Growing up in Vietnam after the war, artist Tiffany Chung remembers being surrounded by monuments honoring heroic soldiers from North Vietnam, but also feeling disconnected from the towering pillars.

“I felt that monuments in general didn’t have much to do with ordinary citizens,” Chung, whose work appears in Beyond Granite: Pulling Together, tells City Paper. “This war killed so many people: the Americans, the Vietnamese, Laotians, Hmong, Cambodians. There were a lot of lives taken. I always wondered why there was no mention of ordinary people—or the other side.”

Beyond Granite: Pulling Together, premiering Aug. 18 on the National Mall, seeks to engage with this question of which stories, people, and histories are left out of our monuments. Beyond Granite also explores how to reveal more of the truths that lie beyond the marble facades spread across the Mall’s 700 acres. The exhibit features the bespoke creations of six contemporary artists, including Chung, and marks the first time a curated, outdoor collection will open to the public on the historic grounds. 

Julie Moore, vice president of communications at the Trust for the National Mall, described the pilot project as an opportunity to test the power of temporary art to inspire change, prompt reflection, and continuously weave new narratives into the “sacred” landscape. 

“This is a way of sharing new stories, perspectives, and memories, in a meaningful way,” Moore says, “and also protecting that grand, open space.”

The installations, which vary in style, will be spread out across the Mall, each placed near a memorial it’s in dialogue with. 

For example, Wendy Red Star’s glassy sculpture, titled “The Soil You See…,” is a stark, bright thumbprint, textured with the names, in a fiery red, of the Apsáalooke nation chiefs who signed treaties with the U.S. from 1825 to 1880 to protect their land and freedom, reflecting—and refracting—the adjacent 56 Signers of the Declaration of Independence Memorial. 

Nearby, Derrick Adams’ interactive playground tells the story of desegregation here in D.C. And next to the Washington Monument, Ashon T. Crawley’s “HOMEGOING” is a sonic memorial to the AIDS crisis, with a spiritual maze of tranquil blue honoring the lives of Black queer musicians who died of AIDS. Near the Smithsonian Metro, Paul Ramírez Jonas’ aptly titled interactive bell tower, “Let Freedom Ring,” is what he describes as an “empty monument,” a structure inviting—and necessitating—audience participation that will change with time, just as America does. And near the Lincoln Memorial, vanessa german imagined a soaring portrait of singer Marian Anderson, planted where she sang on Easter Sunday in 1939 after being barred from Constitution Hall due to segregation. German’s statue is a loving collage of flowers, uplifted arms, and mirrors, which together she describes as a “monument to the human heart.”

Chung’s cartographic embroidery sits near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a sprawling piece of land art with rainbow threads tracing the routes of Southeast Asian immigrants and refugees following the Vietnam War. It’s the result of years of research gained from traveling the world, digging through archives in search of lost data and stories detailing the journeys people were forced to endure at the hands of the violent conflict. Her design began by “thinking about the living,” she says, and all those “ordinary” people her younger self saw to be missing.

“For me, it was another take on the project,” she says. “I want to really deconstruct monuments; it is not threatening, it is not me over you, it is not making you feel so little and insignificant. I want the map to be so relatable. In fact, it’s on the landscape, on the ground.”

Since Aug. 8, she’s been on site with her team of landscapers, all women, with their tools and tenacity, as Chung put it, literally carving new lines and routes into the Mall’s contours.

“And who knows?” she asks. “Grass will grow over the lines. Soil will be washed away in the rain. It’s really about the brevity of life on earth, of what we will become when we go away from this world. I think monuments should be about us as well, so the title is ‘For the Living.’”

Beyond Granite: Pulling Together runs through Sept. 18 along the National Mall. See website for a map of the exhibit and the schedule of special events accompanying each project. beyondgranite.org. Free.