A monument that will not look like this one is going up in Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s native Brooklyn.
Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images
A monument to Ruth Bader Ginsburg is officially coming to Pier 1 at Brooklyn Bridge Park. On Monday, a state commission launched an open call for designs that would reflect the late Supreme Court justice’s “fearless pursuit of equality and justice” and also make sense on the southwest plaza of Pier 1 — where tree-lined lawns frame a view of the harbor and the Statue of Liberty.
The call for proposals is the first major announcement from the committee, which was appointed by Andrew Cuomo shortly after Ginsburg’s death in 2020. Per Governor Kathy Hochul’s office, planning for a monument to the “daughter of Brooklyn who became a giant of American jurisprudence” was a “top priority.” The members include Ginsburg’s daughter and granddaughters, plus lawyers, legal scholars, museum administrators, biographers (including our own Irin Carmon), and the principal of her alma mater in Midwood. (A smaller group of honorary commissioners includes Hillary Clinton and Gloria Steinem.) Their ranks also include curators Anne Pasternak of the Brooklyn Museum and Susana Torruella Leval of El Museo del Barrio, whose experience will be key in the next step: evaluating the first round of proposals, which are due on February 2. (More on that here.)
The lawn on Pier 1 last year. The site frames views of Manhattan and, to the left outside of this image, a view over the water to the South.
Photo: Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images
Monday’s announcement doesn’t veer far from what Cuomo riffed on at a press conference after he launched the project: Our then-governor said a nice location for a statue might be “Brooklyn Bridge Park on a site that would overlook the Statue of Liberty.” Members of the committee said they also liked the view of the statue and appreciated that the pier was easy to access by subway, bus, and the ferry that spits out passengers at the next dock.
Ginsburg in 2019.
Photo: Tom Brenner/Getty Images
So what will it look like? The call for proposals says the work “may include” a likeness of Ginsburg, but that’s not a requirement: The group is “open to a range of artistic styles and methods, and encourages creativity and innovation.” And artists inclined to rebel against the tropes of snoozy public art may latch onto a line that asks artists to consider Ginsburg’s reputation for “thoughtfully challenging entrenched power systems.” (Though designs must still be “consistent with public access” and “take maintenance into account.”)
There are a lot of other Ginsburg tributes out there, a testament to her legacy and to what some see as Democrats’ desperation for a unifying mascot. Within months of her death, lace collars appeared on statues of women, clothing nude bronzes on an Illinois college campus and on the throat of the “Fearless Girl” of Wall Street. Ginsburg’s face appeared on postage stamps, and the city council of Los Angeles approved plans to put up a monument, which is now being funded by Hulu to go up near its offices in Van Nuys. Her name itself now adorns a street sign outside her old high school in Midwood, an elementary school in Washington State, and the Brooklyn Borough municipal building (a Bill de Blasio move, made days after Cuomo’s). In downtown Brooklyn, shoppers who popped into City Point in spring 2021 could pause to take photos with a seven-foot bronze of RBG in full court regalia, which has since moved to a public hospital that was named for her. Up in Albany, visitors can scan the entrance hall of the State House for a bas-relief portrait of Ginsburg in the sandstone walls — the first face added to the gallery since 1898 and the room’s only Jew. Murals in RBG’s likeness have gone up everywhere from the Lower East Side to Austin to Denver. (Though in conservative-leaning Houston, a more abstract memorial that included her lacy collar was decried as “satanic” by a local pro-life group. Last year, it was “decapitated” by vandals.)
The bronze statue by Gillie and Marc Schattner that went up in Brooklyn in 2021.
Photo: Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images
The monument in Brooklyn Bridge Park may be the most official, not just because of its budget (somewhere between $1 to $2 million) but its connection to Ginsburg’s own family. Her daughter and granddaughter sit on the committee, and in today’s announcement, they said they’re “delighted” at the prospect of an honor “in the borough where she was born and raised.”
*This piece has been updated.
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