In a city boasting hundreds of monuments to historic figures, there are only two dedicated to women: French heroine Joan of Arc and Bostonian Quaker Mary Dyer. To address the absence of women in public monuments in this city, Sharon Hayes’ sculpture If They Should Ask marks a long line of Philadelphia women, from the mid-1600s to the present day, who could be or could have been recognized with monuments. Hayes recreated nine pedestals from existing monuments in Philadelphia, scaled them to half-size, and arranged them together in a singular assemblage. Hayes convened a group of intergenerational, intersectional, and civically-engaged women to discuss, as Hayes notes, “the persistent and aggressive exclusion of women from this form of public recognition.” Hayes and these advisors initiated an ongoing collection of names of Philadelphia-area women who have contributed to the social, cultural, political, and economic life of the city, a selection of which were incorporated into the sculpture. For a full list of names and to contribute your own, visit iftheyshouldask.com.

This project was created for Monument Lab: A Public Art and History Project curated by Paul M. Farber and Ken Lum and produced by Mural Arts Philadelphia. Monument Lab was premised on central guiding question: What is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia? From September 16 to November 19, 2017, temporary prototype monuments by 20 artists were installed across 10 sites in Philadelphia’s iconic public squares and neighborhood parks. These site-specific artworks were presented together with research labs housed in shipping containers, where proposals for new monuments were collected from community members. The proposals—more than 5,000 in total—became a dataset of public speculation presented in a final report the city. During the exhibition, the collection was on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.