Five years ago, a 12-foot bronze statue of a young, plus-sized black woman in Times Square would have been considered reflective of its time. But today, Thomas J. Price’s Grounded in the Stars — unveiled in April 2025 and scheduled to remain until mid-June — feels more like a museum piece from the bygone era of 2020, when groups like Black Lives Matter dominated world discourse and such installations still possessed the power to draw attention. Today, the installation stands as a testament to how yesterday’s purportedly radical gestures have calcified into mediocre establishment art.

Price’s massive bronze figure, described by Times Square Arts as confronting “preconceived notions of identity and representation,” is the latest in a series of nearly identical statues the British artist has installed in cities worldwide. In Rotterdam, he erected “Moments Contained” in 2022; across the United Kingdom, his Hackney Windrush commission and Fourth Plinth nomination have cemented his status as the go-to sculptor when civic bodies need to demonstrate their diversity credentials. It’s a lucrative niche Price has carved for himself: churning out formulaic bronzes that let institutions feel progressive while securing hefty commissions.

The language surrounding Price’s work reads like a script of art world jargon. His sculptures are described as “silent totems for change” that challenge “the unmediated immortalisation of triumphant figures.” The accompanying press materials, with references to “psychological embodiment,” “social signifiers,” and “predetermined value,” could easily be mistaken for text generated by artificial intelligence — the kind of boilerplate diversity-speak that major institutions now deploy with the ease of filling out a tax form.

The controversy that erupted around Price’s Rotterdam statue “Moments Contained” offered a window into the tensions surrounding this type of art. Dutch columnist Rosanne Hertzberger described the Rotterdam statue as “mundane, boring,” questioning why someone “who has accomplished nothing in particular” should be commemorated. She went further, arguing that “simply being a woman, having a disability, wearing a headscarf, being dark-skinned, and better still, a combination of all these, is now enough to be celebrated.”

Her critique, which set off a media firestorm in the Netherlands, gets at a fundamental tension: these sculptures aren’t celebrating individual achievement, but rather, placing stock black bodies into spaces previously reserved for historical figures of note. Price himself describes his characters as “everymen” and “everywomen” who are “amalgamated from multiple sources” using “a hybrid approach of traditional sculpting and intuitive digital technology.”

One wonders where this sort of art goes next. When diversity itself becomes a kind of prompt for generic, almost AI-style art — a quota to be satisfied rather than a revolution to be waged — it prompts questions about whether any of this challenges power structures or merely gives them another coat of paint.

That’s the unavoidable trajectory of protest movements: from radical disruption to institutional absorption. Price’s statue, standing impassively in Times Square as tourists snap selfies, may well be the perfect monuments to this process — a bronze embodiment of how quickly yesterday’s radical gesture becomes today’s safe bet, already on its way to becoming tomorrow’s footnote. When questions of identity are foregrounded once again, as vestigial votives like this indicate they surely will be, one can only hope more vital forms of resistance stand ready.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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