Screen and Discuss: Disgraced Monuments

Featuring rare archival footage and interviews with sculptors, art historians, and gallery and museum directors, Disgraced Monuments (1994) is a documentary that looks at the Soviet Union to examine how monuments connect us with the past and spur us to new futures; why so often in times of social cataclysm, old monuments are destroyed and new ones raised; and how every turning point in society has begun history anew in a struggle with old monuments.

Following the film, Olga Yukhno, recent McMaster Gallery manager at UofSC and Russian American artist, and Dr. Robert Greene II, assistant professor of history at Claflin University and civil rights scholar, discuss what it means to live amongst monuments to fallen leaders of the past and the implications of destroying or preserving these vestiges.