About

Monumental Gestures is an Indianapolis-based initiative dedicated to transforming public spaces through ambitious art and design experiences.

We work closely with partners to envision and deliver innovative, community-centered projects that invite conversation, amplify voices, and celebrate histories.

Monumental Gestures is an initiative of Landmark Columbus Foundation, which cares for, celebrates, and advances the cultural heritage of Columbus, Indiana, and works with other communities to strengthen civic life through design excellence.

Mission

Monumental Gestures’ mission is to transform public spaces through ambitious art experiences that invite conversation, amplify voices, and celebrate histories.

Values

  • We seek ambitious projects that imagine better futures.

  • We move with the desire to understand and center the dynamics of people and place.

  • We are intentional in our participation and partnerships.

Goals

  • Advocate for free art experiences in public spaces;

  • Be accessible to a wide range of audiences;

  • Endeavor to reflect histories told and untold;

  • Promote spaces of belonging;

  • Bring people together.

Team

With leadership based in Indianapolis, Monumental Gestures brings together creative talents from the worlds of art, design, architecture, and landscape. We assemble the right team for each project—no more, no less.

Sarah Urist Green
Artistic Director

Sarah Urist Green is a curator and art educator based in Indianapolis whose work demystifies art, artists, and museums for wide audiences. She is the host and consulting producer of Crash Course Art History (2024) and creator of The Art Assignment (2014–2020), a PBS web series with over 675,000 subscribers and 35 million views. Her book You Are an Artist (2020) brings together assignments from today's most innovative artists to help readers open their imaginations and begin to create. Since 2020, Green's curatorial work has focused on building infrastructure for public art in Indianapolis. She previously served as curator of contemporary art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where she organized exhibitions including Graphite and Andy Warhol Enterprises and helped develop The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park: 100 Acres. Green holds a BA from Northwestern University and an MA in modern art history from Columbia University.

Richard McCoy
Managing Director

Richard McCoy is the founding Executive Director of Landmark Columbus Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to caring for, celebrating, and advancing the world-renown cultural heritage of Columbus, Indiana. He has a long history of creating unique solutions to complex cultural heritage challenges and occasionally writes about arts culture. He is the former Conservator of Variable Art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and holds a bachelor of arts from Indiana University and a master of arts from New York University.

Jamie Goldsborough
Creative Director

Jamie Goldsborough is a multi-scale designer whose work bridges storytelling and the built environment. Trained in graphic design, architecture, and design criticism, she brings a multi-scale approach to connecting people with art, architecture, and place. As Creative Director at Landmark Columbus Foundation, she leads communications, exhibitions, and publications that engage broad audiences with the design legacy and evolving cultural landscape of Columbus, Indiana, contributing to wider conversations across architecture, culture, and society. Goldsborough holds a Master of Architecture and a Master of Arts in Design Criticism from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Communication Design from Indiana University Indianapolis.

Additional Team
Frequent Collaborators

Merritt Chase

Merritt Chase LLC is a landscape architecture firm founded by Nina Chase and Chris Merritt in 2017. The practice engages, tests, and questions how public spaces can be unique to their region and reflective of the communities that inhabit them.

Merritt Chase has experience in the curation, management, design, construction, and implementation of landscape projects with public art components that vary in scale, time, medium and material. The firm’s current work includes the Indianapolis South Downtown Connectivity Vision Plan, Georgia Street, Monument Circle activation, City Market, The Stutz, and 16 Tech Innovation District.

Monumental Gestures team members are Chris Merritt and Danica Liongson. Chris’s work focuses on the design of culturally significant public spaces in complex social, ecological, and infrastructural contexts. He is a graduate of Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Purdue University. Danica is a landscape designer based in Indianapolis. She holds masters degrees in Landscape Architecture and Design Studies from Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Rokh

Rokh is a multidisciplinary, cultural equity, research & design studio. Founded in 2016, their work encompasses identity, communications, and critical race theory. Their partners are scholars, researchers, and practitioners who work collaboratively and independently towards rooting tactical and somatic equity & liberation in the civic sphere. Danicia Monét Malone (pictured) is the founder and principal planner at Rokh.

Storyboard Planning

Storyboard is the independent planning and design practice of Jessica Kartes. Jessica has a decade of experience leading planning and design projects in both the public and private sectors. She approaches her work through a transdisciplinary lens, integrating broadly across disciplines and leveraging her expertise in policy, urban design, storytelling, and visual communication.

Rasul Mowatt

Rasul A. Mowatt is the Department Head of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management in the College of Natural Resources and Affiliate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University. Primary areas of research are: Geographies of Race, Geographies of Violence, Animation of Public Space, and Critical Leisure Studies.

Published research reports, articles, and chapter on the complexities of cities and matters of: racial erasure and the legacy of the activities of old Civil Rights Organization in the modern age on Cleveland, Ohio, the Phillis Wheatley Association, and Cuyahoga Valley National Park for the National Park Service (2022); the destruction of a forest preserve and the rise of tactical urban policing sites, such as Cop City in Atlanta, Georgia in Leisure Sciences (2023); re-examining the sites and travels of Dylann Roof in preparation for his killing of nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina in the collected volume Socialising Tourism (2021); the base of colonial empire through tourism development and children’s reading books in London, United Kingdom in the Annals of Tourism Research (2022); the power and problematics of former slave castes in Cape Coast, Ghana also in Annals of Tourism Research (2011); and, the need for memorials to difficult heritage sites, such markers, exhibitions, and memorials to the victims of Lynching in Montgomery, Alabama and elsewhere in Heritage of Death (2018). A theorization of violence in the city is contained in the book, The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence: The City and State Between Us (2021) and Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits (2024). Another book, The City of Hip-Hop, will be available in 2025.

Rasul also continues to moonlight as a DJ, a love of a craft that began over 30 years ago.

Additional Team
Landmark Columbus Foundation

Abigail Flout Operations Coordinator
Hadley Fruits Photographer
Kate Powers Partnership Officer

The Monumental Gestures Handbook

This workbook emerged from a planning process that took place from September 2023 to February 2024, made possible through a development grant from The Herbert Simon Family Foundation. Many of the sites and projects mentioned have changed since this work was completed. We invite you to peruse with that caveat in mind, understanding that projects in the civic sphere are in constant flux. Download the Monumental Gestures Handbook (Spring 2024).