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Monuments are very much in the air these days sometimes quite literally as you can see in our title graphic for the exhibition featuring the monument to John C Calhoun lifted from its pedestal in charleston, South Carolina in 2020. And in our own immediate neighborhood in new york city, you might think of the Theodore Roosevelt monument recently removed from the steps of the American Museum of Natural History or earlier actually just before this exhibition opened and it is being moved to the new Theodore Roosevelt president ial library in north dakota, which is set to open in 2026. There is also the statue of Jay Marion Sims who in his Gynecological Research operated on black women without their consent and without anesthesia that monument was moved from central park on east 103rd street and is now located in Greenwood Cemetery in brooklyn where sims is buried and then theres the Thomas Jefferson monument remove from New York City Hall and now on longterm loan to us at the New York Historical society. It was installed in our lobby just last week. There has been a lot of justifiably heated debate over these and other monuments and the aim of this exhibition is to provide a space to think critically and to think contextually about this very difficult subject and more specifically to show that these controversies which feel so of the moment. In fact have a very long history that dates back to the founding of our nation. Thats why we begin with this vandalized 18th century monument to william pitt, which you see on the left hand side of this installation shot set against photographs of monuments and contemporary protests against them the point of this juxtaposition is really to immediately draw that connection between past and present controversies and also to give those controversies the weight of history the pit statue originally stood at the intersection of william and wall streets in lower manhattan. It had been installed by colonists in honor of the english statesman who had helped them repeal the stamp act saying in his a famous speech to parliament in 1766 that i rejoice that america has resisted as one person expressed their gratitude in verse i think the pit for all thy glorious strife against the foes of liberty and life. So here was this proud monument to a supporter of the colonists, but then the british took possession of new york city during the revolutionary war and from their perspective in the heat of battle between the empire and her colonies the monument read differently here was a statue of someone who had stir the colonists to revolution. So while no one knows for sure precisely who damaged this sculpture. It was almost certainly british soldiers. They beheaded the statue and broke off its arms divesting pit of the very tools of what he was most famous for his oratory his capacity for speech and gesture. This was a very pointed desecration. So this statute introduces the exhibition out signed the gallery and then inside the gallery we feature a series of what im calling vignettes. Each of these vignettes is centered around a small scale version of a specific monument and they move through history around the gallery from the nations founding to the present day. So i thought i would you through these vignettes. We began with this one centered around a all scale recreation of a monument to king george the third that was once installed in Bowling Green in lower manhattan. The original monument was dedicated in 1770 and if you know Bowling Green, you know that this monument is no longer there. What happened . Is that on july 9th 1776 new york colonists and continental soldiers gathered in what is now a city hall park. And they listened to a public reading of the freshly written declaration of independence, which was a document outlining 26 indictments listing the repeated injuries and user patients of a king unfit to be the ruler of a free people who unleashed tyranny over these states the crowd heard the indictments and the people became impassioned and they grew emboldened and in a wave of revolutionary forward they marched down broadway to Bowling Green with their sights set on the monument to the king and imposing statue weighing 4,000 pounds guilt to reflect the sun elevated on a marble pedestal 18 feet off the ground and showing king george presiding in his classical robes and laurel crown like an emperor over the colony. And so as johannes hurdle pictures here the colonists tore down the monument and the tyranny it represented. This was an act of symbolic overthrow. They pulled the statue from its pedestal. They chopped off the head. They shot the head with a musket they intended to set it on a spike near Fort Washington like that of a common criminal they smashed the rest of the statue into pieces. They scraped off the the gilding from the lead and then they carted those remaining lead pieces off to connecticut to be made into bullets precisely 42,000 and 88 of them to be used by the Continental Army the new york postmaster described these bullets as melted majesty. That would be fired at the kings own troops. You can see this transformation of the monument into musket balls in our display where we place a small scale recreation of the statue next to one of the surviving fragments of the original sculpture. The horses tail and a set of bullets excavated from a revolutionary war barracks. The question that this vignette evokes is one that is constantly being posed today in our current culture wars is removing monuments a means of making history or erasing history on the one hand. You have a removal