Team
With leadership based in Indianapolis, we bring together creative talents from the worlds of art, design, architecture, and landscape design. The group seeks to transform public spaces through the addition of ambitious art experiences that invite conversation, amplify voices, and celebrate histories.
How can we think through Indianapolis’ present by looking at its past? What lies under its history that belies an even deeper relevance as we think of public memory, monument development, historic remembrance, and placemaking in Indianapolis?
Rasul A. Mowatt
Sarah Urist Green
Artistic Director
Sarah Urist Green is a curator and art educator based in Indianapolis. Through her work in online education, Green demystifies the worlds of 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 that grew to include over 675,000 subscribers and has more than 35 million views. Her book You Are an Artist (2020) brings together assignments devised by some of the most innovative artists working today, helping thousands of “aspiring artists and makers to open their imaginations and begin to create,” as NPR put it.
Green’s curatorial work since 2020 has focused on building infrastructure for impactful public art experience in Indianapolis. She is the former curator of contemporary art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where she organized the exhibitions Graphite and Andy Warhol Enterprises, among others, and was instrumental in developing The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park: 100 Acres.
She holds a bachelor of arts from Northwestern University and a master of arts 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.
Merritt Chase
Design Director
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
Cultural Equity Director
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 is the founder and principal planner at Rokh.
Rasul A. Mowatt
Research Director
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.
Jordan Ryan
Cultural Researcher
Jordan Ryan is an architectural historian, archivist and activist-scholar, currently working on built environment, land use, and other site-specific projects under the independent consulting firm, The History Concierge. They currently serve as the first City-County Archivist for the City of Indianapolis, managing local government records compliance and access. They have a master’s degree in public history from Indiana University-Indianapolis and a bachelor’s degree in art history from Herron School of Art and Design. Their scholarship revolves around local archives, the built environment, urban planning, historic preservation, marginalized communities, and spatial equity.
Additional Team
Landmark Columbus Foundation
Abigail Flout Operations Coordinator
Hadley Fruits Photographer
Laura Garrett Director of Partnerships
Jamie Goldsborough Creative Director
Jessica Thorpe Urban Strategist
Seeking Partners
Monumental Gestures is actively seeking partners who share our aspiration to create world-class, transformative cultural amenities for the city of Indianapolis.
The type of work we are pursuing is ambitious and rigorously thoughtful, underpinned by the belief that our city will be meaningfully improved by the addition of bold, accessible, and free art experiences in truly public spaces.
We offer potential partners a deep curiosity about what makes our city’s spaces and neighborhoods distinct, historically and today. We bring with us a respectful awareness of the political nature of public space, along with a deep desire to listen to the many stakeholders and communities who are impacted by our work.