Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Vaness and every week I sit down for a gorgeous conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

On today's episode, I'm joined by Dr. Elizabeth Alexander, where I ask her, what should we make of America's monuments?

Welcome to Getting Curious. This is Jonathan Vaness, as it always is, we have an incredible guest this week, so let's dive in.

Welcome to the show Dr. Elizabeth Alexander, a prize winning and New York Times bestselling author, renowned poet, educator, scholar, and cultural advocate.

She is president of the Mellon Foundation, the nation's largest funder in the arts, culture, and humanities.

Her new book, The Trayvon Generation, explores the power of art and culture to illuminate America's unresolved problem with race, and the challenges facing young Black America.

We're asking today, what stories do America's monuments tell?

Elizabeth, welcome to the show. How are you doing this morning?

I'm doing great. It's a sunny day in New York City, and I've been looking forward to talking with you for a long time.

Oh, my gosh. Well, we've also been looking forward to making this happen.

We also recently got to record an episode with Professor Sabrina Strings about the racial origins of fat phobia.

In that episode, we got to talk a lot about visual art and specifically like paintings, and how paintings through history represent certain body ideals of the time, and how that shifted as time has gone on.

And I've got us thinking about a different type of visual representation, which is monuments.

For me, it's like Charlottesville, it's what happened there, but we've also seen that type of tension and flare happen around monuments several times in our history.

So we want to kind of explore these associations and significance of monuments throughout our history.

We also got to sort some questions from our listeners, right?

And one of them is from Lauren here in Austin, where I am, and she asked, I'd love to hear what distinguishes monuments within the greater concept of art.

I would start by saying that what I think are important about monuments is that they are all around us.

They are in public spaces. They are often free of charge to go and visit them.

They teach us all the time what our story is, and I'm going to talk about that hour who comes within that hour in this.

And for now, we're going to talk in the United States context, because as we know, the hour is gorgeously multi-vocal.

You know, the United States is made up of incredible experiences, people, places, origins, points of view, all of it.

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