A Monument for Shirley Chisholm in Prospect Park

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Talk about a contrast. Our next two segments are going to be about Shirley Chisholm and then Barbie. This week, the New York City Public Design Commission approved the construction of a new monument in honor of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to serve in Congress in the whole United States. Upon completion, the 32-foot tall monument will be housed near the southeast entrance of Prospect Park. It will be the first permanent artwork created in honor of any woman in Brooklyn's history.

With us now is one of the designers of the monument, MacArthur-winning artist, Amanda Williams, as well as the New York City Cultural Affairs Commissioner, Laurie Cumbo. Amanda, welcome, Commissioner Cumbo, welcome back to WNYC.

Amanda Williams: Thank you for having me.

Commissioner Laurie Cumbo: Thank you. We're excited to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Commissioner, you want to put this in context a little bit first, there's been a whole rethink of the monuments in New York City in recent years, monuments that should be taken down, monuments that should be designed because there are so many gaps with women at all or Black women at all. Give us the context of this because the process started a few years ago, right?

Commissioner Laurie Cumbo: I'm very excited to be the commissioner at this particular time in herstory. We are recognizing the underrepresentation of women in design, in architecture, in public art projects, and in representation. We set forth in this administration realizing and making good on the promise of the previous administration to have representation of women throughout New York City. This is one of these incredible projects that's going to do just that.

It's so important for particularly young people. It's important for them to see what they can be, because if they don't see representations of themselves, then they are not going to have the ability to aspire to achieve really great heights. Shirley Chisholm is certainly an icon in Brooklyn, New York, but also globally. We're really excited about this and we're really excited about kick off this incredible project with Shirley Chisholm with so many more projects to come.

Brian Lehrer: Amanda, as one of the two designers of this piece, can you begin to describe it for the radio audience? Once it's up there, what would we see?

Amanda Williams: Sure. We thought it was really important because of its location of the intersection of Ocean and Parkside, that as you walk along those vistas, that you would see something that would orient you, but then as you approach and get closer to the entrance to the park, that you also have something that feels welcoming at your scale. If you're walking along either of those vistas coming out of the train, the first thing you'll see is a large-scale silhouette of Shirley Chisholm's iconic image of her the day that she announced her presidency for the United States.

It's going to be lined in a bronze edging and then have patina metal in green as her image face and then it will also have a silhouette of the US Capitol, so closer to the ground and at the scale of the pedestrian. As you're in the plaza, you will be enshrined by the shape of the dome of the Capitol. Then on the grounds, we'll have inscribed the semi-arc of the congressional seating to represent that space that she was able to occupy and open the door for others and then also inviting everyone to be part of the conversation about democracy.

Brian Lehrer: Were you trying to either continue or break from any traditions of monument design? Maybe the first thing that would come to mind for a lot of people is the bronze man on a horse. Where you're looking to like, "Do what people think of as monuments to individuals, but now we're going to do it for a woman and a Black woman," or were you thinking also, "No, we need to break out of that model of design," in the first place?

Amanda Williams: A little bit of both. I think because there has been an underrepresentation, sometimes people literally just want to see something that looks like themselves standing somewhere. A lot of our artists, colleagues continue in that tradition. Lake and I both trained as architects at Cornell University so what we know is space. What we think primarily about is creating spaces that people can feel connected to and oftentimes are using things that are not the human image. We did think it was important that you see something that references her so that distinctly that this is about Shirley Chisholm, but that your focus then turns to community, to broader interactions, to more than one person.

That actually was encouraged component of the call for the design so that we could rethink what really should be monumentalized. It's actually her call to participatory engagement that is her legacy in addition to the fact that she was just so iconic with her style of clothing and with her facial features and hair and glasses. All of that had to be mixed in, but we wanted to make sure that we were really pressing the message about inclusion as much as we were pressing the message about this individual heroic figure.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few phone calls either to pay a little extra tribute to Shirley Chisholm as a person since we're talking about the monument that's going to go up honoring her in Brooklyn, or to talk about the monuments and the changing face of monuments in New York City, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Give us a call or text a comment or a question to that number, 212-433-WNYC for Amanda Williams who was just speaking, one of the designers of the Shirley Chisholm Monument, and the New York City Cultural Affairs Commissioner, Laurie Cumbo.

Commissioner, what's the city's involvement once you commission someone like Amanda to design a monument to a particular individual? Do you get involved at all? Do they have to present proposed designs and it's a competitive process in that respect? Or do you just choose a designer who you respect and say, "Okay, your artistic vision rules go do what you do?" How does that work?

Commissioner Laurie Cumbo: To bring it back all the way full circle, we begin the process with an all call. We also have a public artist registry, and so we have many artists within our registry, but we also do all calls. In that aspect, we're also alerting the artistic community that there is this opportunity to create a project such as this. We received so many exciting projects that we were able to review to look at. Through a very competitive process, through a panel review process, we were then able to select the winning artists for this particular project. Then from that, it goes through a number of community board meetings.

