In Higher Manhattan, amid the colourful inexperienced foliage of Riverside Park, the whiz of dashing vehicles from the West Facet freeway, and the hum of bustling Harlem residences, a 15-foot-tall bronze depicts the hole define of a person frozen mid-stride with one cautious hand raised. A quote from Ralph Ellison’s pioneering 1952 novel is etched into the floor of a low-lying granite panel: “I’m an invisible man… I’m invisible, perceive, just because individuals refuse to see me.”
The memorial honoring the Oklahoma-born author and scholar, who resided throughout the road at 730 Riverside Drive, was created by the Black revolutionary artist Elizabeth Catlett, who spent her six-decade profession drawing consideration to the lives and experiences of Black and Mexican ladies by means of work, sculptures, and prints. Her solely public artwork fee in New York, “Invisible Man: A Memorial to Ralph Ellison,” unveiled in 2003, stays one of many few monuments within the metropolis honoring a Black American that was additionally created by a Black artist. (A bit of greater than 2% of town’s 800 outside public monuments had been created by Black artists.)
The work is amongst 30 public sculptures and bas-reliefs featured within the not too long ago revealed guide New York Metropolis Monuments of Black Individuals (2025) by David Felsen.
Proper: Gabriel Koren and Algernon Miller, “Frederick Douglass Memorial” (2011)
A highschool historical past instructor in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, Felsen instructed Hyperallergic that he began researching the illustration of Black Individuals within the metropolis’s public memorials amid the nationwide elimination of Accomplice monuments sparked by Black Lives Matter protests and the homicide of George Floyd in 2020.
“ [My classes] use monuments on a regular basis as examples of items of artwork that inform us rather a lot a couple of society at a given time limit — what we worth, who we worth — after which additionally how that adjustments,” Felsen stated.
As he started delving into town’s panorama of public artworks, he noticed that context for depictions of Black historic figures was “not instantly apparent.”
“ I felt like there was a necessity for this sort of info on the market,” Felsen stated.
Whereas there are a whole bunch of plaques, markers, summary sculptures, and residing memorials honoring Black Individuals all through town, Felsen’s information particularly focuses on public visible representations of Black individuals. Organized chronologically, it begins with the primary look of a Black American in a New York Metropolis monument: a anonymous, previously enslaved Black man featured in a bronze bas-relief panel within the Civil Struggle Troopers’ Monument (1869) on the Inexperienced-Wooden Cemetery.
Like all memorials that includes Black people over the following seven a long time (similar to one of many sculptural figures within the Troopers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch in Grand Military Plaza), the person featured within the Inexperienced-Wooden monument is a symbolic illustration of a personality relatively than the likeness of an actual particular person.
The primary monument to pay homage to an actual Black particular person arrived in 1946 with Richmond Barthé’s bust of writer and educator Booker T. Washington, situated on the Corridor of Fame for Nice Individuals in Bronx Neighborhood Faculty. The revealing of this work and others that adopted, like statues honoring George Washington Carver, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Duke Ellington, coincided with the rise of Black American residents in New York Metropolis through the Nice Migration of the early twentieth century and a rise in Black political illustration.
Nonetheless, regardless of this progress in rectifying the hole in racial illustration, there’s a staggering absence of Black American ladies within the metropolis’s monuments. New York has lengthy struggled with a evident underrepresentation of non-men in its public memorials — a problem that initiatives like She Constructed NYC have solely not too long ago begun to handle. Abolitionist and activist Sojourner Reality is featured within the Girls’s Rights Pioneers monument in Central Park, though she was initially excluded within the unique proposal, and a long-awaited tribute to state congresswoman Shirley Chisholm is at the moment underway, hampered by pandemic-related delays.
Notably, this lack of illustration led annoyed activists to put in a guerrilla bust honoring trans rights advocate Marsha P. Johnson reverse the Stonewall Inn in 2021.
“Monuments at all times matter,” Felsen stated. “Who we select to honor is a illustration of what we care about and who we care about.”
He added that the importance of those public tributes is particularly salient within the present second, because the Trump administration continues to whitewash historical past whereas defunding the humanities and humanities.
“ On this specific second, as a result of the president is basically attempting to erase Black historical past and since the Division of Protection has determined that they need to not have a good time Black Historical past Month, the preservation of Black historical past, wherever it occurs, is particularly necessary,” Felsen concluded.
