During the spring and summer 2025, eighteen dialogues will take place across New Jersey, organized around specific themes, topics, and place-based histories. Please see the Events Calendar for specific dates and information on how you can participate.
In the fall 2025, and winter and spring 2026, public stakeholders will be invited to participate in three Monument Events, to be held in each region, and have the chance to share their own experiences of migration and labor, and work with installation artists on a monument. Please see the Events Calendar for specific dates and information on how you can participate.
Dialogues
Monuments to Migration and Labor is organizing 18 community dialogues that will take place across New Jersey, from March 27 through August 31, 2025. Im/migrant and second-generation community members, serving as dialogue facilitators, will guide stakeholders in conversations about place-based labor histories. Stakeholders’ personal narratives and connections to labor and migration will be translated by community and digital artists into Art Responses, to be exhibited at regional galleries and venues, and featured on the project website.
To build continuity across the process, dialogue facilitators will document the themes, topics, and key perspectives that stakeholders bring to each dialogue, so that Monument Installation Artists joining the project can call on these conversations.
Monument Events
Three monument installation artists – to be selected by a jury – will join the project in September 2025. In each region, monument installation artists will work with the project team to organize three monument events, which will take place in the Fall 2025 and Winter 2026. Over the course of the three monument events, installation artists will work closely and collaboratively with public stakeholders in each region to develop the monument concept, and to make it available for stakeholder review and feedback.
Monument events – through the participation of Newest Americans and Talking Eyes Media – will also offer attendees and stakeholders the chance to produce and record, with professional photographers and storytellers, their own narratives of migration and labor. These materials will feature on the project website, as firsthand accounts that honor and make visible histories of labor and migration.
Monument Installations, Programming, and Conference
The monuments created for each of the three regions, will be installed in the summer 2026. Through engagements that continue the dialogues’ and monument events’ conversations about migration, labor, and public commemoration, installations will be accompanied by on-site programming and activation events, to continue through the fall. In the fall 2026, Rutgers will host a conference with project artists, facilitators, and other partners - and with scholars and artists from around the country - to engage with Monuments to Migration and Labor as a process, and to workshop how public memory work featuring migration and labor, can be sustained.