Hulu to erect monuments to famous women, and only sort of as a complex Handmaid's Tale promotion
Hulu isn’t really known for making a physical impact on the real world, since it’s a streaming service that just pumps out content into the atmosphere where your internet devices can suck it all up and put it on screens. Thanks to a new equality initiative, though, future generations living in a Mad Max wasteland with no streams or content whatsoever may still be able to find reminders that there was not only a thing called Hulu, but that the thing called Hulu cared about important women in American history. That’s because, according to The Hollywood Reporter, Hulu is working with artist Saya Woolfalk to launch Made By Her: Monuments, a new project that involves setting up monuments honoring Coretta Scott King, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The Hollywood Reporter story takes some time getting to the why of all this (beyond the fact that these women deserve monuments), but it all seems to stem from a campaign that Hulu launched to promote season three of The Handmaid’s Tale called The Shape Of History that involved setting up “temporary exhibits of mirrored female statues” in four cities to balance out the dramatic disparity in this country between statues of men and statues of women. Now, rather than putting up temporary statues, these monuments will be donated to the public art collections of the cities where they’re being constructed, adding to the number of woman-honoring statues in the United States.
The Coretta Scott King monument will be built in Atlanta and will feature “a hand-crafted sculpture of microphones on a mosaic tile plinth as a reminder of the power of using one’s voice.” The Marjory Stoneman Douglas one will be in Miami, offering “a space to sit in repose while surrounded by nature.” Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was a New Yorker before she started working in Washington D.C., will naturally have her monument constructed in Los Angeles. It hasn’t been unveiled yet, but THR says it will be built at the Van Nuys Civic Center at “what was once a center of Jewish communal life.” The preview images that have been released don’t show if there will be any kind of plaque commemorating the exciting things you can see on Hulu, but maybe that’s what news stories like this are for? Did we get tricked into promoting Hulu?