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>https://twitter.com/andrewbeckusa/status/1618248543537606656
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The statue, named "NOW", is a female figure emerging from a pink lotus. It has braids shaped as horns with a judicial lace apron. It is meant to pay homage to Ruth Bader Ginsberg and her fight for abortion.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/25/arts/design/discrimination-sculpture-madison-park-sikander-women.html
Move Over Moses and Zoroaster: Manhattan Has a New Female Lawgiver
The artist Shahzia Sikander calls the eight-foot sculpture she has placed atop a New York courthouse an urgent form of “resistance.”
Frenzied commuters in New York’s Flatiron district have been stopped in their tracks in recent days by an unlikely apparition near Moses, Confucius and Zoroaster. Standing atop the grandiose state courthouse is a shimmering, golden eight-foot female sculpture, emerging from a pink lotus flower and wearing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s signature lace collar.
Staring regally ahead with hair braided like spiraling horns, the sculpture, installed as part of an exhibition that opened last week, is the first female to adorn one of the courthouse’s 10 plinths, dominated for more than a century by now weathered statues representing great lawgivers throughout the ages — all of them men.
Shahzia Sikander, 53, the paradigm-busting Pakistani American artist behind the work, said the sculpture was part of an urgent and necessary cultural reckoning underway as New York, along with cities across the world, reconsiders traditional representations of power in public spaces and recasts civic structures to better reflect 21st-century social mores.
“She is a fierce woman and a form of resistance in a space that has historically been dominated by patriarchal representation,” said Sikander, who previously served on the New York Mayoral Advisory Commission of City Art, Monuments and Markers. She said the work was called “NOW” because it was needed “now,” at a time when women’s reproductive rights were under siege after the U.S. Supreme Court in June overturned the constitutional right to abortion.
“With Ginsburg’s death and the reversal of Roe, there was a setback to women’s constitutional progress,” she wrote in her artist’s statement.
With an acrimonious culture war over abortion buffeting the country, some lawyers expressed surprise at seeing an artwork, partially framed as a response to the overturning of a Supreme Court decision, atop a state courthouse. But New York has long been at the forefront of the drive for abortion access and New York has moved to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.
It is not the first time this court, the Appellate Division, First Judicial Department, of the New York State Supreme Court, has changed the lineup of figures presiding over its rooftop. In 1955 the court removed a turn-of-the-century, eight-foot-tall marble statue of the Prophet Muhammad when the Pakistani, Egyptian and Indonesian Embassies asked the State Department to intervene; many Muslims have deeply held religious beliefs that prohibit depictions of the prophet.
To compensate for the visual gap left at the commanding southwest corner of the building, seven statues were shifted one pedestal westward, leaving Zoroaster in the place of Muhammad. The easternmost pedestal, once occupied by Justinian, was left vacant. That is where Sikander’s sculpture presides.
The Lahore-born Sikander, whose work has been displayed at the Whitney Biennial and who made her name reimagining the art of Indo-Persian miniature painting from a feminist, post-colonial perspective, was at pains to emphasize that Muhammad’s removal and her installation were completely unrelated. “My figure is not replacing anyone or canceling anyone,” she said.
Much as Justice Ginsburg wore her lace collar to recast a historically male uniform and proudly reclaim it for her gender, Sikander said her stylized sculpture was aimed at feminizing a building that was commissioned in 1896. Writing in The New Yorker in 1928, the architect and author George S. Chappell called the rooftop ring of male figures atop the building a “ridiculous adornment of mortuary statuary.”
The aesthetic merits of the courthouse’s sumptuous Beaux-Arts-style architecture aside, the building’s symbolism has outsize importance in New York’s civic and legal identity and beyond: The court hears appeals from all the trial courts in Manhattan and the Bronx, as well as some of the most important appeals in the country.
Justice Dianne T. Renwick, the first Black female justice at the Appellate Division, First Department, who chairs a committee examining issues of diversity, said that, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in 2020, the court had undertaken a long overdue effort to address gender and racial bias since the courthouse had been built, at a time when women and people of color were erased and overlooked.