that harkins back to the ancient roman process of demaccio memorial or condemnation of memory. This is a scrubbing of people from history. It included the destruction of images and the removal of names in an effort to erase all public traces of the dishonored person and expunge them from the public record. Is an effort resonant perhaps today with our socalled canceled culture . On the other hand the destruction of this symbol of monarchical rule was both foundational two and expressive of the making by the people of a new and democratic nation and by demolishing the monument effectively, the colonists were creating a new monument. They left the empty marble pedestal up. For over 40 years in Bowling Green and it stood there as a as a reminder of the revolution and of their hard one liberation. So weve just looked at the nations founding in the first vignette. And the next vignette is about remembering that this nation was founded upon someone elses land as a settler colonial state. It centers on a statuette by John Quincy Adams ward, you might recognize the statuette from its larger than lifesize version that stands in central park at the south and of the mall. Is an elegant sculpture it contains these gorgeous textural contrast that you can see here between the two sides of the hide and the figure is posture evokes that of the ancient greek sculpture the borghese gladiator. Its defined by this strong diagonal and long stride. But this celebration of a young and free roaming indigenous hunter was completely at odds with the reality of the indigenous situation in the mid 19th century when the United States was brutally subjugating Indigenous People through violence forced assimilation and land displacement and thats really the purpose of the larger vignette to contextualize and complicate the statue wards romanticized hunter is set against a map of the us reservation system. And in conversation with a painting of the new england pilgrims who appear in this installation to be walking across the continent to be walking across the map armed with rifles and bibles in pursuit of their manifest destiny to settle this land. And the framing the entire vignette are the words of the indigenous poet Laverne White bear whos searing verse directly addresses the pilgrims her poem speaks of the invasion of the dakota homelands as well as to the pilgrims oppression of Indigenous Peoples following their own escape from oppression and the title savages is meant to upend that racist slur to honor a people who have been forced to fight for their lives. Here is Laverne White bear reading her poem. Here here is a dakota sun who bears a white mans face. And there there are their men women and children. From where did you come . Escaping. Were you . Did you steal respect and honor to . Even our children cast in stone. You stole their stories and made them your own. Porcelain beauties high children beneath falls of wool sucking their lips to hasten their will is that fear upon your face . Did you not covet this sacred place . The land where children of the stars live the place where time began. She she is their mother in a macaw. They respect and honor her none other. Who do you fear the savages . Oh, yes, its true. Remain afraid i say for ignorance requires. No skill. As you scurry along the trail making your prayers without fail. Ask yourself this who should you fear in the lakes beautiful mirror . And do they look like you . I personally find the shift from who do you fear to who should you fear . Im quite thoughtprovoking. The third vignette is a group of objects that continues this theme of nation and race and to some extent immigration. It explores the statue of liberty and the significance of this grouping really rests on the tension between these two juxtaposed hands. One of the hands is a largescale reproduction of a drawing of the statue of libertys torchbearing arm when it went on display in philadelphia before it came here to Madison Square park, and the other is a contemporary cain featuring a black hand emerging from the image of a supplicant enslaved person and breaking its own chain. This juxtaposition is meant to call attention to the gap between the ideals upheld by this iconic monument to liberty and lived reality of Many Americans at the time of its conception in the late 19th century today, of course, the statue of liberty is understood as a monument to immigration, but this is a relatively new association crafted in the early 20th century. The statue was originally conceived of by a french abolitionist in the wake of the us civil war to honor the triumph of enlightenment ideals in the United States particularly as they were realized in Union Victory and in the abolition of slavery an early model by the sculpture, which you see on the right in fact shows lady Liberty Holding in her hand. Not a tablet but a broken shackle symbolic of emancipation. The final version of the statue does still incorporate chains, which actually sliced through by the head of an ax but they lie at lady. Libertys feet tucked mostly beneath her robes where they are hardly visible except from a helicopter. The fact of the matter is that the statue hesitated to embrace the most radical potential of freedom in the wake of the civil war namely racial freedom. Imagine if lady liberty were black. Imagine how galvanizing that would have been when the statue was unveiled in 1886 by which time jim crow was seizing the nation crushing the gains of reconstruction through the legalization and segregate of segregation and brutal violence towards black americans ultimately this monument retreated from race