggestions from community stakeholders.

Throughout this process, Via Partnership, the Project’s public art consultant, will work with the artists to identify and secure monument installation sites and serve as a liaison for the artists.

Monument Installation Programming and Activation

Programming and activation that engages the public will be key to the success of the monument installations. As part of their scope of work, Monument Artists will work with the Project Team to propose a Community Engagement Plan. The Project Team will help facilitate and support agreed-upon programming and activations.

NJ Monument Project Symposium

The Project will host a symposium at Rutgers University once the monument installations are unveiled, to take place in the fall 2026. The project team, in collaboration with the Mellon Foundation, will invite artists, scholars, and community organizations from the United States and New Jersey, to learn from project participants and to workshop their own plans and ideas. Monument Artists will participate in the symposium. Travel costs, lodging and meals for the symposium will be covered separately by the Project.

Monument Installation Sites

Sites for the Monument Installations will be selected in collaboration with the Monument Artists from a list generated by the community partners and project stakeholders. Via Partnership, the project’s public art consultant, will help determine viability of sites, including helping to secure permissions, and assist the artist with site-related technical concerns.

Monument Installation Goals

The overarching goals for the Monument Installations are to:

• Draw on the work done in the Community Dialogues, recognize and honor im/migrant laborers’ histories and stories, and bring visibility to the significance of im/migrant laborers and their contributions to New Jersey.
• Offer entry points for the public to engage with stories of im/migrant laborers and develop a deeper understanding of migrants and workers’ experiences and this aspect of our society.
• Foster conversations about the role of im/migrant laborers in our society, and their experiences, putting history and the present day in dialogue with each other.
• Generate national interest and serve as a model for other communities to pursue similar projects and conversations.

Regional Context and Parameters

In addition to the overarching goals stated above, each region has a unique context and specific factors that should be considered in the development of monuments.

North Jersey

The immigrant labor force in Northern New Jersey has historically been extremely diverse, both in terms of occupations and countries of origin. Im/migrant labor was an essential component of the Industrial Revolution, which in the U.S. arguably began in Northern New Jersey at the Great Falls in Paterson, and then flowed down the Passaic River to Newark and Jersey City. The public dialogues in North Jersey will engage the wide variety of immigrant communities, past and present, whose labor built New Jersey’s three largest cities. At each stage of this history different im/migrant communities arrived to work in the factories and construction sites, provide domestic care and nursing, staff restaurants and other service industries, and start the businesses that give the state its distinct character. African American, Arab, Eastern European, Jewish, Latine, and South Asian migrants all contributed to this labor history, will contribute to the public dialogues, and will have a stake in the monument design. For this reason, our goal will be for the selected artist to create a monument that can be activated to attract and serve multiple im/migrant communities.

Central Jersey

The Central Jersey region will be focusing culturally and geographically on the experiences of the Latine community in New Brunswick. Predominantly Oaxacan, the Latine community in Central Jersey is also comprised of immigrants from Colombia, Guatemala, Peru, the Dominican Republic, and other Latin American and Caribbean countries. The Central Jersey project will consider these communities’ experiences working with staffing agencies and as warehouse labor and restaurant workers, as well as the experience of trying to find work as a new arrival. Through the dialogue facilitations, we will have the opportunity to contrast these experiences with those of the City’s older immigrant groups including Hungarian and Puerto Rican communities.

South Jersey

South Jersey is the most rural part of New Jersey, and the population is dispersed across multiple areas that each have different centers and regional orientations. For this reason, the monument installation for South Jersey should be able to travel to or take place at multiple sites. The Project has partnerships with cultural and arts organizations in Atlantic City, Seabrook, Bivalve, and Millville, which may be available to help find venues or locations for the resulting artwork and - and help strengthen connections and relationships between different communities within South Jersey. The Project is especially interested in monument installations that explore the region’s long history of seasonal migration, involving Black, Italian, and Caribbean workers, for jobs in agriculture, oystering, and service industries catering to tourism on the Shore, and how these communities were established as more permanent over time – as has been the case with more recent immigrants as well.

Artists’ Scope of Work

In each region the selected artist will be responsible for developing a community engagement plan and designing, fabricating, and installing the artwork, including:

• Participating in and helping design the three Public Events for their assigned region.
• Developing and presenting initial concept and final designs for monument installation at the Public Events and to the Project Team and site owners for final approval.
• Working with the Project Team to select and finalize site selection.
• Executing the final design on schedule and in budget, and in a manner that conforms to the approved concept.
• Managing all aspects of the installation of the artwork.
• Providing maintenance instructions for the completed artwork.
• Working cooperatively and maintaining effective communication with all parties involved in the project.
• Assisting with the promotion of the artwork and attendance at dedication event.
• Participation in the Monuments to Migration and Labor Symposium at Rutgers in the fall 2026. (Travel costs, lodging, and meals to be covered separately by the Project.)
• Participating, as requested, in media interviews.
• Managing and facilitating the removal of the artwork from the site at the end of the exhibition period and the return of the site to its original condition.

Anticipated Timeline

• Mid-May, 2025 - Finalists Selected and Notified
• Week of June 7 -13, 2025 – date TBD - Finalist Interviews (virtual)
• June 2025 - Artists contracts
• Fall 2025 - Early Spring 2026 - Three Public Events

1. Artists introduced to community and engage with attendees
2. Artists present initial concepts and receive stakeholder feedback
3. Artists present revised designs and receive feedback

• March – June/ July - Fabrication
• July/August - Monument Installation Openings
• Fall 2026 - NJ Monument Project Symposium at Rutgers
• Late 2026 - Deinstallation of Monuments