A member of the commission that oversees art and architecture on city property suggested Monday that instead of simply adding statues of historical female figures to Central Park, the panel yank out some of the male ones first.
"There are what, five or six [male] statues that I think could easily be replaced by individual statues of each of these women," said Hank Willis Thomas, a painter who serves on the Public Design Commission, at a hearing at City Hall.
Thomas appeared to be specifically fingering statues including that of Scottish poet Robert Burns, in the park’s Literary Row, and the one of Christopher Columbus in the park, near the famed second one of the explorer in Columbus Circle, for removal.
"I don’t think that there are many people who will miss the Burns statue, or some people may not miss the Columbus statue if there’s another one just a few hundred yards away," Thomas said.
But Mayor Bill de Blasio
...cryptocommie mayor of New York and for some reason a Dem candidate for president in 2020. Corrupt and incompetent, his qualifications for office seem to consist of being married to a black woman, with whom he honeymooned in Cuba. He has a preppy-looking son named Dante, whose Divine Comedy involved getting his back hair up when a police car drove past him slowly...‐ who created monumental hoopla when he opened the door to possibly removing what some groups deemed offensive statues by creating an advisory panel ‐ refused to back the notion.
A rep for Hizzoner told The Post that the mayor ‐ who hand-picked Thomas and the rest of the 10 commissioners on the panel ‐ continues to support adding new monuments instead of removing existing ones.
De Blasio fueled the controversy over potentially removing statues such as those of Columbus by creating an advisory panel to review monuments throughout the five boroughs.
In the end, his panel suggested just one statue be removed ‐ that of 19th century Dr. J. Marion Sims, who experimented on enslaved black women, from Central Park. His advisory panel also said descriptions accompanying other questionable figures be tinkered with to note both sides of their story.
Then there was a movement to increase the presence of female statues, and two names ‐ of women’s rights pioneers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony ‐ were pitched. Central Park currently has 23 statues ‐ all male.
But the proposed double-female statue met resistance for not including a woman of color, so there were calls for abolitionist Sojourner Truth to be added.
Still, the panel said it was troubled over linking the trio in one monument, since while the women all worked on the suffrage movement, they had different approaches, and it began thinking about individual monuments.
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