In the heart of Bryn Mawr’s cloisters, a new monument invites the community to reflect on the College’s legacy and remember individuals whose contributions have long gone unacknowledged.
Don’t Forget to Remember (Me), an installation by Washington, D.C.-based artist Nekisha Durrett, weaves together light, earth, and memory to honor the lives and labor of Black students and staff. At its center is a braided pathway of engraved pavers and illuminated stones, shaped like a knot that “cannot be undone.” It’s a visual metaphor for interconnection and a reminder that, as Durrett puts it, “these histories are embedded, […] literally and figuratively braided into the landscape here.”
The title, Don’t Forget to Remember (Me), comes from a song that has been recorded across generations since the 1930s. Durrett imagined what it might have meant for someone like Enid Cook, the first Black woman to graduate from Bryn Mawr, who had to walk nearly a mile to campus each day because she was barred from living in the dorms. “I thought, what if someone asked her what her class song would be? What would she choose?”
Working with the College archivist and student researchers, Durrett identified the names of more than 250 Black staff members who worked at Bryn Mawr between 1900 and 1930. Their names now appear on the engraved pavers, drawn from salvaged time cards that were nearly destroyed in a fire in the 1960s. “Someone had the good sense to rescue them,” Durrett said. “That’s kind of what I do; I take these mundane objects and extract more meaning from them than most would assign.”
The installation is a commissioned piece in Bryn Mawr’s ARCH Project (Art Remediating Campus Histories), part of the College’s broader efforts to reckon with its institutional legacy and history of racial exclusion.
Durrett’s creative process starts with research, but also involves her “spidey-senses” which went wild when she stepped inside the cloisters. The installation, which took shape after conversations with students, archivists, and College staff, sits above what were once known as “servant tunnels,” historically used by Black workers to move invisibly beneath campus buildings. “There was just something charged about this place,” she said. “It felt like the space that needed to be activated.”
Her experience on the student-led Black at Bryn Mawr tour was “illuminating,” and shaped the direction of the artwork. “It’s one thing to read all this on the website or in the archives, but to actually be led around by students who have felt in their bones what it’s like to walk into a space like this […] that changed everything for me.” One of the tour guides wore long braids, which became a powerful symbol for the installation. “I thought about braids being a ‘protective’ style” for Black women because “the strands are stronger together than they are apart.”
Light is central to the piece as well. To Durrett, lights represent the names of all the Black men and women laborers and students whose names have been “lost to time and memory.” Reflecting on her own experience as a Black woman working in predominantly white spaces, she added, “It’s those familiar faces in a sea of the unknown that you’re guided towards.”
Durrett was clear that the work is not an endpoint, but a beginning. She wants the piece to be a reminder to remain strong in the face of erasure that is “so out in the open, so violent” in universities, which are places that are looked to as “beacons” and where “revolutionary thought and activism” take place. It’s important to remember that the fight is ongoing.
Now that the installation is complete, she hopes that the stories of the artwork “stay embedded in the minds, hearts, and souls” of the viewers and serve “as a constant reminder of the struggle to keep these histories alive.”
A dedication and celebration of the monument will take place on April 24, where the artwork will be unveiled to the public for the first time.
