Pass the soon-to-open V&A East Museum in London and you will encounter a young woman who seems to have just glanced up from her mobile phone. Thomas J. Price’s bronze figure A Place Beyond (2026) is a characteristically complex study in ordinariness by the British artist, albeit one that stands at a monumental 5.5 meters. The woman has chunky trainers and a short-sleeved top, its crinkled textile rendered seductively in polished metal; she is Black with braided hair. She looks away, as if she has just thought of something. The key detail, however, and one that has run through much of Price’s work over the past 15 years, is that she very much does not seem to be posing. She doesn’t assume that she is being looked at, that there is a viewer’s gaze. 

‘I’ve always tried to capture a moment in which the person seems unselfconscious,’ Price says when we meet shortly before the sculpture’s installation. This can be seen across his figurative bronze sculpture, be it the young woman in tracksuit bottoms that stares introspectively over commuters at Rotterdam Centraal train station, or his actual monument, the Windrush memorial in Hackney, London – Warm Shores (2022), which commemorates Caribbean migration to the UK with an intergenerational pair who might be passing by chance on the street. ‘I think different people will feel that freedom in different ways, the freedom of not being on view, on show,’ the artist reflects. ‘I think that, particularly for Black people in public spaces, that would really register.’

Price is one of a number of artists internationally reshaping expectations of what public sculpture is for and who it depicts. His reputation has been forged less through museum and gallery shows (though there have been plenty of those – an earlier version of A Place Beyond was included in his 2025 exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles) and more in commissions for streets and plazas in the UK, Europe, and the US. He joins the likes of Shahzia Sikander, Hew Locke, and Olu Oguibe, artists who use the motif of the monument, and the baggage that comes with it, to tap into political narratives surrounding whose stories are placed on a pedestal. 

‘Traditionally, the figure in public sculpture was about fulfilling expectations, individuals who are held aloft within society and who must conform to that contract of monumentality,’ Price continues. ‘I talk a lot about this idea of being a worthy individual. Who’s worth it by default, and who gets to earn it? And if you’ve earned it, how precarious is that?’

Locke and Oguibe, for example, both faced – and faced down – the precarity of political fashions. In 2022, Locke recontextualized an existing statue of Queen Victoria in Birmingham, UK, wrapping a wooden ship around the memorializing bronze to reflect on Victorian imperialism. When he was commissioned to carry out a similar treatment on a statue of Leopold II in Ostend, Belgium, in 2023, however, the project was cancelled after a change in local administration. A towering obelisk by Oguibe, Monument for Strangers and Refugees (2017), commissioned for the German town of Kassel by Documenta, was removed and then returned, albeit in a less prominent location, all within two years of its original installation.

In London, the Fourth Plinth commission in Trafalgar Square has been the subject of similar political controversies. In 2005 Marc Quinn installed a 13,000 kg marble sculpture of a nude and pregnant Alison Lapper, an artist who was born with no arms and shortened legs. ‘All hell broke loose,’ Quinn recalled years later. When its installation was announced, a Conservative member of the British parliament bemoaned, ‘The politically correct lobby has prevailed. […] we should have focused on individuals of great achievement.’

It seems opinions have barely changed, if the US artist Tschabalala Self’s experience is anything to go by. In September she will unveil her own work for the plinth, Lady in Blue, which depicts in bronze a glamorous Black woman mid-stride in a long blue evening dress. ‘I will give her glass jewelry that catches the light,’ Self says over a video call. ‘I want the sculpture to be beautiful and enjoyable.’ That’s understandable, given the events surrounding the installation of Seated (2022) – Self’s first public sculpture in the UK, of a Black woman on a chair – outside the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, in 2023. One night shortly after the work had been moved to the site from London, the figure’s skin was spray-painted white by vandals, in what was clearly a racist attack. 

‘It caused a lot of trauma in the community,’ Self recalls. ‘The art center covered it up, but I felt that was heightening the anxiety, so I asked them to first uncover the sculpture and then I thought, let’s get the community involved in cleaning it up. Hundreds of people showed up.

‘The ultimate narrative was that of healing,’ the artist continues. ‘She was made whole again through the trauma of being recognized and acknowledged, and people taking action to aid in the restoration.’ 

Artists working in a public realm polarized by debates about identity are learning to steel themselves against such attacks. In 2024 a bronze outdoor sculpture by Sikander at the University of Houston in Texas was damaged deliberately. Witness (2023) – a female figure with braided hair in the shape of ram horns – had previously been condemned by conservative Christian groups. Sikander decided against repairing the work, writing that she wanted to leave it as a ‘testament to the hatred and division that permeate our society.’

Contemporary public art has become a particular bugbear of the far right since the controversies over Confederate-era statues in the US, torn or taken down as the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum. The curator Hamza Walker explains over a video call that the reaction is wearily expected: ‘Even in the 1960s [during the civil rights movement], if you took three steps forward, there would be four steps back.’ ‘Monuments’, the exhibition he has co-curated in Los Angeles at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and The Brick, where he’s director, 10 Confederate-era statues will be on show, as well as commissions from the likes of Kara Walker, Stan Douglas, and Karon Davis. ‘We wanted to show that there is a long history of civil disobedience around these signs and symbols,’ Walker says. Kevin Jerome Everson’s 10-minute video portrait of Richard Bradley, for instance, reveals how the activist removed the Confederate flag in downtown San Francisco in 1984. Kara Walker used parts of a toppled 1921 equestrian statue of the Southern military general ‘Stonewall’ Jackson to create Unmanned Drone (2023), a monstrously hybrid figure of horse and man. As Hamza Walker points out, it becomes a monument not to a hero, but to ‘horror.’

While the figures Price creates are far more benign, he also received considerable backlash to his works installed in Rotterdam’s Station Square in 2023 and New York’s Times Square in 2025. ‘Why are they so controversial?’ he asks. ‘They’re just sculptures of people standing, after all.’ Hamza Walker suggests that encountering a sculpture outside elicits a different response from seeing one in a gallery, that people are primed to expect the person depicted by a statue to represent more than themselves. ‘Does the object determine its meaning or the context? What are the expectations? And what are the reactions?’

These are questions Price is attuned to. ‘Bronze is a material of power. And the scale I use in public works is associated with celebration of an individual. When the work refuses these expectations it can create dissonance, anxiety, and some sort of resistance.’

Both Price and Self say that they do not want their work to be read in terms of identity only though. Rather, they aim, as Price puts it, for wider questions ‘about being human.’ Self affirms, ‘I’m really fascinated by the body as an object, vehicles that allow all of us to engage with one another. That’s my primary interest in figuration, a more existential concern as to what it means to be embodied in general. What are these things we encounter others through?’