The phrase “pulling together” comes from educator and activist Mary McLeod Bethune’s account of how Anderson’s concert “told a story of hope for tomorrow — a story of triumph — a story of pulling together, a story of splendor and real democracy.”

“Over time, artists have come to us on an ad hoc basis,” says Teresa Durkin, executive vice president of the Trust for the National Mall. So the trust decided to undertake a pilot program to place temporary artworks on the Mall, the first time a curated multi-artist program has been exhibited there. The goal, Durkin says, was to try “to learn everything that we can by actually installing six different pieces across the whole length of the National Mall, all at once, in a curated exhibit.”

The idea began with the National Capital Planning Commission, which has long wrestled with the demand to place new landmarks on the Mall’s increasingly crowded 700 acres. NCPC and the trust agreed to experiment with a solution, Durkin says, “for this problem of ultimately not having enough land, if we continue to build permanent memorials on the National Mall.” The two organizations together applied for a $4.5 million Mellon Foundation grant to fund the undertaking.

Stop building museums on the National Mall

To curate the project, the trust selected the Monument Lab, a Philadelphia nonprofit organization whose director is Paul M. Farber, also a senior research scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. As co-curator, he enlisted Salamishah Tillet, a professor and administrator at Rutgers University Newark and a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic-at-large for the New York Times.

“This was an opportunity to think about artists from a variety of practices, a variety of backgrounds,” Farber says, “who would answer the question that is at the center of this project — what stories remain untold on the National Mall? — in distinct but complementary ways.”

In choosing sites for the installations, the curators had to follow National Park Service guidelines and yield to practical considerations. All but one of the artworks will be on a hard, flat surface that can handle installation machinery, but several pieces will be placed near existing Mall features to which they respond.

Artist Vanessa German took on the subject of Anderson’s concert with a statue titled “Of Thee We Sing.” The other artists are Derrick Adams, Tiffany Chung, Ashon T. Crawley, Paul Ramírez Jonas and Wendy Red Star.

Red Star’s “The Soil You See … ” speaks to the ignored or abrogated U.S. treaties with Native Americans and will stand on Signers Island in Constitution Gardens, near the memorial to the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The piece is a seven-foot-high glass thumbprint that represents the many Crow chiefs who signed such treaties with a thumbprint.

“The ridges of the thumbprint are red, and in between the ridges it’s clear, and within the ridges are all the names of the different chiefs who signed those treaties between 1825 and 1880,” says Red Star, who grew up on a Crow reservation in Montana.

Chung’s “For the Living” is a world map of the routes taken by refugees from Southeast Asia in the 1970s. It purposefully lacks national boundaries, the Vietnam-born artist notes. “The map is from that particular refugee migration out of Southeast Asia after the war, but I want to open it up so that people can reflect on their own journeys.”

Two of the pieces rely on sound. Ramírez Jonas’s “Let Freedom Ring” is an automated carillon that plays 41 notes of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” but leaves the 42nd note to a 600-pound bell that can be struck by visitors. “In a way, it’s a very straightforward thing,” Jonas says. “If you participate, the song is complete. And if you do not participate, the song is unfinished.”

Crawley’s “Homegoing” is a three-station memorial to AIDS victims, especially musicians, singers and choir directors from the Black Pentecostal tradition in which the artist was raised. The music was written or co-written by Crawley, who teaches at the University of Virginia.

Crawley — who is writing a book about the Hammond organ, the AIDS crisis, Black churches and popular culture — says he sees the sound installation as “the performance of the book … and a way to engage a different kind of audience that might not be interested in reading the book but would be interested in listening to some of the sonic materials.”

Adams’s “America’s Playground: DC” is an interactive piece that features at its center a large reproduction of a photograph of one of the first desegregated play areas in D.C. To Adams, playgrounds are inherently political.

“It’s a place where you have to learn negotiation,” he says. “It’s a place where you have to learn to take turns. It’s a place where you understand leadership, and take risks.”

While Adams’s piece turns on a single photo, German’s collage-statue of Anderson features many, including multiple views of the singer’s face and scenes of the diverse crowd at her 1939 concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Also incorporated are images of Sandhof lilies, which flower occasionally in a small area of Africa; hanging blue bottles like those the artist says were used by enslaved Africans on the Gullah “to capture evil spirits”; and a bodice trimmed with the notes to one of the songs Anderson performed, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”

The assemblage, German says, embodies “that sense of fight and spirit and love and just grit that makes you want to keep going.”

Of all the artists, German was the least impressed by her initial experience of the Mall. “Very cold,” she recalls. “A lot about war and men.”

Red Star first visited the Mall in 2018 but saw it anew when surveying it with the Monument Lab curators and her fellow artists last fall.

“What I noticed is that there really isn’t any color represented on the Mall,” she says. “That was surprising to me. Everything is, like, the color of the natural materials the monuments are made of,” she says. “So my thumbprint is red.”

Chung’s response to the Mall’s grandiosity was to devise the only installation that will hug the earth. “I want to create something that is not like a humongous, larger-than-life monument that reaches to the sky,” she says. “Instead, I would like to spread it onto the ground.”

“Monuments are my métier,” says Ramírez Jonas, who’s a professor and department chair at Cornell University, so he visits the Mall frequently. “It’s one of the few places in the country where people are deliberately visiting that site to look at monuments. Most of the time, people encounter monuments incidentally.

“Monuments should be open, so each individual can input what they think is significant,” he adds. “We have an ever-changing composition of our population. But we don’t have monumental forms that speak to that.”

For a month, “Beyond Granite: Pulling Together” will try to do just that. The attempt could lead to profound experiences, co-curator Tillet suggests.

“There’s an opportunity as you go from artwork to artwork,” she says, “or if you just sit in front of one of them, to really meditate, in community of other people at the Mall, what it means to be American, what it means to be at the Mall at this moment, and really for all of us to pull together to live up to the promise that the Mall has meant for so many people.”

Beyond Granite: Pulling Together Aug. 18-Sept. 18 at various locations on the National Mall. beyondgranite.org/exhibition.