On X, viral posts have labeled Thomas J. Price’s sculpture Grounded in the Stars (2023), a 12-foot-tall statue of a Black woman now on view in Times Square, a sign of a “very sick society” and a harbinger of the “death of civilization.” But online rants are one thing and real-world responses yet another, and so, earlier today, I ventured over to Times Square myself to observe how tourists interacted with the sculpture, located not far from the TKTS booth. The reactions in person were just as confusing and dispiriting as what I had encountered online, acting as proof that the internet outcry over this work was rooted in the real world.
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I watched as a Black woman stood before Price’s statue and mimicked the work’s pose by defiantly placing her hands at her hips. While that woman was having her picture taken, a white man went behind the sculpture and beamed as he palmed its buttocks. He, too, had his picture taken by someone who accompanied him. Meanwhile, the woman continued to pose on the other side.
Both reactions seemed emblematic of the response to Grounded in the Stars more broadly. To some, Price’s work has been seen as powerful and affirming, a statue that looks quite unlike the two white men—the Catholic priest Francis P. Duffy and the playwright George M. Cohan—monumentalized just steps away from the Price piece. (The Duffy and Cohan monuments are permanent, and have been there since 1937 and 1959, respectively; Price’s statue will come down on June 17.) To others, Grounded in the Stars has been treated as “a physical representation of the knots that wokeness has tied the Left into,” as the conservative journalist David Marcus wrote in a Fox News op-ed.
A string of racist social media posts has followed. Open X, and you can find AI slop remaking Price’s statue as Aunt Jemima and the Oscar-winning actress Da’Vine Joy Randolph, along with crudely Photoshopped versions of Grounded in the Stars, one of which shows the woman depicted holding a KFC bucket and a watermelon. Open Instagram, and you can also find a mocking video from a white influencer who theatrically feigns being so overwhelmed by the sculpture that she is moved to tears. “She finally got the recognition she deserves. She’s done so much for our country,” reads that video’s sarcastic caption.
These posts all suggest that Grounded in the Stars has struck a nerve with a certain slice of the public that would rather not see monuments such as this one. That is a deeply unnerving and deeply flawed position—and a sign we should all be paying attention to the response to this piece.
Thomas J. Price, Grounded in the Stars, 2023.
Photo Liao Pan/China News Service via Getty Images
Grounded in the Stars communicates in such a straightforward language that it’s easy to forget what this work has pulled off. For about a decade, Price has been making bronze sculptures of Black men and women that perform quotidian activities. Some in his current Hauser & Wirth show downtown check their phones and stand around. They wear sweatshirts and jeans, T-shirts and slacks. They seem like people you might encounter walking down the street.
Despite their grand scale, Price’s sculptures often feel understated. Part of this has to do with the vacant gaze of his sculptures, which are typically composite portraits of people Price has encountered. “They’re not looking to engage or for validation,” he once told Interview magazine. “They exist whether or not the viewer is there.” He connected his works to ancient Egyptian statues, whose cold yet regal appearance he sought to imitate.
The understated quality of Price’s art also links him to the more recent tradition of Photorealism, which began in the 1960s as an attempt to lure the everyday into art museums. Whereas most Photorealists were painters, Duane Hanson took sculpture as his medium, immortalizing shoppers, loungers, and workers such as janitors with a piercing degree of naturalism. Though Hanson’s subjects may have been treated as unworthy of attention from the art world’s elite when he started showing his sculptures, Hanson looked at them with empathy, just as Price does for the men and women he sculpts.
Price’s works, like Hanson’s, display a keen eye for detail. You can stare at Grounded in the Stars and admire its imperfections: the way her shirt doesn’t quite fit, with its hemline rising a bit higher than it probably ought to, and the way that her sneakers show signs of gentle wear. No, Price isn’t a formal inheritor to Hanson: Price’s unadorned bronze sculpture looks like it could’ve been produced wholesale, especially in comparison to Hanson’s labor-intensive pieces made in hand-painted resin, and the pose portrayed in Grounded in the Stars is more than a little on-the-nose. But conceptually, Price’s work elegantly follows up on themes already found in Hanson’s work.
Thomas J. Price staring at his 2022 sculpture Moments Contained.
Photo John Phillips/Getty Images for The V&A
Unlike Hanson’s sculptures, Price’s have been seen as being explicitly political. Since 2020, the year when statues of Confederate soldiers and European colonialists were pulled down by protestors, Price’s art has been treated as a response to the ongoing debates around monuments, something that the British artist has himself even acknowledged. “We know what they’re supposed to look like, and this doesn’t look like that,” Price recently told the Art Newspaper of the Times Square work.
That’s almost certainly why Grounded in the Stars has made so many people—mainly conservatives—angry. It’s the kind of work that could be called a counter-monument, a riposte to the statues of people connected to colonization, enslavement, and systemic racism that can still be found in many corners of the world.
Some want to ensure that those statues can continue to be found. This year, President Donald J. Trump revived a proposal to build a National Garden of American Heroes where “the legends of America’s past will be remembered,” as he put it in his 2021 executive order earlier this year. He said he had in mind the “tragic toppling of monuments to our founding generation and the giants of our past.” His plans currently include 250 “realistic” representations of “great individuals from America’s past”; to fund this garden, Trump plans to redirect $34 million from the National Endowment from the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.
History changes, and so does our perception of it. But Trump and others want to ensure that this isn’t the case. Maybe this is why Grounded in the Stars has caused such an outcry, and why Marcus, in his Fox News op-ed, closed out by asking: “if we have to have the angry Black lady, can we at least have Teddy Roosevelt back?” He was referring here to the Roosevelt monument that once appeared uptown, in front of the American Natural History Museum, whose director said in 2022, “Simply put, the time has come to move it.”
Now, the time has come to center works like Grounded in the Stars, whose subject looms larger than life, towering above those who might wish to will her out of existence. She stands stoically, maybe even a bit heroically, refusing to bend to the vitriol sent her way. We’d be wise to look up in awe.
