A review of Nina Cooke John’s monument to Harriet Tubman, Shadow of a Face
By Jacob Swanson; April 2024
Nina Cooke John’s 2023 monument to the venerable Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman, Shadow of a Face, dominates Newark’s Harriet Tubman Square in a swirl of concrete, steel, and wooden slats. The monument was commissioned in 2020 to replace a statue of Christopher Columbus that was removed during that year’s Black Lives Matter protests. The square footprint of the statue’s plinth remains, inscribed on the ground in not-so-subtle contrast to the monument’s circular plan. Tubman’s face, rendered monumental in a tactile grey mosaic, magnetically pulls visitors across the park and into a protected interior space. On one side, a blue-tile mosaic illustrates community members’ reflections on the meaning of freedom and is one of the most powerful elements of the structure. Opposite, panels elucidate New Jersey’s history of activism towards Black liberation. Tubman’s abstract silhouette, veering closer to spidery than cloaked, towers above, a subtle (though not complete, given the sheer scale of Tubman’s face on the reverse side) separation of Tubman-the-myth from Tubman-the-person. Stay long enough and Queen Latifah’s disembodied voice will relate Tubman’s life story or Newark residents will share what Tubman means to them. In its overly literal interpretation of “giving voice” to the community, the audio element comes across as gimmicky. Together, it is not a monument that aspires to a heroic whole. Rather it is an assemblage that partially looks toward the social relationships it engenders for legitimation. It attempts to materialize them into an active mélange of past and present. Furthering that goal, the monument is a Grace Farms Design for Freedom project which guarantees the monument’s materials were produced without forced labor.
The memorial is an artifact of a movement that defined itself, in part, against a particular type of monumentality: the valorization of figures implicated in, and thus representations of, the historic violence against Black and indigenous people as above reproach. They argue that the truly inclusive society America strives to become must no longer center its story on problematic figures like Columbus or Robert E. Lee. At the same time, Cooke John rejects many of the methods and concerns of the late 20th century’s response to the celebratory monument. Born out of social disillusionment following the Holocaust and a desire to mark the grief it wrought, these “anti-monuments” sought to complicate heroic narratives and the monument’s construction of cultural memory. Later, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial and MASS’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice explored these approaches in an American context. With the Tubman memorial, Cooke John is not looking to negate monumentality. Rather, she wants to assert the story of Black liberation, of Harriet Tubman, as a quintessentially American story, braiding together Tubman’s life story, her mythological status and a broader lineage of political-cultural struggle toward fulfilling the country’s founding promise. It thus implicates us in the continuing struggle for liberation. By itself, the Tubman Memorial is a powerful testament to a truly democratic and inclusive society.
At the same time, in its effort to tell this story, it elides the specificity of the history it displaces. A 1927 gift from Newark’s Italian-American community, Columbus’s statue represented an expression of their own claim to Americanness as they fled poor treatment in Italy and following encounters with racialized violence in the United States. In the Tubman memorial, Columbus’s inscribed square reads more as a caricature of “oppression” than a serious engagement with what Columbus did and what his story means or meant, an unfortunate choice given its other attempts to pluralize meaning. As such, it creates the perception that there is only so much space for commemoration in the city, that public narratives and space must not be too complicated, that monuments can only sustain one type of meaning rather than complex or even contradictory ones. It thus (re)produces a monumentality that flattens history into a teleological symbol, more concerned with its own finality than engaging the layered meanings of its site.
I wonder what the monument would have looked like had Columbus’s plinth stayed, sans statue, as it stood from 2020 to 2022. If those blue-glazed tiles now hidden in the interior had instead been applied to its surface in an act of collective acknowledgement and resignification, transforming the staid marble whiteness into a cacophony of color and expression. If it had incorporated the perspectives of the indigenous peoples for whom Columbus’s arrival presaged cultural genocide. Or the Italian-American community for whom his statue represented an affirmation of their own belonging in the country. If it had accepted a more complicated, nuanced, and indeterminate understanding of its place in space and time in a restorative approach to monument-making; interpretively, rather than formally, dynamic. Perhaps then it might better prompt new ways of understanding our histories and what they mean to us and each other.
Originally published in iteration_03: Inclusionary Spaces; April 2024
Jacob Swanson 