We just recently had an elected officials briefing that was held with the local city council members, state assembly members, and representations from Congress that also weighed in on the project. We've had multiple community engagements and opportunities for people to meet and be able to look at the incredible work that Amanda and Lake were able to put forward. It's not as if Amanda and Lake put forward a design, and that's the design. It's that they put forward a design and through community feedback, through process, the project evolves and it's going to continue to evolve with the input that's been received. It's going to continue to be refined as we have a better understanding of the materials that are going to be used, how those materials are going to be used.

At Monday's PDC meeting, the Shirley Chisholm monument received the first stage of approval from PDC, the Public Design Commission, known as conceptual approval with the unanimous support from the PDC commissioners. The artists can now proceed with the next phase of design, including detailed refinement and fabrication drawings.

This is really a community-based process. It's really exciting to be able to see the community have real input. Believe me, I was a council member when this project was first offered to the community. I know to toot my own horn, I was very proud that I was able to through advocacy insist that the project not happened in Manhattan, but that it happened actually in Brooklyn, New York because of the critical role in all that Congress member Shirley Chisholm inspired.

The list goes on from New York State Attorney General Letitia James, who was inspired and made herstory right there, Mary Pinkett, first African American woman city council member comes from that same district, Dr. Una Clarke, first Caribbean-born city council member comes from that neighborhood, and Congresswoman- -Yvette Clark, who was the only currently African-American woman from Congress in New York State.

It's because of that incredible act of courage, and bravery, and assurance that Shirley Chisholm put forward, it inspired so many women to step up to the plate. We have more women in City Council than ever, in Congress, in the Senate, and that's really because of the tremendous and courageous act of courage taken on by Shirley Chisholm.

Brian Lehrer: Does the location, Amanda, dictate to you at all what kind of monument you'll design? This is going to be near the southeast entrance of Prospect Park. Is it going to be different do you think because it's there for any reason than if it was in the middle of a city block or anything else?

Amanda Williams: Definitely. I want to emphasize two points to your question. One is, as an entrance to the beautiful Prospect Park, one of the visages or one of the points of access will have the silhouette and the Capitol dome silhouette in a filigree that actually mimics English gates, so really thinks about what it means to be a threshold into that kind of social space. We chose filigree that then also pays homage to Shirley Chisholm's Barbados roots. You will see some flora and fauna that have been in terms of the decoration, not the actual flora and fauna that are there, but in terms of the filigree decoration in the sculpture itself. Then also plants that would be native to Brooklyn and to some of what you would learn or see inside of Prospect Park.

Additionally, as I mentioned, because we are architecture, we do often think about how this is going to integrate with people's path of travel, pedestrian, bikes, so on and so forth. This is part of a larger project that was already going on. We were particularly sensitive to making sure that this is a compliment to that and is not a barrier or an impediment.

I will say that we've gone through, as the commissioner said, a robust community engagement process despite the slowdown of the pandemic. Community Board 14 in particular, we had a fantastic dialogue and conversation where people were really offering really minute details about points of access, the accessibility, disabled community, so on and so forth. So that we really, despite living in Crown Heights and me requiting Prospect Park and Lefferts Gardens and the neighborhoods around it, it's always great to have that one-on-one individual understanding of, "I come from this way and I leave this way. I love when I'm coming this way that I can always see that tree or this access or this intersection."

We really gave that a lot of attention with, there's archways and kinds of openings that allow you to pass through directly into the park so that we really thought about how somebody might engage this that uses it every day, and how obviously people will come from around the world also to celebrate Shirley Chisholm and the legacy that she's created. Yes, it is for this spot. It was not designed in absentia and could be relocated. It's really quite site-specific.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, on my reference to the cliché of a man on a horse and a monument, listener texts-- Well, the listener says that it has real meaning. Person text, horse means the featured person fought in a war. One horse leg up means wounded in action, two legs up means killed in battle. That's an interesting detail if true that I did not know about monument design. Let's take a phone call from somebody who knew Shirley Chisholm. George on the Upper West Side, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling in.

George: Good morning, Brian. I was a college student in a special program in Washington DC for political science students run by American University. We were 100 of us from all over the country, and we were encouraged to try and work on the Hill or in some of the agencies just to get a sense of how the government worked best. In the spring of 1970, I chose to work for Mrs. Chisholm. In those days, she was almost brand new and she had a small office in Longworth and a small staff.

I didn't know any of the people who operated in Brooklyn for the Major Owens who ran the office in those days in her Brooklyn office, but I never met him. Periodically, I lived in New York and I would occasionally drive her to Washington from her home in Brooklyn. I got to meet her ex-husband Conrad, and we would spend two, three hours together chatting about this or that as we went down. After a while, because I was asking her so many political questions, she would say, "I have to do some work, so you have to leave me alone to work," so I said, "Okay."

Anyway, she was quite charming. It's interesting that you're discussing her clothing. There's a story behind that, but I'm not going to tell that on the air. There's some question about some things that she didn't know about. Anyway, she was rather a remarkable woman and she was basically all by herself. The advantage for me as a college intern was that I got to write speeches for her for different audiences. I didn't handle constituent matters, but she would get me involved in different things that she wanted to do. I had it all to myself because most of my peers were going to major Senate staffs or very powerful congressmen or whatever with large staffs. I really had it all to myself. It was a rather unusual situation, so just wanted to share that.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, George. Thank you. Sounds like an incredibly rich and-- imagine being Shirley Chisholm's intern. What an experience to take with you for the rest of your life. Do either of you know what he might have been referring to there with respect to her clothing?

