A Monument Among Many : Thomas J Price in New York

It’s rare for an artist to occupy the scale of a metropolis while simultaneously inviting an inward, human gaze. With Resilience of Scale, British sculptor Thomas J Price’s first major solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in New York, and the concurrent installation Grounded in the Stars in Times Square, the artist has managed just that. Across two radically different settings: the polished calm of a downtown gallery and the electric chaos of the city’s most commercial intersection. Price stages a dialogue about monumentality, public presence, and everyday dignity.

At Hauser & Wirth’s Soho gallery, the figures in Resilience of Scale greet viewers not from lofty pedestals but at eye level, walking among us, as it were. They are cast in bronze, standing between nine and twelve feet tall, yet they do not impose. Instead, they invite. The absence of plinths collapses traditional hierarchies and opens space for recognition: those familiar folds of a hoodie, the subtle slouch of a weighted stance, or the faraway look of someone deep in thought. These figures, based not on historical icons but on imagined composites of real people, operate outside the art world’s usual pantheon. In their stillness and their realism, they insist not on celebrity but on presence.

The sculpture A Place Beyond, rendered in a golden-hued bronze, draws particular attention. Its luminous surface catches the light as if to recall the grandeur of antiquity, yet it depicts a young man in casual contemporary clothing, with a posture both grounded and alert. There is reverence here, but it is redirected toward the anonymous, the underrepresented, the ordinary made monumental.

Just days after viewing the exhibition in Soho, I visited Times Square, where Price’s Grounded in the Stars stood resolutely among the digital cacophony of billboards, LED lights, and hurrying crowds. It is a twelve-foot bronze sculpture of a young Black woman, her arms placed firmly on her hips, her expression poised yet unyielding. The impact was immediate. Amid the relentless churn of commercial messages and tourist snapshots, here was stillness: unmoving, unadvertised, unafraid.

The public’s reaction was palpable. People stopped. They circled the work slowly, read the placard, and took selfies not just with the sculpture but seemingly for it, offering it the kind of attention Times Square rarely allows. Some passersby commented on the sculpture’s likeness to people they knew—a cousin, a sister, themselves. Others spoke emotionally of its scale and setting, expressing gratitude for a figure that unapologetically took up space, particularly as a representation of a Black woman in a place more often defined by commodification and spectacle.

Not all responses were affirming. Online commentary has exposed the frictions the work is unafraid to stir. Some have dismissed it, politicized it, or even derided it. But this, too, is part of its life as a public monument. It lives in the tensions it provokes, in the questions it raises about beauty, identity, and who is granted the privilege of visibility.

Price’s dual presence in New York this spring creates a powerful spatial and conceptual continuum. In the quiet of the gallery, one confronts the intricacy of form, the respect for the individual body, and the choice to memorialize the often unseen. In the roar of Times Square, that choice is broadcast. It reverberates with a different kind of power, calling on passersby not only to look but to reckon.

Resilience of Scale runs at Hauser & Wirth’s Wooster Street location through June 14, 2025, while Grounded in the Stars remains installed at Broadway and 46th Street until June 17. Together, they do not simply mark a moment in Price’s career. They mark a shift in how, and whom, we see. In a city that never stands still, Price’s sculptures ask us, just for a moment, to do exactly that.