Too Big to Be Ignored: On Stillness, Visibility, and the Aesthetic of Refusal from the Center of the World
- Shapel LaBorde
- May 13
- 11 min read
Combating Hyperinvisibility: Monumentality and the Misreading of Bigger Black Women
By Shapel M. LaBorde, Daughter of South Jamaica Queens
“The visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.”
—Audre Lorde, Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger, 1984
“Through scale, materiality, and posture, ‘Grounded in the Stars’ disrupts traditional ideas around what defines a triumphant figure and challenges who should be rendered immortal through monumentalization.” Located at Broadway and 46th Street, the installation will be up until June 17.
I really didn't want to write a thinkpiece or what have you on this Bronze artwork. But I could not help it. There are so many racing and still thoughts on this. I've done my best to collect some of them into some streamed harmony here. If you care to follow their trajectory, keep on reading...
Prelude: The Monument Was Already Moving
Let us go back to June 2021. I stood in Times Square as a real New York City kid. Well woman, yes I was posing but the purpose and the sudden shift in energy was not to pose, but to plant myself. I did not want to perform, but to persist. I had just graduated from Christine Valmy’s Nail Technician program. I was a full-time educator during a pandemic, with a supervisor harassing me, a single mother to a toddler, and a caregiver to my great-grandmother, who would transition into ancestorhood by fall. Phew. Now looking back maybe that is why I paused to sit and feel the energy of it all.
I was tired. I was unyielding. I was, without knowing it, becoming monumental in my own becoming.. Four years later, a sculpture rose in that same plaza. Twelve feet tall, bronze, Black, and still. Grounded in the Stars by Thomas J Price.
And all I hear the most, unfortuantely is the noise in the negative. They called it “mammy.”I didn't see that, I saw myself. I saw an ordinary ass Black woman making it through odds and all and still... standing in joy.
Grounded in the Stars embodies both an empowering visibility and the tensions that come with it. Black women have historically been “invisible” in monumental art, yet hyper-visible as stereotypes. This sculpture forces a hypervisible presence of a Black woman in one of the world’s busiest public squares, disrupting a long history of Black women’s absence from the monumental landscape. Cultural critic Patricia Hill Collins has described how controlling images like the Mammy and angry Sapphire have long been used to marginalize Black women.
I. Reading Her Wrong: Misrecognition and the Colonial Aesthetic Gaze
When Price’s sculpture, a young Black woman with natural hair, hands in her pockets, no smile offered was unveiled in 2025, just a couple of weeks ago, the public response revealed how deeply entrenched colonial scripts remain in visual culture. Some viewers read her thickness and stillness through the lens of “mammy,” reducing a complex, sovereign presence to a stereotype born of slavery’s visual afterlife.The fact that Grounded in the Stars was accused of resembling a “Mammy” or “Aunt Jemima” figure reveals the deep imprint of these stereotypes on the collective imagination. Yet Black feminist scholars urge us to recognize the difference: Price’s bronze woman is not a caricature created for servitude or comic relief; she is self-possessed, looking out at the world with a “contemplative” gaze.
bell hooks (1992), in Black Looks: Race and Representation, argues that Black female bodies, when not framed by white expectations of servitude or hypersexuality, are rendered either grotesque or invisible. “When representations of Black femininity are outside the cultural script of desirability or domesticity, they are pathologized,” she explains (p. 63). This is precisely what is at stake in the misreading of Grounded in the Stars—not the failure of the sculpture, but the failure of the gaze trained by white supremacy. Far from serving anyone, she occupies space for herself. In this way, the piece aligns with what scholar bell hooks called “the critical gaze” of Black women, claiming the right to look and be seen on one’s own terms.
The figure’s refusal to perform, no exaggerated pose, no explanatory context, confounds an aesthetic system rooted in Enlightenment ideals of proportion, thinness, formality, and idealization. The statue refuses all of that. And in doing so, it echoes the refusal I embodied when I stood in the same plaza in 2021: present, full-bodied, and unbothered. So why are you really mad because we all know we have aunts, cousins, sisters, friends, grandmas, and etc who look like this. And they have had a monumental and ordinary presence showing up in our lives. Why is the ordinary dignity and existence of Black woman making you gag still? Is this racialized and marked flesh, being, on its own in the center of the world when everything else is going on, causing you fits of rage forreal? Shoutout to Dr. Spillers forever.
