Theodore Roosevelt statue removal begins at Museum of Natural History

 

It was past midnight when a crane descended on the imposing bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt, lifting his upper body from the pedestal where it has presided at the American Museum of Natural History since 1940. The remainder of the sculpture, now surrounded by scaffolding, is scheduled to leave in pieces through the week. Flanked by representations of a Native American man and an African man on foot, the shadow of the president on horseback is diminishing by the day.
A spokeswoman for the institution said that the approximately $2 million removal process was conducted with historic preservation specialists and several dozen workers. It was approved by multiple New York City agencies.

The New York City Public Design Commission voted last June to remove the statue; in November, its destination — the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, N.D. — was announced. The statue is moving to storage and will be shipped to the presidential library within a few weeks.
The removal caps a decades-long saga of protests by critics who argued that the equestrian statue symbolized the painful legacy of museums upholding images of colonialism and racism in their exhibitions. Activists have targeted the monument since the 1970s; in recent years, they have tried shrouding the sculpture with a parachute and defacing it with red paint. Holland Cotter, co-chief art critic for The New York Times, characterized the statue as one of the most contested images, and monuments, in New York City.
“The time has come to move it,” the museum’s president, Ellen V. Futter, said in an interview with The New York Times when she announced the sculpture’s impending removal in 2020.