This fall, a pair of monumental scrolls presided over Baruch College’s Mishkin Gallery in Decision at a Desk, an exhibition by Bronx-based artist Christian Hincapié. Up close, their gridded masses of diazotype blue were revealed to be magnified spreadsheet cells pulled from a publicly available, 1,836-page PDF listing all officially recognized artworks within the jurisdiction of the New York City Parks Department, its strings of coordinates and litanies of toponyms illegibly enlarged in a parody of government transparency.
A lacuna in this data dump, and one of particular concern to the artist, is a series of cast art deco monkeys that once appeared shackled to the restrooms serving Riverside Park’s 148th Street playground, developed under the supervision of Robert Moses in the 1930s. Hincapié first learned of the sculptures from a few lines (scanned and entered into the exhibition) in The Power Broker, and his ensuing work bolstered the successful campaign to remove them. In the show’s titular piece, one of the statues returns as a negative impression sunk into kneaded eraser putty—a material that aids forgetting.
Since Robert Caro’s passage went viral two years ago, many have taken the monkeys, which came down in 2023, as further evidence of Moses’s well-established anti-Black animus. Skeptics have pointed out that the neighborhood immediately surrounding the playground was largely inhabited by European immigrants in the 1930s and that simian statuary adorned the West 83rd Street comfort station as well. It’s also debatable whether Moses knew of these figures or whether they were indeed shackled, rather than swinging from playground rings. Nonetheless, the mythos of Moses’s monkeys captures an ecstatic truth. Stylized and unattributed, they seemed to emanate from a colonial unconscious, to crystalize the racism and inequity of Moses’s New York. In the exhibition’s accompanying booklet, Hincapié notes, among other abuses, the master builder’s infamous razing of San Juan Hill to make way for Lincoln Center; his shortsighted devotion to private transport; and the unaccountable power structure of his Triborough Bridge Authority. In the gallery, a challenge coin belonging to a Bridge and Tunnel “Peace Officer,” an unanswered letter addressed to Moses from a Black resident of Harlem reporting harassment from white park users, and other archival finds document Moses’s built legacy as it crumbles around us, all too slowly.
How, then, to channel the belated outrage engendered by Moses’s self-satisfied grin, reproduced in another diazotype print near the show’s entrance? Hincapié lifted this likeness from a commemorative mosaic in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, removed only recently due to disrepair and labeled, improbably, “Robert Moses by Artist Andy Warhol 1964.” Following the power broker’s storied kerfuffle with the pop artist, which resulted in the censorship of Warhol’s archly homoerotic contribution to the 1964–65 World’s Fair, Drella retaliated with a series of unflattering silkscreen portraits. Eventually, somebody with a sense of humor slipped one of these images into the pavement of the park’s David Dinkins Circle—an anti-Mosaic mosaic hiding in plain sight.