when the acclaimed civil rights activist w e b dubois sailed into new york harbor in 1894 only eight years after the statues unveiling he described the monument as having its back to america. And the incisiveness of this description comes across very clearly when you understand that du bois had been sailing on a segregated ship. That same disjunction between reality and the ideals espoused by the monument is expressed in the vignettes framing poem. Its called fettered liberty. Its by Esther A Yates and it was published in the official magazine of the naacp in 1916. Heres the excerpt that we display in the exhibition and this is freedom. This is liberty the place were just as rains home of the brave and free look trace the deepened furrows of civility upon a burdened race. And even if we consider the statue of liberty as a monument to immigration note that in 1882 only four years before the statue was unveiled the United States issued the chinese exclusion act this racially based antiimmigration law was in full effect in 1903 when that famous poem by emma lazarus. Give me your tired your poor your huddled masses yearning to be free was emblazoned on the statues pedestal. The fourth vignette moves us on to the final wall of the exhibition and into the 20th century. It is about about a monument by Augusta Savage someone who is little known today, but who in her time was a true mover and shaker of the harlem renaissance. She was a remarkable woman born in 1892 in the jim crow south to parents who had been born into slavery. She moved to new york to study art. She opened her own art school, which one visitor described poetically as a sanctuary of industry and dreams. She founded and directed one of the largest wpa art centers and she became the first black woman to open her own gallery. This is a souvenir reproduction of her signature work a commission for the 1939, new york worlds fair. It was the only commission at the fair from a black woman artist life magazine in fact described savage as one of few black people commissioned by the worlds fair to do anything, but quote pick and shovel work. The piece was inspired by the song lift every voice and sing which had been declared the black National Anthem by the naacp in 1919. Here is a short clip of the song as performed by the harlem boys choir. Here regardless ; . Savages sculpture becomes i think a visual manifestation of that songs power. It features 12 young black singers in graduated heights taking the form of a harp. Theyre pressed together in community and in solidarity theyre singing in surround sound with their heads turned in alternate directions the folds of their prior robes become the strings of the instrument the kneeling man at the front forms the foot pedal and the sounding board has generally been understood to represent the hand and arm of god picking up on the religiosity of lift every voice and sing particularly the third verse and transforming these 12 young singers into the instruments of god. I have come recently however to increasing really wonder whether given savages own foundational role in the harlem renaissance this could represent her hand as well. This is someone after all who made tremendous efforts to create an infrastructure through her schools through her gallery to lift others in her community up. Savages original sculpture was a soaring 16 feet tall. It was the largest work that she ever made you can get. Some sense of the scale here in this photograph of the artist at work in her studio the final sculpture was placed at a prominent entrance to the fair and it was seen by millions of visitors. But at the end of the fair it was smashed by bulldozers because savage lacked the funds to preserve it. And thats why it survives only in the form of souvenir replicas like the one in the exhibition. It was not i should note uncommon for worlds fair objects to be demolished many of them were never meant to last but for savage this was part of a larger pattern in her career. She worked always against adverse socioeconomic conditions as a black woman during jim crow who had struggled through poverty since childhood and only half of her documented work survives. And so the main point of this vignette is really to raise the question. What have we lost or if you phrase it differently. What who what and whos what work and whose work do we choose to preserve . I think its easy to think of monuments as static and fixed, but they are not they require upkeep they require care and they require funding in a symposium hosted by the New York Historical society in 2020. Brent legs who serves as executive director of the africanamerican Cultural Heritage action fund noted that we need the same stewardship level for the contributions of africanamericans as for others. We need public and private investment in black Cultural Heritage if we value that he said said then we value black lives. Next we have a group of works by three contemporary black sculptors bearing witness to suppressed histories. The point of this vignette is to raise questions about whose stories are preserved and celebrated in the historical record and to demonstrate the ways that new monuments can change history the ways that they can redirect how and what we remember for context. Youll notice the small group of objects toward the left of this installation shot. These are included as a group of works to provide a sense of what these contemporary artists are working against it is anchored by this career and ives print showing a hotly contested monument called the emancipation memorial by thomas ball in washington, dc. While this sculpture was propo