Projects

Public and off-site work: projects that live in the world, in the ground, and in the landscape, beyond the gallery.

Queer American Memorials

Queer American Memorials places interactive geo-markers at the sites where queer people were murdered between 1999 and 2009, the decade Congress debated the inclusion of LGBTQ people in the National Hate Crimes Bill.

The memorial system, designed by Sean Fader, pairs a dyed ceramic brick set permanently into the ground or wall, a carved waveλlength mark connecting the 1970 gay liberation lambda to the physics of light and the rainbow flag, and an augmented reality layer that holds each story. Developed with Maureen Towey, Michael Murphy and MASS Design Group’s Public Memory and Memorials Lab, and Julie Rhoad.

Visit queeramericanmemorials.com ↗

Insufficient Memory

A live, web-based memorial in Google Earth. Fader drove 25,000 miles to photograph the unmarked sites where LGBTQ+ people were murdered in 1999 and 2000; each pin on the map opens a photograph of the site and the story of the person killed there, researched over eighteen months with librarians across the country.

The photographs were made with a Sony Mavica, the popular consumer digital camera of the years of the murders. Insufficient Memory is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.

Open the Google Earth tour ↗ Project page