British artist Thomas J Price probably could have counted on some controversy when he erected a sculpture of a Black woman in New York’s Times Square. Unveiled on April 29, the 12-foot-high bronze Grounded in the Stars shows an unidealized woman in everyday clothes, standing with hands on hips, gazing into the distance with a contemplative look. Per a description of the work by the presenter, Times Square Arts, Price’s practice “confronts preconceived notions of identity and representation.”
And controversy he got, despite a subtle degree of aggrandizement; Price’s figure stands in a pose that nods to Michelangelo’s David, and Jean Cooney, director of Times Square Arts, was drawn to the artist’s work “because of the novel ways in which he imparts a sense of reverence for people’s everyday humanity,” she told Artnet News in February.
But she’s being greeted in some quarters online as an unflattering representation, one with an “attitude,” one who looks stereotypically angry.
Times Square Arts’s own Instagram post of the work has generated dozens of comments, with plenty of love-eyes, flexing muscles, and fire emojis. But they run the gamut, including bessieblount16’s terse “Trash” and Ms_izzie_bee’s “I h8yte your statue as it’s not an accurate representation of Black American Women. We come in all shapes and sizes and you have her plainly dressed looking angry. You’re British and know nothing of Black American Women. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
Thomas J Price, Grounded in the Stars (2025). Photo: Michael Hull. Courtesy Times Square Arts.
“This is some leftist nonsense just to piss off white people,” contributes JayeF121212. “And based on the comments, blacks dont like it either.”
Predictably, aesthetic conservatives use President Donald Trump’s slogan to denigrate the work; one meme juxtaposes it with Antonín Pavel Wagner’s classicizing 19th-century Hercules and Cerberus, in which the mythical Greek hero sports abs for days, under the heading “make statues great again.”
Right-wing media also found a way to place the work in a context they are obsessed with.
“Who is this woman?” asked Fox News host Jesse Watters on Thursday. “What did she do to get a statue? A nice one, too!”
In answer to his own question, he concludes, “Nothing. This isn’t a real person. It’s a DEI statue.”
Price is aware of the debate. On May 9, he reposted to Instagram a slideshow from the popular real_toons account, whose first slide sums up the positions: two Black women flank the sculpture, one saying “I love this!” and the other saying, “Wow, I hate this.” More Black people join in the conversation in succeeding slides, one asking, “What’s next, pajamas and a bonnet?” while another pipes up to say “We are so deep in European beauty standards that the idea of a plus-size Black woman being honored is somehow disrespectful?”
Price did not immediately answer a request to weigh in on the debate, sent via Times Square Arts.
The Times Square installation coincides with Price’s exhibition, “Resilience of Scale,” at Hauser and Wirth’s SoHo showroom. His first major show with the gallery in New York, it presents five similarly towering bronze figures depicting everyday Black people. In Time Unfolding (2023), a woman consults her phone; As Sound Turns to Noise (2023) shows a woman in athletic wear; Within the Folds (Dialogue 1) (2025) shows a man in sneakers and a sweatsuit.
Thomas J Price, Grounded in the Stars (2025). Photo: Michael Hull. Courtesy Times Square Arts.
Price’s Times Square installation also takes place in the same city at the same moment as many Black women (and men) are enshrined in their everyday glory in Amy Sherald’s acclaimed Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition “American Sublime,” where the artist shows Black people as stylish and confident. Prominent Black artists are in the spotlight at the Guggenheim museum as well, with a Rashid Johnson retrospective, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with a rooftop installation by Jennie C. Jones.
Other Black artists have also used Times Square as a place to comment on representation of Black people. Price’s midtown installation comes a few years after artist Kehinde Wiley, known for painting young men of color in settings and poses inspired by art historical portraiture, erected a sculpture, 29 feet high and also in bronze, of a Black man in everyday clothing—Nike sneakers and a sweatshirt—but astride a horse, riffing on monuments immortalizing Confederate leaders in the American South.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
