A Review of: Race and Revolution: Reimagining Monuments

Museum where the exhibition is located: The Old Stone House; Museum cost of entry: nothing; Type of field near museum, according to website: “open synthetic turf field”; Adjective author used to describe field: bouncy; Revolutionary War battle that happened near museum: Battle of Brooklyn; Baseball team for which museum acted as a clubhouse: the Brooklyn Grays (predecessor to the Dodgers); Number of times that the author’s partner has corrected her that the baseball team wasn’t the Brooklyn Dodgers, but an early predecessor: many.

Central Question: How can a monument reflect the complications of history?

On the eastern edge of Park Slope, in the center of an enormous playground, sits a shoulder-high statue of Christopher Columbus. From a distance, the statue looks like it is carved out of stone or cast in cement, but closer examination reveals the figure to be spongy and porous—more vegetable than mineral.  A haphazardly laminated label affixed to a nearby fencepost states that this statue is made of mycelium, a kind of fungus, and will eventually break down and transform into a patch of mushrooms. Behind the statue is an unassuming building that at first seems there only to house the public bathrooms. But it is, in fact, a historical museum called the Old Stone House.

The Columbus statue, made by artist Zaq Landsberg, is a miniature replica of a statue that stands nine miles away, atop a 28-foot rostral column in Columbus Circle. The mushroom statue is an outdoor element of a temporary exhibition at the Old Stone House called Race and Revolution: Reimagining Monuments, put together by independent curator Katie Fuller. The show is part of a series of exhibitions that Fuller has put together to explore patterns of systemic racism. Landsberg’s fungal facsimile is an effort to address the fraught history behind the uptown archetype original—a majestic representation of a man we now consider to be a genocidal monster. Yet the Columbus Circle monument itself was born from a noble impulse, sponsored by the Italian-American community in the late 19th century as a way to counter the systemic prejudice they faced as new immigrants. By creating a monument that is ephemeral—one that openly acknowledges that its use value may be limited; that its meaning may evolve, and its truth may be less than universal—Landsberg points to the changing nature of history. He asks the viewer to imagine historical monuments not as static and permanent, but as embodying shifting and sometimes contradictory ideas, undergoing growth and decay and, ultimately, disappearing.

There are over 800 public monuments in the New York City, including 125...