Every third Thursday, IAM stays open until 8 pm with after-hours programming designed to help you end your day inspired.

Monumental Conversations is a series of programs inspired by Monumental: Sculpture by Dr. Charles Smith. Artists and scholars explore public art in Chicago and beyond, reflecting on how it shapes historical narratives and collective memory. In this first lecture, Rebecca Zorach discusses the public murals Wall of Truth and Wall of Respect, which sit opposite one another in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. 

This event is free. Registration is encouraged. 

Rebecca Zorach is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art and Art History at Northwestern University. Her writing and curatorial interests cut across early modern art, science, and culture and post-1960 art and activism in the United States and more broadly. Consistent themes of gender, race, materiality, print media, politics, and ecology resonate through her work across fields. Her books include Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago, 2005); The Passionate Triangle (Chicago, 2011); Art for People’s Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago (Duke, 2019); Temporary Monuments: Art, Land, and America’s Racial Enterprise (Chicago, 2024). She co-edited The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (Northwestern, 2017) with Abdul Alkalimat and Romi Crawford, and curated The Time is Now: Art Worlds of Chicago’s South Side (Smart Museum, 2018). In addition to her academic research, curatorial work, and teaching, she has taken part in several art and activist organizations (AREA Chicago, Never The Same, and Feel Tank Chicago), has served in the leadership of Northwestern’s Faculty Senate, and has sat on the boards of several nonprofit arts organizations, including continuing service on the board of directors of the South Side Community Art Center.