II. Stillness as Resistance: Campt, Quiet Refusal, and Embodied Futurity
While hooks critiques the colonial gaze, Tina M. Campt extends the discussion by illuminating how Black life often resists through the everyday. In Listening to Images (2017), Campt introduces the concept of “quiet fugitivity”—a refusal not through spectacle, but through the endurance of being. I love Campt's work and it has inspired many of my ponderings as of late on aesthetics and being while Black woman.
She writes: “Refusal is not only the act of saying no, but the generative act of imagining what might exist in its place” (Campt, 2017, p. 37). The sculpture’s quiet posture,hands tucked, gaze distant, is not passive and dumb. No it is movement in the stillness and it is charged. It refuses productivity, explanation, and performance. It inhabits space without apology. When I stood in Times Square in 2021, I wasn’t performing either. I was carrying a lineage, mothering, mourning, surviving. All at 29 years old. Trying to become who I dreamed to be as a Black woman by any means necessary. That moment was not staged unless we think about divine and ancestral placement, positionality and movement. It was lived. And that, Campt reminds us, is its power. Quiet is a language. Stillness is a strategy. I recently found myself trying to unearth this truth via voice in my writing this semester after reading Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein. I appreciated this quote from Dr. Kelli Morgan, “People have a hard time when there is an image of humanity or an image of labor or an image of freedom that isn’t a white man. We’re so socialized into seeing it… When people see something they recognize but they don’t necessarily see themselves in it in the way that they’re used to, I think it creates a cognitive dissonance.”
A plus-sized Black woman depicted with dignity upsets viewers conditioned to seeing white males as the default heroes. The vitriol says less about the statue’s intrinsic qualities and more about entrenched biases: the mere sight of a confident Black female figure in a monumental context triggers latent stereotypes (Mammy, “angry Black woman,” etc.) in the minds of some onlookers. I think of my body in spaces not welcoming necessarily to my very being and I think of the audacity people swear I got for sale. Some viewers cannot see a heavy Black female body in art without defaulting to this demeaning archetype, of Mammy, even though Price’s figure is a young woman in contemporary clothes (not an obedient apron-clad caretaker).
The statue’s physical posture and presence also convey what might be called embodied knowledge. Standing with hands on her hips, weight balanced, the figure exudes an everyday resilience and attitude familiar to many Black women. It’s a stance of both labor and leisure – as one writer mused, she could have “just got off a night shift and still has groceries to pick up”, suggesting strength, weariness, and resolve all at once. This speaks to a truth of Black womanhood that academics like Melissa Harris-Perry have noted: Black women are often expected to be indefinitely strong (the “Strong Black Woman” trope) yet are criticized for any sign of assertiveness (the “angry Black woman” trope). Here, Price’s sculpture visibly embodies that paradox. Her pose is confident but not aggressive, assertive but not militant – yet projections of anger were instant.
III. Diaspora in the Wake: Christina Sharpe and the Politics of Placement
Christina Sharpe’s
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) adds another layer to this discussion, reminding us that Black being is always shaped by the afterlives of slavery, displacement, and premature death. We live “in the wake”, that is, in the lingering consequences of crossing, rupture, and refusal.
Sharpe's theory forces us to ask: what does it mean to place a sculpture of a bigger Black woman in Times Square, a site of consumerism, surveillance, and performance?
She might argue that this act of placement both resists and repeats the logic of the spectacle.
“What does it mean to defend the dead? To tend to the Black body in pain while living within systems that benefit from its suffering?” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 22).
And yet, I stood there. Alive. Full. In pain, yes but also in motion. I was the wake and the witness to my own becoming and before my full arrival.
By placing her there, Price created a rupture. But my presence in that plaza, before the bronze, was already a living monument to the struggle and grace of what Sharpe calls "wake work." Black women in motion, in stillness, in movement. Black women’s embodied presence in a space of honor (Times Square’s public art platform) clashes with ingrained social hierarchies.
IV. Atlantic Debate: Both/And Politics of Representation
I must also admit that there is rightful critique about bringing a British sculptor to represent Black womanhood in New York City. As a New Yorker, raised by women who cooked miracles from Wonder bread, pantries and hard-earned labor as well as bought food stamps and wept(possibly) in silence after night shifts—I know this city breeds brilliance and beauty. We have Black women artists here. Simone Leigh. LaToya Ruby Frazier. Torkwase Dyson. This critique is not about nationalism, but about investment in our own. Yet and still Leigh’s work, coming from a Black feminist perspective, intentionally avoids literal portrayal of a modern individual, perhaps sidestepping some of the pitfalls of recognition and stereotype that Grounded in the Stars encountered.Are audiences more comfortable with a symbolic Black woman (Leigh’s work) than a lifelike one? Leigh “went really big” and gained attention and praise, whereas Price’s realism triggered discomfort.
