Location: Graham Auditorium
Registration required.

Join us for a lively conversation on contested history, collective memory, power, and aesthetics of public space, including a discussion about what to do with Baltimore’s decommissioned Confederate monuments and their former sites. Following the lecture and Q&A, we welcome you to enjoy a light reception in the Level 1 Lobby and Museum Cafe.

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This event is sponsored by the Walters Art Museum and the Johns Hopkins University’s SNF Agora Institute and Program in Museums and Society.

5:30 p.m.: Introductions and Conversation
6:40 p.m.: Q&A Session
7 p.m.: Reception in the Level 1 Lobby and the Museum Cafe

About the Speakers

Hannah Burstein is a curator, researcher, and public programmer. Her interests include contemporary interventions with historical objects, constructions of race in public space, alternatives to traditional museum interpretation, and horror. She is the curatorial associate of The Brick and the MONUMENTS exhibition at MOCA in Los Angeles.

Nekisha Durrett is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans public art, installation, sculpture, painting, and social practice. Durett is especially drawn to stories of Black life, labor and imagination that have been forgotten or intentionally erased, creating spaces that hold both remembrance and possibility. Her permanent public artworks are found at Arlington Arts in Virginia, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Miami Dade County, the Phillips Collection and MLK Jr. Memorial Library in Washington DC, the City of West Palm Beach, and Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. Her commission for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, Hem of Heaven, is in production and scheduled for unveiling in summer 2026.

Martha S. Jones is a writer, historian, legal scholar and public intellectual whose work aims to understand the politics, culture, and poetics of Black America. She is the author of: The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir, Vanguard and Birthright Citizens and director of the Hard Histories at Hopkins Project at Johns Hopkins University.

Hamza Walker is the director of The Brick (formerly LAXART), a nonprofit alternative art space in Los Angeles. An award-winning curator, writer, and educator, his practice explores the rhetoric of race in the United States, racial identity, and politics. He is the curator of the Monuments exhibition currently on view at MOCA in Los Angeles.

Available resources: Assistive listening devices, seating, sensory kits
Accessibility resources and accommodations are available for programs and events. Visit our accessibility web page for more information. Please email [email protected] with questions and requests.