Bloody Foundation? Ethical and Legal Implications of (Not) Removing the Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt at the American Museum of Natural History
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Bloody Foundation? Ethical and Legal Implications of (Not)
Removing the Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt at the
American Museum of Natural History
Sinclaire Devereux Marber*
Now the statue is bleeding. We did not make it bleed. It is bloody at its very foundation.
INTRODUCTION
On October 26, 2017, protestors calling themselves the Monument Removal
Brigade (MRB) splashed red paint on the base of a statue of Theodore Roosevelt
outside the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH, Museum, or
Natural History Museum) in New York City as a form of public protest art.2 This
1939 sculpture by American artist James Earle Fraser (the Equestrian Statue of
Theodore Roosevelt or Equestrian Statue) portrays the twenty-sixth president of
the United States sitting upon a horse, flanked on either side by a standing African
man and Native American man intended to represent their respective continents.3 On
its anonymous blog, MRB called for the statue's removal and claimed, [t]he true
damage lies with patriarchy, white supremacy, and settler-colonialism embodied by
the statue. The Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and
* Sinclaire Marber is a litigation Associate at White & Case LLP, New York. She received her
LL.M. in Intellectual Property from the London School of Economics, J.D. from Columbia Law School,
ALM in Museum Studies from Harvard, and B.A. in the History of Art from Yale. She was previously
an Articles Editor for the Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts. The author would like to thank Professor
Tatiana Flessas for her supervision of the dissertation on which this article is based, and dedicate this
article to her late grandfather, the sculptor William Klapp. Any views expressed in this article are strictly
those of the author and should not be attributed in any way to White & Case LLP. White & Case means
the international legal practice comprising White & Case LLP, a New York State registered limited
liability partnership, and all other affiliated partnerships, companies and entities. This Article is prepared
for the general information of interested persons. It is not, and does not attempt to be, comprehensive in
nature. Due to the general nature of its content, it should not be regarded as legal advice.
1. Prelude to the Removal of a Monument, MONUMENT REMOVAL BRIGADE (Oct. 26, 2017),
https://perma.cc/3ULA-HQBE.
2. Colin Moynihan, Protesters Deface Roosevelt Statue Outside Natural History Museum, N.Y.
TIMES (Oct. 26, 2017), https://perma.cc/F7TZ-2FCT.
3. A.L. FREUNDLICH, THE SCULPTURE OF JAMES EARLE FRASER 123 (2001); MAYORAL
ADVISORY COMM'N ON CITY ART, MONUMENTS, & MARKERS, REPORT TO THE CITY OF NEW YORK (Jan.
2018), https://perma.cc/F63H-GSFN [hereinafter REPORT TO THE CITY OF NEW YORK].
4. MONUMENT REMOVAL BRIGADE, supra note 1.
C 2019 Sinclaire Marber. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License, which permits
noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction, provided the original author and source
85](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/cjla43&div=6&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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