In a 2023 lecture that she describes as “more of a musing than a talk,” Carrie Mae Weems recounts her long engagement with the meaning of monuments. Weems spoke as part of Monumental Concerns, a symposium hosted by Syracuse University, where Weems served as the university’s first-ever artist in residence. Among questions Weems asks are what function monuments serve, suggesting they function as “a vessel and container that can hold a certain kind of meaning, a certain kind of complexity.”