After narrowing down the possibilities to seven projects in the Bronx, he chose Forest Houses — a cluster of high-rise buildings completed in 1956, housing 3,376 people — largely because of the enthusiasm of Mr. Farmer, 43, who has lived there almost his entire life and functions as the nerve center for the development. In constant motion around its grounds in a motorized wheelchair (he lost the use of his legs in a car accident when he was in college), Mr. Farmer seems to know everyone who lives in its buildings and to command, if not authority, at least respect.

He was one of the only people to ask Mr. Hirschhorn for Gramsci’s writings while considering the monument proposal. And when he and Clyde Thompson, the complex’s director of community affairs, embraced the idea, Mr. Hirschhorn said, he felt that he had found partners — in the cosmology of his art work, he calls them “key figures” — who would be able to help him see the monument through.

Mr. Farmer said he decided to make a persuasive case for Forest Houses not only because the monument would provide temporary construction and security jobs for residents, but because he hoped that it could mean more for the development.

“There’s nothing cultural here at all,” he said one afternoon in early June as he watched Mr. Hirschhorn and several residents hard at work on the monument’s plywood foundation. “It’s like we’re in a box here, in this neighborhood. We need to get out and find out some things about the world. This is kind of like the world coming to us for a little while.”

(At the project’s end, the monument will not be packed up and reconstituted as an artwork to sell or show elsewhere; the materials will be given to Forest Houses residents in a lottery.)

Over the last two months, I spent several days watching Mr. Hirschhorn as he plotted out the monument in consultation with Mr. Farmer, whose job, among others, was to hire residents as temporary employees of the Dia Art Foundation, which is financing the project. (Those helping to build and staff the monument are being paid $12 an hour; the state’s minimum wage is currently $7.25 an hour.)