Last spring, the University of Virginia School of Architecture’s Center for Cultural Landscapes took a timely and in-depth look at one of the most important issues in our culture today in its inaugural symposium Race and Public Space: Commemorative Practices in the American South. The event, funded by a generous gift from noted UVA alum and Arts Council member Cary Brown Epstein (College ‘84), began with a keynote presentation by internationally-acclaimed scholar and former UVA professor Dell Upton, Chair of the Art History Department at UCLA. The symposium presented a series of lectures and workshops featuring speakers from within and outside the UVA community covering a wide range of topics. The workshop served as the kickoff for the University’s Institute for Environmental Negotiation’s initiative aimed at developing guidance for communities and institutions seeking to tell a more complete racial history and expand the narrative through the representation of their past history, identity, and values. “We are so grateful to Cary Brown Epstein, who endowed the UVA Sarah Shallenberger Brown Cultural Landscapes and Sites Initiative, for her vision and generosity that allowed us to host this important symposium,” said Elizabeth K. Meyer, FASLA, the Merrill D. Peterson Professor of Landscape Architecture and the Director of the Center for Cultural Landscapes at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. The event received additional support from BNSF Railway. “This year’s inaugural symposium sought new design and planning tactics for altering, modifying, and transforming contested sites of memory – public parks, squares, plazas and boulevards – that commemorate figures and institutions associated with racial separation and oppression,” Meyer said. “A cultural landscape approach also opens up ways to add new narratives to existing sites through design tactics of addition and alteration. We were heartened and inspired by the talks and the panel discussions as they expanded our horizons beyond the often-debated approaches of artifact preservation or demolition/removal.”