Terry Berlier (M.F.A.,’03) has been awarded a Faculty Creative Project Seed Grant from Stanford University to support a new project to re-envision the 19th-century statue of renowned scholar of natural historian Louis Agassiz, once installed at Stanford University.

During the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the statue fell from the second floor of the zoology building, burying Agassiz’s upturned body in the ground. In 2020, the statue was removed after student-led requests sought its removal based on objections to Agassiz’s promotion of polygenism.

Berlier’s project — “Tonic Immobility” — will be a series of sculptures, installations, and performances exploring the intersections of queerness, ecology, memory, monuments, and archives based on the history of the Agassiz sculpture. Berlier’s project will take this object/statue as her starting point to perform an exorcism to remove its racist history.