Mellon-funded project will create monuments and public art
The Paterson silk industry employed immigrant workers from Europe and the Middle East.
A Rutgers University labor historian wants to change the debate on immigrant workers.
Andy UrbanAndy Urban has kicked off a three-year Mellon Foundation-funded effort to create public art exhibits, monument installations, and educational and cultural programs that recognize the contributions of immigrant and migrant workers in New Jersey.
“Having art in public spaces that remind people of the grand contributions of migrants as workers will go a long way toward changing the debate and changing perceptions,” Urban said. “We want to create things that get people talking and discussing immigration and labor in a nuanced and deep way.”
Urban, a professor of American studies and history, said migrant workers across generations have helped the New Jersey economy thrive, yet have seldom been recognized for their hard work.
In Paterson, immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Mideast worked the silk mills that turned the region into an industrial powerhouse. At the Jersey Shore, Black Americans recruited from the Chesapeake Bay region shucked oysters for the booming seafood industry. In Central Jersey, Latinos have kept the economic engine humming, working in factories, warehouses and restaurants.
Urban said it’s high time for a public reckoning with that history.
The project, he added, is particularly timely in 2025 as stepped-up ICE raids throughout the nation target immigrant communities.
“I have always been painfully aware just walking around communities that there are few monuments or museums that foreground the perspective of these workers,” Urban said. “It represents a real loss if we take seriously that it’s monuments and museums where people do the work of remembering the past.”
Ánh AdamsArmed with a $1.08 million grant from Mellon, Urban and his team, which includes Rutgers post-doc Arlene Fernandez and doctoral student Ánh Adams, kicked off the New Jersey Monuments to Migration and Labor project over spring and summer 2025, meeting with community stakeholders, immigrant advocacy groups, and museums across the state to discuss how to share the stories through public art.
The project is wide in scope, aiming to cover many groups who worked in multiple professions across generations. The 18 meetings took place in in libraries, churches, and museums as Urban and his team met with Asian Americans, Latinos, Arab Americans and many others.
A discussion at the Jersey City Free Library in the Journal Square area, for example, focused on the late-1960s wave of South Asians and Filipinas recruited by the Jersey City Medical Center to fill nursing trainee positions.
A meeting at a South Jersey museum—Bayshore Center at Bivalve—focused on the laborers who worked in the oyster houses and boats in the 1930s and 1940s.
“We brought in descendants of people who worked in the industry during its heyday,” Urban said. “They brought in artifacts, photographs and mental maps of communities that no longer exist, which they used as prompts to share memories.”
In Newark the group met with representatives of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.
“That was a really exciting collaboration,” says Adams, who served as a public humanities intern on the project. “They all came in their National Domestic Workers Alliance shirts, and there was a strong spirit of camaraderie.”
This pile of oyster shells in New Jersey is testament to the thriving oyster industry in New Jersey. Photo credit: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives.What the monuments will look like, and where they’ll be located, are still being worked out. But Urban say the finished work may take many different forms and will likely be portable. There will be three separate projects, one for each of three regions of New Jersey.
“They are not building stone statues that will then exist in perpetuity,” he said. “These are meant to be temporary artwork installations, and they might travel form site to site.”
The project entered a new phase in the late September with the announcement of the three artists who will design and build the monument installations. The artists are, moving North to South: Michelle Angela Ortiz, Chat Travieso, and Immanuel Oni. (Travieso is the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts.)
The artists, who were selected by a jury of artists, scholars, curators, and community activists, will now collaborate with community groups during three public meetings to develop a design concept and then make it available for public review and feedback.
Adams, the intern, said the artists seem well suited to the task.
“One thing that stood out to us about each of these artists is that they were very much committed to community-based public art,” Adams said. “All of their projects started with ideas that they had gathered from the communities they worked in.”
The monuments are expected to be installed in the summer of 2026 with on-site cultural programming, such as music, dance, and theater performances. An academic conference on the project will be held at Rutgers during the 2026-2027 academic year.
Several key community groups are serving as regional leads on the project, including, coLAB Arts, the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center, the Noyes Art Museum of Stockton University and Newest
Americans and its director, Rutgers-Newark Professor Tim Raphael.
Beyond all the educational and artistic goals, Urban said he hopes the project will simply spur New Jerseyans to reconnect with their own civic spaces.
“I think there is a goal of reclaiming public spaces in a time of fear, and also a time of disengagement, whether it’s because of technology or still lingering habits from the pandemic,” he said. “These monument installations are going to be vibrant places.”