The Angels of our waters

In proposing a new monument for the city of New York, I am interested in addressing where our source of understanding history has come from in the past. So often, women and marginalized communities are left out of public space. Tracing this issue of representation back to ancient history, it is clear that when they are included, their stories are told for them and too often in a way that discredits their achievements. Similarly, these communities largely aren’t given the opportunity to choose their own visual depictions. I believe there is great importance to the first person narrative; to strip someone of their control of the word “I” is really a dishonor of their identity and personhood. For these reasons, it is important to me that in creating a monument for New York City today, we do so with the intention honoring the full story and particularly those voices that history has had a way of forgetting.

Currently, we are living in a time where history is being created through the massive changes in our world due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. While many of us have the privilege to ‘stay at home’ or even ee the city, there are still people working to restore health and maintain a sense of the livelihood or “normalcy” of others. One city comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, reported that over 60% of these “front line workers” in NYC are women-- a total that includes 81% of those in social service and 74% of healthcare workers. Additionally, 75% of the city’s essential workers are people of color and over half are immigrants. In short, the people who this story belongs to aren’t, for the most part, the people who have traditionally had the power to write history.

We continue hearing words like “unprecedented”, “historic” and yes, even “monumental”. The story of the Coronavirus will be told in history, and likely it will be told through public art. Understanding the way history has been written in the past, and who this particular story really belongs to, I am driven to urge New York City to be really intentional about how this story gets told, and who gets to be the ones to tell it.

As such, my question in proposing a new monument for the city of New York became: How might public art make space for the heroes of this monumental time in history (essential workers) to tell their own story ? With this, I looked to existing works of public art in e ort to communicate with the city's existing cultural and physical landscape. One that stuck with me, both for its symbolism and history, was the neoclassical, 8 foot tall, bronze sculpture, Angel of the Waters, standing in Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain.

The statue was created by a sculptor named Emma Stebbins in 1873. It was notable because this was the rst time a woman (and a queer woman at that) was commissioned for a work of public art in New York City. And yet, after the piece was erected, Stebbins work was largely discredited. Many critics dismissed the work when it arrived. Others credited her commission to her powerful family and the fact hat her brother was on the board of sanctions at Central Park. After studying female representation in ancient history, this felt all too familiar.

In addition to Emma Stebbin’s having been sadly forgotten in history while her work remains central to New York City, the symbology of the work itself is what really resonated with me as something that could be addressed today. The Angel of the Water , and Bethesda Fountain as a whole, were created as a monument to the Croton Aqueduct which brought fresh water to New York City in 1842 after the tragic, city-wide cholera epidemic. Stebbin’s work alludes to a biblical story of the pool of Bethesda, whose waters had been touched by an angel, granting it powers of healing, renewal, and purity.

This sentiment of bringing health and rebirth to our sick city felt both beautiful and shockingly timely, and the more I looked into the cholera epidemic, the more overlap I found. Historians note (much like many journalists are noting our current situation) how the sickness largely exposed the inequalities that already existed in the city. While many wealthy Manhattanites were able to see to their homes in the country, the people who had to bear the spread of the disease were mostly low income families, immigrants, and minorities. These people were left the only ones to occupy a city whose streets, architecture, and public art wasn’t built for them. The Coronavirus saw a similar impact as essential workers continue to work in and commute through a city that had otherwise emptied. Just as to see the city, to ‘stay at home’ is a privilege that not all New Yorkers can say in a time of sickness.

Looking at Stebbin’s work of the angel who grants healing powers to the water, this fact of the inequalities highlighted in mass sickness stuck out to me. Yes, it is one of too few works of public art to use a depiction of the female body, but it is important to note that the one here is mythological. And yes, this notion of health and rebirth is beautiful, but those granting such things upon our city and our world today are not angels or deities. They are real people with real lives that they risk everyday. And many of them are people whose stories could get easily lost on history.

On this note, I want to create a story that speaks to the Bethesda Fountain, but is dedicated to the ‘Angels of Our Waters’ who are, in fact, human beings. My monument will sit directly between the Bethesda Fountain and the central pond as to communicate a sort of timeline for sickness and rebirth. In further effort to create a dialogue with the existing work, I will use a key symbol from Stebbin’s sculpture. In the Angel’s right hand she holds a water lily which is used to symbolize the healing properties and purification that she bestows on the water. This symbol will be the subject of my monument as not to anthropomorphize the totality of many different people who are working to bestow health and wellness upon us today.