Design

After nearly half a decade, Vinnie Bagwell, a self-taught sculptor-artist, is still waiting for the million dollars that the New York City department of cultural affairs promised for her to work on monument Victory Beyond Sims, after winning the artist competition to replace the monument of Dr J Marion Sims in 2020.“It just requires a lot of diligence and perseverance,” she said to the Guardian. “A lot of times, people don’t realize how important and impactful art in public places is until they see it.”Sims was a 19th-century gynecologist known for experimenting on 12 enslaved and poor immigrant women without consent. City officials removed his monument in April 2018 after a unanimous vote by the Public Design Commission.Bagwell will be the first Black woman to have a memorial on Fifth Avenue. Bagwell began sculpting in 1993 and created the First Lady of Jazz in Yonkers, the first public artwork made by a contemporary African American woman commissioned by a municipality in the United States.Her 9ft (2.7-meter) monument is of a Black woman with 14ft wings, only the second Black Angel statue to be visible publicly in the US.The shape of Africa cut away from the woman’s heart symbolizes the enslavement of 12 million people over hundreds of years. On her right side the braille will read “My Soul looks back and wonders how I got over!” and on the left it will read “Primum non nocere!” (First do no harm).View image in fullscreenTo honor the suffering of Sims’s victims, whose anguish brought advancement to the field of gynecology, there will be 12 women silhouetted on her back. A slave ship is also depicted on the back to illustrate the inhumanity of slavery. The names of the survivors we know will be emblazoned into the helm of the garment.Bagwell hopes that the monument, which will be across the street from the New York Academy of Medicine, will function as a vehicle of change for the community. “Women are more under fire now than we were before. So many of us women have lost a lot of the right to control our bodies. New York is still safe, but [women in] Arkansas aren’t,” she says. “When you look at some of the things that this particular administration is talking about, they’re talking about going backward; that is still something to be concerned about.”Bagwell’s situation is not unique, with many other cities also stalling progress to replace Confederate statues and symbols. However, Vinnie has encountered many obstacles.First, a committee chose artist Simone Leigh as the winner, even though community members had voted for Bagwell. After a heated debate, the city ultimately reversed its decision. Then, the city attempted to cut $250,000 from its budget but failed. Bagwell has been waiting longer than the typical 90 days after signing her contract to receive the money.In a statement to the Guardian, the department stated its excitement about the project moving forward. “New York City has taken bold steps in the effort to foster a collection of public artworks that better reflect who we are as a city, including this project – long called for by the local community – to commission a new monument for this site in East Harlem,” they note.“This administration remains committed to fostering a diverse, vibrant public art collection that more fully represents the vast range of stories, experiences, and backgrounds that define New Yorkers. We’re excited for the Victory project to move ahead.”View image in fullscreenOn 23 June, the design commission voted unanimously to approve Bagwell’s designs, and she can now begin work.Bagwell’s situation reflects a broader failure to follow through on legislation and promises made following the 2020 racial justice protests, where Americans dismantled statues of Confederate soldiers that stood in their communities after the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man.In 2021, Joe Biden passed legislation to replace the monument of Roger Taney, a pro-slavery chief justice who served on the court from 1836 until 1864, with one of Thurgood Marshall, the first African American supreme court justice, in the United States Capitol. The intended deadline for the building of the statute was December 2024, but that month, a source familiar with the matter said the joint committee on the library had only just signed off on a memorandum to begin the process.Now, a 2025 executive order signed by Donald Trump mandating that the secretary of the interior restore monuments removed in the last five years puts in jeopardy the already fragile progress made by past laws to diversify the public landscape in the US.Jamaican sculptor Basil Watson said that it’s “very possible” that more people are now in support of removing objects that help tell Black stories. “It’s the risk we take that is part of the struggle,” he said. Watson worked to replace a Confederate monument with a John Lewis memorial in Decatur, Georgia. “It would be a tragedy if it were to be removed, but then we’ll just have to do it again,” he said. “The journey cannot be stopped.”In 2017, Trump tweeted: “the beauty [Confederate monuments] that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!”This debate on the rise and fall of monuments dates back to the 1870s. In 1876, Frederick Douglass called into question the making of the Emancipation Memorial, built by artist Thomas Bell in Washington DC. The creation of the statute was funded using donations from recently freed people.View image in fullscreenWhile the city created the monument to honor emancipation, it depicted a white man holding out his hand over a chained kneeling Black man, a design Douglass found problematic. “What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the Negro, not couched on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man,” he said. DC officials removed the statute in 2021, and advocates are still discussing its replacement.Nearly 150 years after Douglass’s speech, only 10% of the top 50 national monuments are of Black and Indigenous people, according to an audit completed by the Monument Lab, a non-profit public art and history studio.