Opening Night Lecture: Monuments: Commemoration and Controversy

On Thursday, September 18 at 5:30 p.m., Vice President and Senior Curator Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto will speak about the exhibition Monuments: Commemoration and Controversy, which she curated at The New York Historical. It explores monuments and their representations in public spaces as flashpoints of fierce debate over national identity, politics, and race that have raged for centuries. Offering a historical foundation for understanding today’s controversies, the exhibition features fragments of a statue of King George III torn down by American Revolutionaries, a souvenir replica of a bulldozed monument by Harlem Renaissance sculptor Augusta Savage, and a maquette of New York City’s first public monument to a Black woman, Harriet Tubman, among other objects from The New York Historical’s collection. The exhibition reveals how monument-making and monument-breaking have long shaped American life as public statues have been celebrated, attacked, protested, altered, and removed. Click here to learn more.

The lecture will also be livestreamed. Click here to register for a reminder.

Image: Augusta Savage, Lift Every Voice and Sing, ca. 1939, white metal cast with a black patina. The New York Historical, Coaching Club Acquisition Fund, 2019.90. Courtesy of The New York Historical

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