Monuments: Commemoration and Controversy

Monuments: Commemoration and Controversy, organized by The New York Historical and curated by Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto, explores monuments and their representations in public spaces as flashpoints of fierce debate over national identity, politics, and race that have raged for centuries. Offering a historical foundation for understanding today’s controversies, the exhibition features fragments of a statue of King George III torn down by American Revolutionaries, a souvenir replica of a bulldozed monument by Harlem Renaissance sculptor Augusta Savage, and a maquette of New York City’s first public monument to a Black woman, Harriet Tubman, among other objects from The New York Historical’s collection. The exhibition reveals how monument-making and monument-breaking have long shaped American life as public statues have been celebrated, attacked, protested, altered, and removed.

Johannes Adam Simon Oertel, Pulling Down the Statue of King George III, New York City, 1852-1853, oil on canvas. The New York Historical, Gift of Samuel V. Hoffman, 1925.6. Courtesy of The New York Historical