The bronze sculpture is intentionally unassuming, depicting an anonymous Black woman, casually dressed, with a neutral expression on her face and her hands on her hips.
But as soon as the 12-foot statue was erected last month in Times Square, it touched off a roiling debate — one that reflects both a long-simmering argument over public monuments, and a very 2025 political dispute about diversity and race in America.
A columnist for Fox News wondered why a statue of an “angry Black lady” had been displayed in the same city where a contentious monument of Theodore Roosevelt had been removed a few years back, while a writer for The Federalist described the work as “leftist cultural warfare.”
“This is what they want us to aspire to be?” Jesse Watters, the Fox News host, recently asked on his show. “If you work hard you can be overweight and anonymous?” He added, “It’s a D.E.I. statue.”
As the conversation has intensified, criticism has emerged from several angles: from those seeking to preserve the country’s historical monuments; from people wondering if the piece employed stereotypical imagery; from critics calling its message and execution ham fisted. But social media has been overrun with commenters, often anonymous, hurling overt racism and sexism.
To the artist and the organizers of the public exhibition, the backlash — however unsavory — effectively justifies the sculpture’s existence at a time when the Trump administration and its allies are targeting all manner of things involving nonwhite people as “D.E.I.”
The piece, “Grounded in the Stars,” was produced in 2023 by Thomas J Price, a London-based sculptor whose work in recent years has directly critiqued the traditions of public monuments and portraiture.
The statue was installed on April 29 by the Times Square Alliance, which periodically invites contemporary artists to exhibit work in the bustling plaza. The piece will remain there through June 17.
A placard displayed alongside the piece declares its intent: The work challenges the conventional wisdom of “who should be immortalized through monuments.” The text points out, too, how the sculpture presents a contrast to the two permanent monuments — “both white, both men” — that stand nearby.
“What has ensued is a fairly impressive amount of debate and exchange and critical dialogue,” said Jean Cooney, the director of the Time Square Alliance’s arts program, “the kind you hope a public artwork will provoke.”
It was a timely provocation. While debates about monuments have bubbled up across the United States essentially since the country’s inception, they have intensified over the past several years amid reinvigorated movements for racial justice and the backlashes to those efforts.
Patricia Eunji Kim, an art historian at New York University, said that monuments inspired widespread emotional investment because they posed questions about how to spend public money, how to shape public spaces and how to project a collective heritage.
“I understand why there is such a backlash, because the stakes are so high in that sense,” Ms. Kim said.
But critics of “Grounded in the Stars” may not have noticed that the piece is not actually a monument, at least not in the conventional sense.
It was first exhibited two years ago in Los Angeles at Hauser & Wirth, an international gallery that is currently hosting an exhibition of related works from Mr. Price at one of its New York locations. The sculptures, according to a release from the gallery, “amplify traditionally marginalized bodies and redress structures of hierarchy, inviting questions about who we choose to celebrate in art.”
With its dark bronze material, towering height and contrapposto figure, the sculpture has read to some as a traditional monument, when it is in fact an artwork about monuments.
“Are there no notable Black women who actually exist to celebrate?” wrote David Marcus, a columnist for Fox News. “How about a giant Condoleezza Rice, or a somewhat more diminutive Simone Biles?”
The hubbub around the statue, for some, also reflected the changing tenor of social discourse in the second term of President Trump.
The term D.E.I. (a reference to the diversity, equality and inclusion initiatives of recent years) has become a political lighting rod under Mr. Trump, and the administration’s efforts to eradicate the concept have taken on bizarre forms, such as the temporary deletion of Jackie Robinson’s biography from a Department of Defense website.
Others saw the blast of racism that greeted the sculpture online as further evidence of an increasingly coarsened climate. Last month, a white woman in Minnesota garnered a groundswell of public support, and amassed almost a million dollars in donations, after directing a racial slur at a Black child on a playground.
On platforms like X, comments about Mr. Price’s work have included A.I.-generated racist caricatures of Black women, vicious stereotypes and crude derision.
“We live in a political climate right now where out-loud racism is now excused left and right, in addition to insidious systemic racism, and people feel emboldened to say racist things all the time,” said TK Smith, a curator and cultural historian based in Atlanta.
Evidence of this evolution, for some, has existed right in Times Square.
Just six years ago, the Times Square Alliance temporarily installed a similarly monumental statue by the artist Kehinde Wiley, who rose to stardom for his aristocratic portraits of contemporary Black people. The work, “Rumors of War,” depicted a Black man in a sweatshirt and jeans heroically astride a horse, in the style of a Confederate monument.
“I don’t recall a single negative piece about that artwork,” said Ms. Cooney, who organized that exhibition as well.
But such art is always at risk of being misconstrued. Michele Bogart, a historian of public art in New York City, said a person encountering an artwork in a gallery was often privy to its intent — and likely open to learning more.
“But when its placed in Times Square, nobody is obligated to try to understand,” she said.
Ms. Bogart also bemoaned what she perceived as the disappearance of arts education and a general oversimplification of ideas about representation among the general public as contributing to the toxic tone of this discourse.
“People are not attuned to aesthetics,” she said.
Vocal online critics of the sculpture have also included Black people, who have knocked Mr. Price for presenting what they see as a disrespectful image of Black women, or for leaning into stereotypes about them.
But Elma Blint, a jewelry designer from Brooklyn, who visited the work on Friday, offered an opposing view, saying the figure looked “like every Black woman in my family” and suggesting its detractors were uncomfortable with the idea of a Black woman taking up space.
Mr. Price, who declined to comment for this article, addressed this debate by posting a comic strip to his Instagram account. The first panel shows two Black women gazing up at the sculpture.
“I love this,” one says.
“Wow, I hate this,” the other responds.
In a 2020 essay for Time magazine, Mr. Price wrote that his work aimed to show “that if you’re a Black person being represented in sculpture, you don’t have to be an athlete, or strike a pose, or fulfill an expectation.”
Within the art world, this kind of conceptualization might risk being discounted as an almost banal insight, and some in the industry have viewed the broad palatability of Mr. Price’s work as a factor in his commercial success.
But out on the street, as the discourse has shown, his point is not so smoothly digested.
“He definitely struck a vein,” Mr. Smith said. “We are dealing with wounds that are not healed. And we can’t heal them if they’re not spoken about.”
Andrew Keh covers New York City and the surrounding region for The Times.
The post Times Sq. Sculpture Prompts Racist Backlash. To Some, That’s the Point. appeared first on New York Times.