And yet, as Sharpe would say, both can be true. We can demand institutional support for local Black women while still receiving Grounded in the Stars as an offering—one that resonates through the diaspora. This is it; it is expansion and I would not name it erasure.
Malcolm X once declared that the most disrespected person in America is the Black woman, and that the protection, elevation, and honoring of her in public life should be a collective priority, especially for Black men. To see a Black man sculpt a Black woman and place her at the literal center of the world,Times Square, is not something to dismiss. It is something to be proud of. It is something to cherish.
And yet, many project inadequacy, discomfort, or disdain onto this sculpture, not because of what it is, but because of what it refuses to be: exceptional, ornamental, or submissive. Black feminist thought emphasizes how the hypervisibility of Black women’s bodies often comes without genuine visibility of their humanity. In this case, while the statue is literally larger-than-life, many failed to see the nuanced humanity in her. Why is the representation of an average Black woman in casual dress, full-bodied, calm, and unapologetically present, so triggering for some? What does it say about the internalized standards we’ve adopted that a Black woman in sneakers, simply standing in her own stillness, is read as unworthy of monumental status? This discomfort is not about her, it is about the colonial residues in all of us.
V. I Am the Evidence
“I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”
—Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn (1978)
They called her mammy and I saw mirror. I refuse to be reduced by the projections of others. Yes I know that she is not me. But she gestures toward me. Toward all of us who stand tall and take up space without needing permission. Those of us who are just in the way!
The notion that one must “do” something (usually great deeds in service of the nation) to earn a statue is a traditionally Eurocentric, patriarchal idea of monumentality. Price’s work – like much of contemporary public art – challenges that idea by honoring everyday existence. It suggests that embodying the life of a Black woman, in itself, is worthy of recognition. This echoes Black feminist thought about “singing the unsung” and making visible those Black women whose labor and lives have historically been overlooked (the hyperinvisibility aspect). It’s a postcolonial critique in that it subverts the colonial monument paradigm (which monumentalizes conquerors, settlers, and abstract ideals often personified as white women allegories) by instead monumentalizing a descendant of the once-colonized, on her own terms.
What they couldn’t see in her is what I’ve had to fight to see in myself:That being big is not excess. It is archive.That stillness is resistance.That presence is not performance. It is prayer. The debate about the statue’s appearance – too casual, too stout, too sassy – mirrors debates Black women face about respectability and visibility in life. Some of the criticism is a form of tone-policing in bronze, effectively saying a Black woman must look exceptional (slim, stylized, saintly, or traditionally heroic) to be acceptable in public art. This reflects how society often demands perfection or utility from Black women (they must be goddesses, or mothers of the nation, or civil rights heroines) but is uncomfortable with simply venerating a Black woman for existing in her fullness. It’s the age-old problem of Black women being expected to represent more than themselves.
As Campt (2017) insists, our stillness holds “the grammar of Black feminist futurity” (p. 48).As hooks (1992) teaches, our refusal to perform according to the white gaze is its own radical act. As Sharpe (2016) reminds us, our presence in the wake is never just about survival only but it is about care, and imagination. And when I stood in Times Square that day,I didn’t need to be cast in bronze.I was already grounded in the stars just like my good sis here. I made it through a mountain and I see some of ya'll would prefer to create them instead of help carry us over and through.
For me, a Black woman from South Jamaica, Queens, someone attuned to hyperinvisibility and embodied knowledge – seeing a form that resembles “us” in a place as prominent as Times Square has been deeply affirming. It validates the idea that Black women’s everyday lives are worthy of art and remembrance, not just the lives of the famous or the mythical. In this sense, Grounded in the Stars carries a symbolic weight beyond its physical bronze: it proclaims that Black women belong in the pantheon of public memory.
The hopes and dreams of Black women have always been “grounded” in a reality that did not see them, yet they have looked to the stars regardless. The sculpture’s title itself invites poetic interpretation: a Black woman rooted on the ground, yet connected to the celestial (perhaps a nod to aiming high despite being held down). The broader meaning here is that monumentality is being democratized and decolonized, albeit contentiously.
References
Campt, T. M. (2017). Listening to images. Duke University Press.
hooks, b. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. South End Press.
Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: On Blackness and being. Duke University Press
Spillers, H. J. (1987). Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book. Diacritics, 17(2), 65–81.
Harris-Perry, M. V. (2011). Sister citizen: Shame, stereotypes, and Black women in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press..
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