Photo of the Day: ‘Rumors of War,’ Times Square, NYC

Last Thursday, a massive limestone base inscribed "Rumors of War," along with the artist’s name, Kehinde Wiley, drew curious onlookers like me to Times Square. Whatever this was going to be, I figured, would be fundamentally different from any other public artwork in this midtown crossroads.

And, once I got a look at the bronze statue placed atop it the next day (and took this photo), so it proved to be.

This was not any old artwork in Times Square. No, this one got a lengthy article in the Arts section of The New York Times. Hundreds of miles south, even The Washington Post took note of it, in a piece equally long.

The lager-than-life coiled body atop the horse makes you think you’re looking at Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, or J.E.B. Stuart. You know: the Confederate generals lionized on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va. 

But that’s no cap on this figure’s head: those are dreadlocks. And that’s not a gray uniform he’s wearing, but a hoodie and ripped jeans. 

With a shock, you realize you’re looking at an African-American—a male descendant, you don’t have to think twice, of someone that Lee, Jackson, and Stuart devoted their considerable military prowess to keeping in slavery.

This is the first statue created by Wiley, a 42-year-old painter whose portrait of Barack Obama now adorns the National Portrait Gallery.

In a sense, the statue is undertaking a journey that reverses the movement of the Underground Railroad north. This time, once Rumors of War leaves Times Square in December, it will travel to Richmond, the capital of the short-lived Confederate States of America, to be placed near the entrance to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, just a few blocks from Monument Avenue.

The white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. brought to the surface the powerful emotions left over from the Civil War. In this context, Wiley’s statue would not only be seen as a response to the tumult two years ago but, by the revanchists in the area, as a provocation of its own. 

In various parts of the country, statues of Confederates—or, more broadly, slaveholders—have inspired desecration. Don’t be surprised if this statue experiences something similar—unless the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts decides to safeguard it in some kind of glass enclosure. 

The Civil War ended 150 years ago, but it's opened a new front in the culture wars of our century.

Photo of the Day: Fiorello La Guardia Statue, NYC

One of my favorite pastimes, when going to some cultural event in New York City, is walking through the surrounding neighborhood and stumbling across something of historic interest. That was the case again a week ago, when, after watching a film downtown, I ambled around Greenwich Village and stumbled across La Guardia Place and the statue of the politician it commemorates.

As longtime readers of this blog have probably guessed, I pulled out my camera to record my discovery and whet my curiosity.

Highly unusual in his own time, Fiorello H. LaGuardia (1882–1947) is simply impossible to imagine in the current political environment of New York or the nation. I can’t think of another Gotham mayor likely to be posthumously celebrated in a Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, like the one created by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock back in 1959. 

While certainly, at only 5 feet, 2 inches tall, “The Little Flower” was short, the exuberance of his personality and the record of his achievement have rendered him larger than life in the annals of Gracie Mansion.

La Guardia looks especially impressive compared with the current occupant of the office. Bill de Blasio (or, as I’ve come to think of him, de Bumsio). A progressive poseur, de Blasio talks a great game about reducing income inequality while doing little to achieve it. La Guardia managed to do so by embarking on a massive infrastructure program that employed thousands of New Yorkers in building roads and bridges and repairing dilapidated parks.

While de Blasio has engaged in a pattern of conduct that has raised concerns that he engaging in “pay-for-play” practices, La Guardia worked diligently to stamp out corruption that had been given free rein by Tammany Hall hacks.

De Blasio has traipsed around Iowa in a maddening Presidential campaign supported only by aides eager to curry favor with their boss. La Guardia was all over city bureaucrats in an attempt to make government more responsive to its citizens.

Fresh from his exertions at gym (often requiring the services of city employees who transported him to these facilities), de Blasio looks in the mirror each morning and sees a big, buff President. La Guardia, for all his ambition, had no such personal vanity.

De Blasio, though facing significant problems, encountered nothing like the situation encountered by La Guardia dealt with the crisis posed by the Great Depression when he came to office.

La Guardia contrasts dramatically not just with current Democrats, but with the Republican holding the White House. Probably the mayor’s most famous utterance was, “When I make a mistake, it’s a beaut!” Can you imagine Donald Trump saying anything similar today?

 

A word about the statue in this photo. Unveiled in 1994, it was created by Neil Estern (1926-2019), who also created the statue of John F. Kennedy in Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, as well as a sculpture of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and their dog Fala, at the FDR Memorial in Washington, D. C.

Photo of the Day: Statue, St. Anthony of Padua Church, NYC

I came across this mainstay of Manhattan just before 5 pm yesterday, as large bells called worshippers to the services about to begin. With the light not putting the entrance to St. Anthony of Padua Church at its best advantage at that time of day, I decided instead to shoot this statue of the structure’s patron saint.

Built in 1886, this church at Houston and Sullivan Streets may have been the first church constructed by an Italian community in the United States, but the first baby baptized there was Irish (Elizabeth Kelly) and its architect English (Arthur Crook). 

No matter: even with a more ethnically mixed congregation, it remains inextricably a part of the Italian-American community here, especially during the feast that takes its name from the saint.

Photo of the Day: Benito Juarez Statue, Washington, DC

A year and a half ago, on vacation in Washington, DC, I came across this statue of the great Mexican leader Benito Juarez, when I was trying to get to someplace else. It took me a while to find an appropriate time to post about it. But really, if not on Cinco de Mayo—the Mexican national holiday that Juarez, the country’s President, declared—when exactly can you write about it?

This 12-ft. bronze statue, located in the Foggy Bottom section of the U.S. capital, at Virginia Avenue, NW and New Hampshire Avenue, NW, is a copy of one located on a mountain in Oaxaca, Mexico, created by French-Italian sculptor Enrique Alciati in 1891. It was received by the U.S. from Mexico in 1969.

What little I knew of Juarez came from American textbooks that discussed how his Presidency was interrupted in the 1860s by Archduke Maximilian, the puppet of France's Napoleon III, and how the United States was annoyed by this violation of the Monroe Doctrine but unable to help because it was dealing with the Civil War.  (A well-intentioned but dull Warner Brothers bio of the 1930s, Juarez, starring Paul Muni, did little to add to my knowledge.) In 1867, Maximilian was overthrown and Juarez restored to office.

But, in reading further about him, I’ve discovered that Juarez was one of the giants of his country. He certainly seems like the type of leader who would not enthrall the current administration in DC. Consider:

*Unlike the dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, he was not the kind of strongman so admired by Donald Trump; 

*He was a Zapotec Indian of peasant birth—making him a minority among a larger group that Trump already sees as decidedly secondary in his scheme of things;

*He was a liberal who believed in the rule of law;

*One of his most famous quotes, inscribed in both Spanish and English on the base of this memorial, is diametrically opposed to Trump’s domestic and foreign policy: “Respect for the rights of others is peace.”