The violent media campaign orchestrated by the fascists against me, spearheaded by the New York Post, has now taken a turn towards art criticism to denounce my public art piece, Phoenix Ladder: Monument to the people of the Bronx. This is not my first encounter with the tabloid, but a continuation of a targeted attack which has everything to do with the fascist seizure of life that is all our reality now, but for Black, Indigenous, and colonized people globally has always been present, albeit at simmering temperatures. It is the clap back which Aime Cesaire called “imperial boomerang” in its full manifestation, or on its way to be. But this crisis was not born yesterday and since its inception, my permanent public artwork has kept the score.
I accepted the commission for Phoenix Ladder: Monument to the people of the Bronx in 2018 at a time when the violent foundations of the settler-colonial project we call the United States were being called into question. Questions that came on the heels of Black Lives Matter and the Occupy Wall Street movement that preceded it. These counterhegemonic actions had seized the narrative, and so it follows that a reactionary right wing would emerge from milieus already retaliating against a Black president, no matter how anti-immigrant, neoliberal, and warmongering he was. What began as a Tea Party in 2007 would materialize 10 years later into White men marching with tiki torches at a Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville.
But in that year, we were tearing down Columbus statues and Confederate monuments. In New York City, Decolonize This Place galvanized community groups across the five boroughs to force the eugenicist institution American Museum of Natural History to remove the statue of Theodore Roosevelt flanked by an African and a Native American placed like servants at his feet. We understood that the defaced and collapsed figures of our enslavers and subjugators were symbolic of the urgent need to abolish the imperial, racist settler colonial project that we call the United States for something else to emerge.
What kind of monuments would replace them? The commission to construct a permanent public sculpture in the Bronx was an opportunity to bring that imagination to fruition. As an artist and organizer born and raised in the Bronx, I am called to steward our histories, create moments of contemplation through art, and fight for our futures. Phoenix Ladder is not a monument of the City of New York. It carries that designation only in the title. A back door declaration from below. The plaque on the piece reads, “Let this monument serve as a rallying cry for those who make home on the periphery of the empire.” Those descendants of Black people fleeing Jim Crow south alongside Puerto Ricans flown in on lawn chairs bolted to the ground of military cargo planes via Operation Bootstrap, and the many migrants that have poured in from all over the global south, together. I imagined the site of the sculpture as a space for gathering, to “renew our habits of assembly,” as Fred Moten reminds us. Public space to gather continues to be taken from us, and Phoenix Ladder would provide it, so that we might conspire against predatory landlords or galvanize against the threat of ICE.
But this project took seven years to complete and many fights against organized abandonment and violence were waged throughout this lull, exacerbated by a historic pandemic. The shelter-in-place was a pressure cooker that exploded with the murder of George Floyd and the crisis for the fascists was made bare as they saw themselves outnumbered, even as they wielded the power of the state. Even as they orchestrated a failed coup with impunity. We had barely licked our wounds when we were hit with over 145 anti-trans bills in 34 states, with 17 passed and the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Soon, they had their foot soldiers orchestrating confrontations on campuses across the US.
This was who I faced in May of 2023 at Hunter College and the reason why I continue to be a target for right-wing media. Students for Life of America, like its ally organization Turning Point USA, is the largest youth-focused anti-abortion organization in the United States, with over $11 million in net assets (as of 2024), according to ProPublica. My confrontation with this organization became political fodder to incite their base and led to multiple death threats and legal entanglements. The university collapsed almost immediately under the media pressure, which resulted in my firing. This capitulation set the tone going forward for all institutions, when five months later, students and professors faced termination, expulsion, and deportation for supporting Palestinian Resistance. Palestine has since transformed our reality and exposed the power relations. The charade has been abandoned, globally. Today, White Christian supremacy is on the fascist march and carrying out a race cleansing campaign which promises to pivot back to forms that we have already known: slave patrol, KKK, deputized by the state.
Despite these obstacles, Phoenix Ladder was completed in November 2025. She is a homage to the people of the Bronx, a lighthouse for our collective futures, and our witness. It’s no surprise that these reactionary forces are appalled by it. They understand that this monument is built on their ruins.
