Welcome to the Providence Commemoration Lab
Funded by the Mellon Foundation and the American Rescue Plan, The Providence Commemoration Lab was a program co-administered by The Department of Art, Culture and Tourism (ACT) and the Rhode Island Historical Society (RIHS). From 2023-2025 The Lab sited and staged new, temporary projects on public property that invited unexpected ways of understanding commemoration as a communal process of historical redress and spatial reclamation.
ACT and RIHS commissioned nine creative practitioners to interrogate the ways that Providence residents construct and share memory and culture at three distinct sites: Columbus Square, Roger Williams Park, and Public Street.
Nine, twelve-month (one-year) artist residencies began in spring 2024. The total budget for the Providence Commemoration Lab was 1.4 million dollars and was spent down over two years.
As of 2026, this site exists as an archive to the project. We hope you explore it with the awareness that, like so much of what has come before, the information contained here is limited by what we were able to collect in the moment and often not updated in fullness.
If any of the projects or artists captivate you, we hope you take the time to get to know the rest of their body of work outside of this website.
Below find links to posts from the PCL Instagram feed. Click through to access readable text ALT-text and additional information.
