614-2023

DATE: July 10 , 2023 
TO: Portland City Council 
FROM: The City of Portland Arts Program  
SUBJECT: Accept the Engagement Recommendations Report from Portland’s Monuments & Memorial Engagement Process Committee

In January 2023, the City Arts Program initiated a partnership with Lewis & Clark College to convene a planning committee to provide recommendations for a thorough and inclusive process to decide the future of monuments in the City.    

The City Arts Program is excited to share the report, “Public Engagement with Portland's Monuments and Memorials,” with the public. This report provides recommendations for how the City should go about engaging the community to make decisions about its public art monuments – including those that were toppled and removed in the summer of 2020, as well as guidelines for considering new monuments in the future. 

We are extremely grateful to Lewis & Clark College and the Portland Monument Engagement Process Committee members' for their steadfast work and partnership. 

“This report is the culmination of nearly five months of collective discussion, outreach, research, and contemplation by committed Portland citizens. Our committee members bring perspectives from psychology, art, education, history, urban planning, Black studies, rhetoric and media studies, historic preservation, and cultural resource planning. We are also parents, community members, teachers, and learners. Although our perspectives are diverse, we each agree that monuments and public art have the capacity to transform our shared spaces, generating dynamic and necessary conversations about where we have been and where we are going as a country, a city, and in local communities. We are deeply invested in the stirring conversations we have had, the ideas we are sharing, and the hope we bring to the future of monuments and public art in our beloved city.”  

--From the Introduction

This report is posted on City Arts Program’s website. 

We agree with the report's guiding principles that monuments are interpretations of history, with a specific point of view; that all of Portland’s communities should be invited to participate in conversations about current and future monuments; and that meaningful public engagement takes time. The City Arts Program looks forward to collaborating with Commissioner Dan Ryan, city bureaus, and other partners to finalize and launch a thorough and inclusive community engagement process, based in part on these recommendations.

We appreciate the opportunity to hear your feedback on this report before we finalize our approach.

Sincerely, 

Jeff Hawthorne, City Arts Program Manager  

Stephan Herrera, City Arts Policy Advisor & Council Liaison