... In 2017, Brewster was working at Google, and he was among the many local activists who tried and failed to persuade lawmakers to remove the towering statue of Christopher Columbus on Fifty-ninth Street. “We were, like, ‘All right, we lost that one,’ ” Brewster recalled. “So we started creating monuments.” Each was fashioned not from bronze or marble but from bits and bytes in the cloud, visible only on screens using augmented reality. ...
This week, without permission from the city’s bureaucrats, Kinfolk is placing four new statues around town. The installations were created in collaboration with the Black artists Hank Willis Thomas, Pamela Council, Derrick Adams, and Tourmaline. Thomas’s piece is a three-hundred-foot Afro pick in the East River, looming over the Brooklyn Bridge. ...
The artist closed the app, eyes welling. “I remember a time when this history was so buried that it wasn’t accessible,” she said. Later, a maintenance man took a smoke break, oblivious of the fact that he was standing precisely in the spot where Mary Jones stood.
See the full story here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/27/the-statue-wars-turn-to-cyberspace