The Politics of Public Art

"The Black body is never seen as neutral," Bell Hooks writes in Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (1995). She argues that Black bodies are politicised forms, shaped by history, surveillance, and resistance. Especially for Black women, occupying public space has often meant being cast into roles—visible, legible, and symbolic—whether desired or not. That legacy remains intact. A body doesn’t even have to be real to provoke outrage.

This idea is distilled in the public reaction to Grounded in the Stars, Thomas J. Price’s bronze sculpture installed in April 2025 at the corner of Broadway and 46th Street in Manhattan, New York. It depicts a 12-foot-tall Black woman wearing casual clothes—a T-shirt, trousers, and braided hair—standing at street level in Times Square. The digital noise of Broadway billboards, tourist traffic, and rotating ads for skincare and crypto glances off her body. Without moving or speaking, she has become the centre of a political flashpoint.

The statue sits on a low plinth, designed to be seen at eye level. Her stance, a relaxed contrapposto, references Michelangelo’s David, but without the heroics or elevation. Price described the figure as intentionally "familiar", a fiction, drawn from a composite sketch of women observed in London, Los Angeles, and New York. Price says she reflects the "intrinsic value of the individual" and seeks to elevate “traditionally marginalised bodies on a monumental scale.”

Crucially, the statue was positioned as a counterpoint to Times Square’s permanent monuments—Father Francis Duffy, a decorated White military chaplain; and George M. Cohan, a White Broadway icon. Both stand tall on pedestals in Duffy Square. As the project’s description pointedly notes: “Both white, both men.” Grounded in the Stars centres a Black woman as a universal subject, inviting viewers to find the extraordinary in an everyday person.

Many viewers took to social media with admiration, writing that they’d never seen a statue of a woman, let alone a Black woman, in an American city. Others called the work overdue and quietly revolutionary. New York City’s Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, Laurie A. Cumbo, told Gothamist that the sculpture offers honour and reverence to “someone’s sister, mother, child or neighbour”—the kind of recognition typically reserved for generals on horseback.

But the backlash was swift. On Fox News, Jesse Watters mocked the piece, calling it an emblem of political correctness and mediocrity. Right-wing media cast it as another example of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) excess.

The installation, well-intentioned as it may be, drew criticism online not just from media companies like Fox News but also from the Black community, especially from Black American women. Why, many asked, was a British man chosen to sculpt a figure meant to speak to their experience? “Why not have a Black American woman sculptor tell this story?” one user commented under Price’s Instagram post. Others said the piece felt like a stereotype flattened into bronze: “This isn’t what I see when I look at myself.”

Many Black users described the piece as a tokenised misrepresentation of them, curated by a white-walled, gallery-going class without real enquiry.

Price is no stranger to these critiques. When Marc Quinn installed a statue of Black Lives Matter protester Jen Reid where a toppled monument once stood, Price wrote an essay in The Art Newspaper criticising the gesture. “A genuine example of allyship could have been to give the financial support and production facilities required for a young, local, Black artist to make the temporary replacement,” he wrote. Ironically, Price now finds himself in a similar position—receiving criticism for occupying representational space that some argue should have gone to a Black American woman. Whether this moment is self-aware or not, it underscores how fraught authorship becomes when power and identity intersect. Even those who challenge the canon can, in turn, become the subject of its contradictions.

Born in London to a Jamaican father and a White British mother, Price has spent his career examining how race, class, and power shape visual culture. His figures are often anonymous, his subjects deliberately unmarked. His work interrogates the absence of representation, of recognition, and the systems that shape it.

But even Price’s response to the controversy drew criticism. On Instagram, he shared an illustration by Real Toons, a satirical cartoon intended to suggest that not all art will resonate with everyone, and that’s okay. Yet many found the image racially loaded. “Condescending,” one commenter wrote. “A missed opportunity to listen instead of deflect.”

Jean Cooney, director of Times Square Arts, said the public’s in-person engagement stood in stark contrast to online outrage. “People stop. They read. They think,” she told Gothamist. The installation is temporary. It will remain on view through June 2025. Still, it has raised questions about public art that go beyond aesthetics. Who belongs in bronze? Who is allowed to be both ordinary and monumental?

The answer, until recently, has been narrow. A 2021 audit of London’s statues found that over 20 per cent commemorated named White men. Only one per cent represented people of colour. Just 0.2 per cent depicted women of colour. In the U.S, Confederate generals and settler icons still dominate civic space. A Black woman, fictional, unnamed, standing still, remains the exception.

This dissonance between artists and the communities they depict is hard to navigate. Can a British biracial artist portray a Black American woman without leaning on stereotype or inference? This tension is not new to art. The question of who gets to depict whom, and under what terms, has long dogged contemporary public installation.

The Embrace, a 22-foot-tall bronze sculpture by Hank Willis Thomas, was unveiled in Boston in 2023 to honour Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. It showed two pairs of arms locked in a hug; an abstraction pulled from a photograph. It was meant to commemorate intimacy, partnership, and struggle, however, many saw it as shapeless, phallic, and even offensive. Seneca Scott, a cousin of Coretta Scott King, publicly denounced the sculpture, calling it “an insult”. He argued that the monument erased identity in favour of abstraction, and that the money could have served Black communities directly.

This charge, that public art turns struggle into spectacle without returning anything to the people it claims to honour, is reflected in one of the most controversial sculptures of all time, Rachel Whiteread’s House.

Unveiled in 1993 (and demolished shortly after), House was a full-scale concrete cast of a condemned East London home. This was the time when Britain’s housing crisis was worsening. Critics praised it for visualising absence. Others saw a different story: an artist turning displacement into Turner Prize-winning minimalism

In that light, Grounded in the Stars enters a similar terrain. Both works focus on what is often overlooked. Both emerged at politically charged moments, and both faced backlash not simply for what they depicted but for who made them. The irony is that in attempting to challenge erasure, both artists found themselves implicated in debates about representation, authorship, and institutional gatekeeping.

Public art has never been neutral. It instructs us on what to remember, whom to mourn, and whom to revere. But more than that, it reveals the anxieties of its moment. The public’s reaction to it, in many ways, tells us more about the cultural, social, and political climate than the art itself. When the subject is a marginalised body, however, the work is frequently collapsed into a statement where representation overrides form, discourse, and material. The opportunity, then, to engage with the beauty of a piece or to allow for the conceptual, abstract and ambitious, is lost. And that loss, too, is a form of racialisation.

As Hooks reminds us, “The work to understand art, in the end, lies with the viewer. They must try to erase, if possible, all the racism from their hearts and minds and only then, when they look at a painting, can they see the art.”