is Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese’s public art project of words carved in ice. Since 2006 Ligorano and Reese have installed 7 different sculptures in 11 different cities across the United States at the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions and other political events, including the 79th anniversary of the Great Depression in 2008, the Peoples Climate March in 2014 and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings in 2018. These event based installations are performative and durational. No one ever really knows when and what will happen except that the sculptures eventually disappear and melt away.

On October 15, 2025, Nora and Marshall are returning to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to install their latest temporary monument of Democracy. The installation measures 17 ft x 5 feet high and weighs over 3,000 pounds. The word carved in ice will melt away and disappear over 10-12 hours. The event launches at 12 Noon with a press conference featuring the artists, Rev. William H. Lamar IV, Tariq Habash, Senator Nina Turner and Rob Weisman.

Last Call – DemocracyICED will be on 3rd Street, NW between Madison and Jefferson Drives, NW.

Melted Away is a documentary poem. Its physical transformation of words and language makes poetry come alive, off the page into physical space onto the ground.

Throughout Last Call – DemocracyICED an ensemble of DC/Baltimore poets and writers will give voice to historian Heather Cox Richardson’s October 2025 daily entries from her Letters from an American on the half-hour from 2 pm until the sculpture disappears. Professor Richardson’s chronicles are acute measures of the Democracy sculpture’s existence.