The Impossible Weight That Public Sculptures Of Women Must Bear

It’s not just the sexualized, weirdly tiny Mary Wollstonecraft; it’s not just the naked Medusa in the park; it’s not just that rather iffy sculpture of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth all sitting down to plan universal suffrage. No. It’s the arc of public art for its entire history – and we do mean history in this case. “Two millennia of European and American history could be told through a genealogy of equestrian monuments to men, from Marcus Aurelius to Gattamelata, from Confederate generals to Kehinde Wiley’s exhilarating riposte, Rumors of War (2019). (And that’s just one genre!) One reason Wiley’s monument succeeds is that it has a heroic model to subvert. But women have no such models.” – Hyperallergic