Carlos Diaz Exhibition Panel Discussion

In support of Carlos Diaz’s When The Land Speaks exhibition at the College for Creative Studies’ Center Galleries, this panel will focus on how Confederate monuments have long stood at the center of public debates about history, identity, and power in the American South. The conversation will explore how these monuments were created, interpreted, contested and reimagined over time. We examine the origins of Confederate memorialization, the myths of the Lost Cause that shaped their narratives, and how these monuments have served the politics of the nineteenth century to the present.

Panelists will discuss how communities have understood these monuments, as heritage, as historical artifacts, as tools of racial hierarchy, or as flashpoints for contemporary activism and how shifting public memory continues to reshape the landscape. By placing Confederate monuments within broader conversations about myth making, civic identity, and the ethics of commemoration, this discussion invites a deeper understanding of what societies choose to remember, what they choose to forget, and how those choices influence the future of public history.

Panelists include Carlos Diaz, Michael Stone-Richards, and Lance Wheeler, and the event will be moderated by Dora Apel.

Parking is available to the general public at the CCS Brush Street lot (on Brush just north of Frederick).