Glossary
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Memorial

An artwork or structure created to keep the memory of a person, group, or event present in public life. Remembrance is its explicit purpose.

"Memorial" and "monument" overlap, but the centre of gravity differs: a memorial centres loss and remembrance, a monument celebrates achievement or power, and a single work can be both. The distinction shows up in form: Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982), a cut of polished black granite holding fifty-eight thousand names, reset expectations for what remembrance looks like, and contemporary memorials have trended ever since toward spaces you enter rather than figures you look up at.

Memorials also demand the most careful community engagement in the field, because the community isn't an audience: it's the bereaved.