Elizabeth Catlett, “Invisible Man: A Memorial to Ralph Ellison” (2003) (all photographs by David Jacobs, courtesy David Felsen)
In Higher Manhattan, amid the colourful inexperienced foliage of Riverside Park, the whiz of speeding automobiles from the West Aspect freeway, and the hum of bustling Harlem flats, 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 am an invisible man… I am invisible, understand, simply because people 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 greater than 2% of the town’s 800 out of doors 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 printed e-book New York Metropolis Monuments of Black Individuals (2025) by David Felsen.
Left: Branly Cadet, “Higher Ground: The Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Memorial” (2005) Proper: Gabriel Koren and Algernon Miller, “Frederick Douglass Memorial” (2011)
A highschool historical past instructor in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, Felsen informed 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 all the time as examples of pieces of art that tell us a lot about a society at a given point in time — what we value, who we value — and then also how that changes,” Felsen mentioned.
As he started delving into the town’s panorama of public artworks, he noticed that context for depictions of Black historic figures was “not immediately obvious.”
“ I felt like there was a need for this kind of information out there,” Felsen mentioned.
Whereas there are a whole lot of plaques, markers, summary sculptures, and dwelling memorials honoring Black Individuals all through the 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.
Shut-up view of the bronze plaque situated on the base of the Civil Struggle Troopers’ Monument (1869) in Inexperienced-Wooden Cemetary
Like all memorials that includes Black people over the subsequent seven a long time (corresponding 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 moderately than the likeness of an actual individual.
The primary monument to pay homage to an actual Black particular person arrived in 1946 with Richmond Barthé’s bust of creator and educator Booker T. Washington, situated on the Corridor of Fame for Nice Individuals in Bronx Neighborhood Faculty. The disclosing 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.
Left to proper: William Behrends, “Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese Monument” (2005); Eric Goulder, “Althea Gibson Monument” (2019); Alison Saar, “Swing Low: Harriet Tubman Memorial”(2008)
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 obtrusive underrepresentation of non-men in its public memorials — a difficulty that initiatives like She Constructed NYC have solely not too long ago begun to handle. Abolitionist and activist Sojourner Fact is featured within the Girls’s Rights Pioneers monument in Central Park, though she was initially excluded within the authentic 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 always matter,” Felsen mentioned. “Who we choose to honor is a representation of what we care about and who we care about.”
Richmond Barthé, “Exodus and Dance” (1941)
He added that the importance of those public tributes is very salient within the present second, because the Trump administration continues to whitewash historical past whereas defunding the humanities and humanities.
“ In this particular moment, because the president is essentially trying to erase Black history and because the Department of Defense has decided that they should no longer celebrate Black History Month, the preservation of Black history, wherever it happens, is especially important,” Felsen concluded.