“The story of this continent is not reflected in our monument landscape in full,” said Paul Farber, the director and co-founder of the Monument Lab. “The monuments we have tell a partial story. Adding a monument or the selective removal of a monument can have a profound effect for a city or town. If we don’t respond to the erasures, the lies by design we will be doomed to repeat. Our audit also showed that 99.4% of monuments were not taken down in 2021 or 2022.”The Trump administration’s influence has now rolled back even that little bit of progress. This year, Pete Hegseth rolled back the names of two military forts to their namesakes of confederate soldiers. Following pressure from Republicans, Washington DC’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, also ordered the destruction of the Black Lives Matter plaza in front of the White House.Trump has proposed reviving his controversial National Garden of American Heroes, using money cut from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which ended hundreds of grants for libraries, museums and archives. The garden would include George Washington and Christopher Columbus statues alongside Martin Luther King Jr, Kobe Bryant and Whitney Houston.“When you look at some of the things that this particular administration is talking about, they’re talking about going backward,” Bagwell says. “That is still something to be concerned about.”View image in fullscreenNationally, Republicans have been mixed on the issue of inclusion in public spaces. A Kentucky state senator, Chris McDaniel, is still advocating for the replacement of a Confederate statue. In 2020, he pre-filed a bill that would replace Jefferson Davis in the Capitol Rotunda with Carl Brashear, the first African American US navy master diver born in Tonieville, Kentucky.“His story is inspirational,” he says. “That’s what monuments are supposed to be about. It’s supposed to be able to point to people and say: ‘This is somebody you can look up to.’”McDaniel’s bill to replace Davis in the Capitol is at a standstill as the Kentucky Capitol Arts Advisory Committee and other legislators must weigh in on who they believe deserves to be honored.Mississippi’s Republican governor, Tate Reeves, has shown mixed messages about Confederate symbols in his state. During the 2020 election, almost 73% of people in Mississippi voted to remove the Confederate flag with a new state’s flag. “This is not a political moment to me but a solemn occasion to lead our Mississippi family to come together, to be reconciled and to move on,” Reeves said after the vote and before it was eventually replaced.In the same year, Reeves simultaneously opposed the removal of Confederate monuments. “I reject the mobs tearing down statues of our history, north and south, Union and Confederate, founding fathers and veterans,” he says. “I reject the chaos and lawlessness, and I am proud it has not happened in our state.” ​Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative who led the building of Legacy Sites in Montgomery, Alabama, a civil rights museum that works to reshape the racist narratives about African Americans in Alabama, explains Reeves’s messaging.“I think it’s a struggle, a competing narrative, and sometimes they give away a little something by holding on to something that makes what they’re giving away feel acceptable,” he tells the Guardian. Stevenson says it “is about power, because most of the people who are kind of in control of these things [are] aligned, in my view, with this problematic history. We can’t accept just what [they’re] gonna give” us.Some artists who have worked to replace Confederate monuments with ones that honor Black history have succeeded and received praise despite government resistance. In Roanoke, Virginia, the city sculptor commissioned Lawrence Bechtel to replace a statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee with one of Henrietta Lacks.View image in fullscreenLacks’ cells, now called HeLa, were taken without her knowledge in 1951 and have now become vital to medical research; they have been used to develop polio and Covid-19 vaccines. It took about four years for the city to raise the money for the statue and a year from the contract being signed for Bechtel to build the monument.“I had bought a veil to cover it over, and everyone was invited to come close as the veil was pulled off, and people just mobbed it. It was fantastic,” he says. “It was just wonderful. It was very uplifting.” Bechtel said he has yet to receive a negative email.Watson, who built a monument of John Lewis to replace a memorial put in place by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, recalls the community’s excitement about the monument before he even finished. “The idea of putting up John Lewis in its place was quite exciting for the community, and since it has been up, I have had nothing but positive responses,” he says.Watson remains steadfast in his belief that the inclusivity of public art is crucial. “I think we artists need to represent our community; we need to have our values represented in our environment,” he says. “I think it’s important that we do have art in our community that represents the truth, represents our values, represents our history, and points our way forward.”Stevenson, a civil rights lawyer, believes that reclaiming the narrative in public spaces can challenge the racist narratives embedded into some Americans’ mindset.When he first started working in public art, there were 59 markers and monuments honoring the Confederacy in his state yet none paid tribute to Alabama’s history of being the state with one of the largest slave populations, so he and his team worked to create plaques in public spaces that honored those who were enslaved.View image in fullscreenHe refers to the process of reframing public conversation as narrative work, responding to the racist views long perpetuated by institutions. With the building and taking down of monuments, he suggests that we need a new framework to tell the full story of American history as a nation.“I think we have to find a better way to help people in this country recognize that there’s a place for people of African descent in this country and that our stories can’t be denied any longer,” Stevenson says.Bagwell also emphasizes the importance of honoring African Americans’ vital contributions to American society through public art. “It’s just stunning that we have made so much out of so little,” she says. “The contributions we’ve made to this country are phenomenal, and they should be remembered because we are very much a part of what made America great in the first place.” More