How many statues dedicated to real women are in Central Park? Just one, and it only went up last year. A new statue has temporarily joined the landscape, though—the Public Art Fund has brought a life-size sculpture of photographer Diane Arbus to the park's Doris C. Freedman Plaza this week, saying it "asserts the impact of Arbus’s human approach to photography and the visibility of women within the male dominated tradition of public statuary."
Artist Gillian Wearing’s 5’6” tall sculpture "depicts Arbus with her finger on the shutter button of her iconic twin lens camera, as she might have been seen in the 1950s and '60s," the press release notes; it was based on several photographs of Arbus.
There is no base at the bottom of the statue, it stands shoes-to-the-ground so as to further humanize the depiction. There is a plaque to commemorate the piece, however, which includes a quote by Arbus: “If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.”
Allan and Diane Arbus (who later divorced). Glamour, April 1951 Portrait, New York.
Arbus, born Diane Nemerov in 1923, was a New York City native who grew up on Central Park West. While she later lived downtown, she traversed the city and its parks with her Mamiyaflex, and shot some of her best-known work while holding court in Central Park, including "Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, 1962," which one photography expert called "one of the most significant photographic images in the history of fine art photography."
According to The Cut, some of her work here was done while also parenting: One of Arbus's daughters, Doon, "would later describe how she and her mother would dare each other to rush up to total strangers in Central Park and try to get a rise out of them."
The statue of Arbus coincides with Wearing's retrospective at the Guggenheim, Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks, which is open until April 2022. The Arbus statue will be on display in Central Park a bit longer, however, through August 14th, 2022—you'll find it in Doris C. Freedman Plaza near 60th Street and 5th Avenue.
