x
  1. Home
  2.  News
  3.  Local News

Monument-making in the city

| 16 Oct 2018 | 02:49
    A majority of the Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers, established last year to address controversial commemorations on city land, advocated for keeping the statue of Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle, saying it “represents the complexity and contradictions embedded in our representation of our history as a nation.” The commission noted that “the best option” to redress similar controversies “will be to add new works of public art or new educational opportunities.” Photo: Marcel Rene Kalt, via Wikimedia Commons
    A majority of the Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers, established last year to address controversial commemorations on city land, advocated for keeping the statue of Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle, saying it “represents the complexity and contradictions embedded in our representation of our history as a nation.” The commission noted that “the best option” to redress similar controversies “will be to add new works of public art or new educational opportunities.” Photo: Marcel Rene Kalt, via Wikimedia Commons
    The city's statue of Dr. James Marion Sims was removed from its plinth at Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, after an outcry arose because Sims was known to have operated on enslaved black women with neither anesthesia nor consent. The removal was recommended by the Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers, established last year. Photo: Jim Henderson, via Wikimedia Commons
    The city's statue of Dr. James Marion Sims was removed from its plinth at Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, after an outcry arose because Sims was known to have operated on enslaved black women with neither anesthesia nor consent. The removal was recommended by the Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers, established last year. Photo: Jim Henderson, via Wikimedia Commons

BY CHARMAINE P. RICE

The history behind many of the city’s monuments is a complicated one, fraught with political intrigue and, some say, elitist attitudes.

Last week, a panel of experts discussed the opportunities, challenges and frustrations in trying to rectify a paucity of monuments commemorating groups, including women, traditionally underrepresented on city property.

“Prior to the mid-1960s or so, there was no particular concern or awareness of community, the unity of constituents, or of a neighborhood. No community was consulted except for the members of the narrowly circumscribed group initiating the project,” said Michele Bogart, a professor of art history at Stony Brook University and the author of the “Sculpture in Gotham: Art and Urban Renewal In New York City. “The outlook was just very different from today.”

The Oct. 9 talk, “Who Decides? The History and Future of Monuments in New York City,” was held at the CUNY Graduate Center on Fifth Avenue and moderated by Todd Fine, president of the Washington Street Historical Society. Along with Bogart, other panelists were John Kuo Wei Tchen, an associate professor at New York University’s Gallatin School, cofounder of the Museum of Chinese in America and a member of the Mayoral Advisory Commission on Monuments; and Mary Anne Trasciatti, an associate professor at Hofstra University.

The de Blasio administration is now making a concerted effort to ensure that public dialogue is a key component in the planning and placement of monuments. Just over a year ago, the Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers was established to address controversies surrounding some of the city’s perceived “hot-button” monuments, including that of Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle and a statue, since removed, of Dr. James Marion Sims, the so-called “father of modern gynecology,” on Fifth Avenue

Commission members convened over the course of three months to discuss monuments and markers on city-owned land. A subsequent report included guidelines and recommendations for the creation and placement of monuments. And in June, the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs launched “She Built NYC,” a $10 million initiative whose aim, in-step with the commission’s recommendations, is to erect public monuments honoring women’s history in New York City. Artists were then given to until Sept. 30 to submit monument ideas.

One of those is Mary Anne Trasciatti, an associate professor at Hofstra University, who is spearheading an effort to build a memorial commemorating the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed 146 garment workers, most of them immigrant women and young girls, in March 1911. For Trasciatti, it’s personal. “I’m a child of a garment worker,” she noted.

Trasciatti outlined the many bureaucratic obstacles in her path. “The first challenge was how to get permission to build a public memorial on a privately-owned building. This was perhaps the most interesting and frustrating element in this project,” she said.

The Brown Building, which housed the factory, is owned by New York University. In 2012, NYU administrators granted permission but made it clear that the university would not pay or help build the memorial.

To move the project forward, Trasciatti enlisted pro-bono help from accountants, lawyers and architects. The proposed memorial, designed by Richard Joon Yoo and Uri Wegman, would consist of ribbon-like steel panels that will travel across both sides of the Brown Building and extend up to the ninth floor, where most of the casualties happened. The names of the 146 victims will be engraved on the panels.

Trasciatti said another challenge is raising the necessary funds. She said interest from the mayor’s office is lukewarm at best. “We hit a brick wall after brick wall. Who wants to fund a labor memorial about immigrant women?” she said.

She said she is puzzled by the de Blasio’s administration’s lack of support for the project. “I implore him to include hard-working people [beyond explorers, conquerors, and colonizers], like the Italian immigrants at Triangle, that is much more representative of the community of New Yorkers,” she said of the mayor.