Located in Christopher Park, a small park in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, stands a permanent monument to the gay rights movement in the United States. Known as the Gay Liberation Monument, the small group of statues by artist George Segal sit and stand in couples, seeming to relax and enjoy the park, “showing the public comfort and freedom to which the gay liberation movement aspired.” The monument is positioned in front of the historic Stonewall Inn, a bar and dance hall which has catered to the LGBTQ+ community since 1966, and which was the site of the famous Stonewall Riots in the summer of 1969. The riots, led by heroes like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, began when police raided the bar and arrested many of the patrons. The Stonewall Riots are widely acknowledged as a major galvanizing force in the fight for gay rights in the United States. The figures placed in the park outside are a poignant tribute to the LGBTQ+ community, and the people who fought for acceptance and visibility.
Immigrant Rights are Intimately Related to LGBTQ Rights
Viewfinding
Viewfinding is a public art installation and queer poetry collaboration by Sarah E. Brook, a New York-based artist whose work utilizes “translucency, layering, color gradients and architectural references to investigate the relationship between expansive external and internal (psychic) space.” Located off the 68th Street Entrance to Riverside Park South, the interactive light sculpture is comprised of five wooden trapezoidal panels within which are strips of cast acrylic painted in colors from rich blue to fiery pink, all meant to reference the sky at sunset. Twenty-six poems by queer poets are attached to the bench below the panels. Through her art, Brook invites the viewer to explore “how vastness can dismantle limiting narratives of being” and “offers viewers the opportunity to seek their own resonant orientation to the work through chosen sightlines, alternately illuminating, obscuring and revealing corridors of visibility.”