Over 100 Artists, Academics Petition Against Relocation Of Roosevelt Statue

In June last year, the New York City Public Design Commission voted unanimously for the removal of an equestrian statute of Theodore Roosevelt from the entrance of the American Museum of Natural History. 

Just last month, the bronze landmark was formally taken down and put into storage, with plans for it to head to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota, on a long-term loan. 

Now, 145 artists and academics have come together to pen an open letter in protest of the statue’s removal, asking the city to reconsider its plans to shift the statue.

According to Hyperallergic, the petition said the authorities had “made a mistake” by approving the forthcoming library as the place to display the work, which features a Native American and Black man below the former president, who sits on horseback. 

“Its transfer to that location only compounds the harms stemming from the statue’s racist message,” said the letter. 

“New Yorkers cannot simply dump their toxic cultural products in other communities. The city should reject the transfer of its undesirable waste elsewhere,” it argued. 

Artnet News reported the letter claimed city officials should have consulted with the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) people, on whose ancestral land the library will be built. 

“We believe that the decision to send the monument to a site that is so culturally important to the MHA Nation is either an act of breathtaking insensitivity or of metropolitan arrogance,” wrote the petitioners. 

Tribal leaders have concurred with the artists and academics. Chairman of the MHA Nation, Mark Fox, told Native News Online that he felt the decision to move the statue onto ancestral land was “ignorant and inappropriate.”

“If the state of North Dakota or the [library] asked for our endorsement directly… my answer would be ‘hell no’,” he added. 

At the moment, nothing has been said by representatives from the American Museum of Natural History or New York City, though with the mounting pressure against the statue’s move to North Dakota, it may have to reassess its travel plans soon. 

[via Hyperallergic and Artnet News, cover image via S-F / Shutterstock.com]