Jorge Otero-Pailos is an artist, preservationist, and Professor and Director of Historic Preservation at Columbia University GSAPP. Otero-Pailos curated Distributed Monuments (2020), an exhibition that constellates canvas casts of dust extracted from two historic sites in the U.S. that are geographically and temporally distinctive and seemingly unrelated. In choosing to make visible an invisible detritus, Otero-Pailos highlights what is typically suppressed to maintain an image of monumental purity. The dust casts are made comparable through their ex-situ mobility and juxtaposition, a constellational approach that reveals the interconnected histories of industrialization, capitalism, labor, and pollution between two seemingly unrelated historic sites.
Jorge Otero-Pailos
