On Thursday, January 23, PPS hosted its 2020 Annual Meeting at the Preservation Award-winning Pavilion at Grace Church. A video of the full meeting is available here. 

Marisa Angell Brown presented the keynote lecture, Inheritance: What We Preserve and Why.

One of the best-known images of the preservation movement of the last century shows Jane Jacobs, Philip Johnson, and others protesting the 1963 destruction of the old Penn Station in suits and pearls. Twenty years into this new century, the image that best captures the current moment in the field may be of Confederate monuments and the protests around their preservation or removal.  In fifty years, the field has slowly shifted away from focusing on fine buildings designed by famous architects toward knottier issues of history, power, race, equity, and justice: preservation is moving out of the parlor and into the streets. This presentation charts these changes within the field, and it suggests that some of the toughest questions to face preservation may just be emerging.

Marisa Angell Brown is the Assistant Director for Programs at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University, where she teaches a seminar on historic preservation and cultural heritage, curates exhibitions related to architecture and place, and develops the Center’s public programs. Brown received her PhD in the History of Art from Yale University and her MA in History from the University of Chicago. She is the author of recent articles on the American architects Bertrand Goldberg, Stanley Tigerman, and M. Paul Friedberg and last spring co-curated, with four Public Humanities Center graduate students, The Providence Album, Vol I, an exhibition of the photographs of Harry Callahan and Carmel Vitullo of Providence in the 1960s.