Experts Picked Acclaimed Sculptor Simone Leigh to Redo a Monument. After a Backlash, a Little-Known Local Artist Now Has the Job

For the activists who had been campaigning for years to remove a
New York City monument to J. Marion Sims, the 19th-century doctor
who made his gynecological advances by experimenting on enslaved
black women, October 5 should have been a triumph. The Sims statue
was gone from its perch in Central Park, and the city was poised to
select a replacement proposal from one of four esteemed black
artists.

Instead, an event that night ignited further controversy, as a
panel of experts voted in favor of the piece designed by the
prominent artist Simone Leigh, whose work has recently been
shown at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum,
despite vocal support from some community members for the work of
Yonkers-based artist Vinnie Bagwell.

Following the contentious vote, culture commissioner Tom
Finkelpearl reassured those assembled that the panel’s opinion was
advisory, not binding.

Today, the city announced that it is bowing to pressure from the
East Harlem community: Leigh has withdrawn her proposal following
the backlash, and Bagwell will design the new monument.

“I greatly appreciate that my proposal was selected by the
committee. However, I am aware that there is significant community
sentiment for another proposal,” Leigh said in a statement. “Since
this is a public monument in their neighborhood, I defer to
them.”

“I want to express my heartfelt thanks to the community-at-large
for their collective advocacy of my work,” Bagwell said in her own
statement.

For the project, Bagwell proposed an 18-foot angel statue
titled Victory Over
Sims, featuring relief carvings of black women’s faces on
the skirt of a figure. In one hand, the angel-like woman holds the
staff of Asclepius, the entwined snake symbol for field of
medicine.

Leigh’s equally tall piece, After Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey,
Henrietta, Laure, and Anonymous, would have
honored Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey, the only Sims subjects
whose names were recorded; Henrietta Lacks, the African
American woman whose cancer cells were used after her death for
groundbreaking research; and Laure, the model for the
black woman in Édouard Manet’s Olympia.

“Formally and aesthetically, [Victory Over Sims is] a
confusing piece of art,” Antwaun Sargent, a member of the voting
committee, wrote on Twitter. “Everyone felt that
Simone’s sculpture was unique, engaging, would stand the test of
time.”

But his opinion fell on deaf ears at Saturday’s meeting, where a
hostile exchange broke out after Leigh’s proposal was announced as
the winner. “We feel very betrayed,” said M. Ndigo Washington, a
member of the Beyond Sims Committee, a community coalition,
told Hyperallergic. “You
continue to ask for our opinion, you continue to ask to participate
in a process, a process that now feels rigged.”

Following an open call for proposals announced in December,
Bagwell, Leigh, Kehinde Wiley, and Wangechi Mutu were announced as
the finalists in
February. Bagwell, a local artist born in Yonkers, was the only
artist to attend the event on Saturday, and won the crowd over in
part because she was competing with international
art-world superstars.

“A fundamental part of the problem was that the [Department of
Cultural Affairs], on their own initiative, put
contemporary-art-world-type, famous artists in the pool, who didn’t
work as hard as Vinnie or even bother to show up [to the event],”
Todd Fine, president of the Washington Street Advocacy Group, told
Hyperallergic.

Bagwell, a self-described “untutored artist,” began sculpting in
1993. Her first public commission was an Ella Fitzgerald statue for
the city of Yonkers in 1996. In March, Governor Andrew Cuomo
commissioned her to create a statue of Sojourner Truth for the
Hudson State Historic Park in Highland, New York.

Now that Bagwell has been named as the winner of the commission,
“the city will work with [her] in collaboration with local
residents to refine the design,” the Department of Cultural Affairs
said in a statement. The sculpture is expected to be completed in
2021.

The post Experts Picked Acclaimed Sculptor Simone Leigh to
Redo a Monument. After a Backlash, a Little-Known Local Artist Now
Has the Job appeared first on artnet News.