Paul Farber serves as Senior Research Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Public Art & Space. In 2012, together with Ken Lum, he founded Monument Lab, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit art and history studio. Monument Lab works with artists, students, educators, activists, municipal agencies, and cultural institutions on participatory approaches to public engagement and collective memory. The studio and its research team spent a year producing the National Monument Audit, scouring almost a half million records of historic properties created and maintained by federal, state, local, tribal, institutional, and publicly assembled sources.

They found that, despite their ubiquity, monuments tend to misrepresent the facts of history, skewing overwhelmingly white and male and celebrating moments of war and conquest more than anything else. Their findings have deep implications for how memory is engaged and represented in public space.