Amanda Williams: I'm going to have a guess and say that-

Commissioner Laurie Cumbo: I do not know.

Amanda Williams: -maybe there were some labor practices that maybe were not as well known as present. I'm guessing, I don't know. She had amazing fashion sense, so I think the patterning and the outsized personality was well ahead of its time if you think about the ability to order things online and that not existing. She had some pretty fantastic attire.

Brian Lehrer: Commissioner Cumbo-

Commissioner Laurie Cumbo: Such an icon.

Brian Lehrer: -when you served as a City Council member, I know you represented some of the same communities that Shirley Chisholm represented as a member of Congress. How does her legacy inform your leadership in government? I take it you were inspired by her.

Commissioner Laurie Cumbo: I think when you look at Brooklyn, New York and you look at the amount of Black women who have now burst onto the scene in such an incredible and vibrant way in City Council, State Assemblies, State Senate, you look at Assembly Member Rodneyse Bichotte, who was the first county leader African-American woman, Haitian born. We're seeing this vibrancy and inspiration that Shirley gave all of us. I think if you were to listen to any of the campaigns of those women that un-bought and un-bossed is in the DNA of running for office for so many Black women in Brooklyn, New York and beyond.

It's how you move forward in terms of being true to your values and not being under the rulership of any county party, of any kind of contributor, that you're able to hold your own and hold onto your convictions and to take that with you, whether you're in the halls of Congress or you're in the City Council chambers, we as women. It's not only Black women, it's women across the board. If you look at City Council right now, if you look at State Senate and Assembly, there are women of all races, religions, that identify in the LGBTQAI community, there are women that identify in all areas with the legacy of Shirley Chisholm.

I really believe it's based on believing so much in what's important and necessary that you throw caution to the wind and you're not bound by what people have said has always been the way. It's always been this person. It's always been this race. In this particular circumstance, Shirley Chisholm said it's not going to be that way and I think that that's what inspires me and so many other women.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. We're almost out of time. Maya in Chicago, who apparently at least met Shirley Chisholm. Maya, we just got 30 seconds for you. I apologize, but, hi.

Maya: Hi. I love your show. I listen to it all the time [unintelligible 00:19:23] Chicago [unintelligible 00:19:24] WNYC.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, thank you.

Maya: I just wanted you to know that in the mid-90s, I was at Georgia State University and I was really intense about doing something in the community. I had then a social justice African-American gay dean in all, basically, what we called Lilly White University back then. He appointed me to be African-American chair for the African History Month and he just told me, "I'm bringing Shirley Chisholm in.” I'm like, "Why? I don't get to say so,” and I'm like, “But I don't need to say anything. This is fine." I- -met her and she was very, very just a powerful-- her energy was just powerful but she was quiet. I said, "Please, I need some wisdom going into the future. I'm trying to figure out my life. I'm starting late and I'm trying to figure out what I need to do." She wrote on the program, “Aim high,” and I thought, “That's it?” I'm thinking to myself like, "I need more instruction. I need a piece of paragraphs because you got too much. I'll never meet you again. Please, aim high? What does this mean? What am I supposed to do with this? What?"

Now, in my mid-50s, I went back to school, I got a graduate degree in social work, I'm working for the state for helping children and the culture of people that are in my age group who are aging out. One manager said, "When I leave, I'm not going to mess up my reputation." I thought, "Well, your reputation is what you do to help raise other people in the older generation who's just coming in [unintelligible 00:21:04]

Brian Lehrer: Maya, I have to leave it there but we take that story as A, a great story and B, a good moral of this story. Maybe all you needed from Shirley Chisholm was those two words, aim high-

Maya: Aim high.

Brian Lehrer: -which it certainly sounds like you did.

Maya: Yes, that’s beautiful.

Brian Lehrer: Commissioner Cumbo, I'll give you the last word, 30 seconds, two quick things. This is a location that's outside the district, as I understand it, where Shirley Chisholm either grew up or represented Bed-Stuy and, further south in Brooklyn than the southeast corner of Prospect Park. Why there and when will we see it?

Commissioner Laurie Cumbo: We are actively working towards a projection of 2025, but again, that's contingent on so many different factors, and we are excited about it. We're working towards 2025, and I'm just going to say that we are excited about it. Shirley Chisholm is a Brooklyn, New York icon, and this is her home. The entire borough loves her. She's inspired everyone throughout the borough, this state, this nation, and this world. Shirley is all of our hero.

Brian Lehrer: MacArthur-winning artist, Amanda Williams, co-designer of the coming Shirley Chisholm statue and New York City Cultural Affairs Commissioner, Laurie Cumbo. Thank you so much for joining us. This was wonderful.

Amanda Williams: Thank you.

Commissioner Laurie Cumbo: Thank you for having us.

 

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