In Brooklyn’s War Monuments, Black Men Are Cast in the Background

The Art Lens is Dandelion Chandelier’s ongoing series on art and visual culture, exploring how artists, exhibitions, and artworks shape perception, memory, and meaning beyond trend.

This Art Lens essay examines Black representational figures in Brooklyn war monuments, seen during a rain-soaked Brooklyn Museum patron tour led by David Felsen, author of New York City Monuments of Black Americans: A History and Guide. The post explores how Black men appear in these public sculptures — visible but secondary, often unnamed, and frequently cast in roles of service rather than civic honor.

At a glance: Brooklyn war monuments • Black representational figures • public memory • Civil War monuments • Brooklyn Museum patron tour • David Felsen • New York City Monuments of Black Americans

black figures in brooklyn war monuments

On a rain-soaked spring Saturday in Brooklyn, we stood before a war monument and looked for the Black man.

That was the uneasy brilliance of the afternoon. The Brooklyn Museum had organized a Black Gotham tour for patrons, led by David Felsen, author of New York City Monuments of Black Americans: A History and Guide. The route, the scholarship, and the central act of looking belonged to him. He taught us how to find the Black representational figures embedded in Brooklyn’s historic war monuments — most of them Civil War memorials, with one Revolutionary War monument in the mix — and then how to understand what their placement meant.

Because once we found them, the finding was not comforting.

They were small. Secondary. Often tucked into the lower registers of the composition, away from the heroic center of the work. In several cases, they appeared bare-chested while the white figures around them were formally, even splendidly, dressed. They were tending a horse. Guiding mourners. Assisting, pointing, carrying, witnessing.

Present, yes.

Honored, not so much.

Felsen’s larger research makes the imbalance plain. New York City has hundreds of public monuments and sculptures, yet his book identifies only 30 publicly accessible monuments, statues, and plaques representing Black Americans. Even within that small group, the heroic figure centered in his or her own right is the exception, not the rule. Many of the earlier examples operate almost like hidden-picture discoveries: Black figures embedded inside larger works whose main subjects, inscriptions, and public honors belong elsewhere.

These were not monuments to Black men. They were war monuments in which Black men appeared — frequently unnamed, usually subordinate, and visually assigned to the background.

The rain did not soften that fact.

It made it shine.

All photographs in this post are by Pamela Thomas-Graham for Dandelion Chandelier.

For another encounter with public art hiding in plain sight, bookmark our essay We Walked on Concrete to See a Masterpiece.

the search begins in the rain

There was, at first, the strange sensation of a treasure hunt.

That sounds disrespectful until one understands the visual problem. To see these figures, one had to search. You could stand in front of a large public monument and still miss them. You could admire the sweep of the stone, the disciplined rhetoric of civic sacrifice, the allegorical mother, the grieving widow, the soldier, the horse, the pedestal, the inscription — and only then, after instruction, notice the Black man in the scene.

There he was.

Or almost there.

It had the structure of a childhood puzzle: find the hidden figure. But the emotional register was not playful. It was uncomfortable, then sad, then increasingly difficult to look away from.

Because the question was not merely where the Black figure had been placed. It was why he had been placed there.

Why so small?

And why portrayed as so very useful?

Why so often undressed?

Why so rarely centered?

And why, in monuments meant to make public claims about courage, sacrifice, nationhood, and loss, was Black presence rendered as service to someone else’s story?

Felsen’s gift as a guide was not merely that he knew where the figures were. It was that he understood how they had been made to function: as support, as symbol, as proof of someone else’s story.

He did not ask us simply to admire the monuments or condemn them wholesale. He asked us to look carefully enough to notice what the composition had normalized.

included is not the same as honored

That is the central distinction.

A figure can be visible and still not be the subject. He can be included and still not be centered. He can be sculpted into public memory and still be denied full personhood by the logic of the work itself.

Presence can become a form of diminishment when it is arranged as utility.

That is what made the afternoon feel increasingly uneasy. The city had not hidden these figures entirely. It had done something subtler. It had included them in ways that made them easy to miss and difficult to celebrate once found.

A monument to someone confers honor. It names, centers, elevates, and asks the public to remember. A monument that includes someone may do something quite different. It may use that person’s body, labor, or symbolic meaning to complete another story.

The Black men were there, but not central.

Visible, but not sovereign.

Rendered, but not released from service.

Cast, in every sense, in the background.

public memory has a foreground

Every monument has a hierarchy.

Someone is central. Someone is elevated. And someone receives the clean sightline, the name, the bronze certainty, the allegorical glow. Someone is given fullness: clothing, posture, gesture, moral purpose, public recognition.

And someone else is made functional.

That is the uneasy intelligence of these Brooklyn monuments. They do not erase Black men entirely. They absorb them into the machinery of white grief, white heroism, white civic virtue, white national repair.

The Black figure becomes helper, handler, guide, attendant, witness.

A man, yes.

But not the man the monument is asking us to remember.

War monuments are never only about war. They are about what a community chooses to say after violence has been turned into history. They are about loss, victory, mourning, loyalty, sacrifice, citizenship, and the stories a city wants to tell itself about who served, who suffered, who mattered, and who belonged.

That is why the placement of these Black figures matters so much.

If a Black man appears as a symbol of emancipation, but not as a political subject; if he appears as a freed person, but not as a soldier; if he appears grateful, useful, exposed, or dependent, then the monument is not only commemorating history.

It is arranging history.

Deciding who gets agency.

Deciding who gets dignity.

It is deciding who gets the foreground.

Fred Wilson’s practice has long asked what museums display, what they omit, and what they make viewers work to see; our visit with him in Fred Wilson and the Black Mirror belongs in conversation with this walk.

what clothing says in stone

Clothing in public sculpture is language.

Uniforms confer authority. Drapery confers nobility. Suits, coats, boots, collars, hats, and military dress all encode status. A dressed body is not merely covered; it is socially placed. It has rank, role, civilization, ceremony.

To show some bodies dressed and others not is to create a visual ranking of power and belonging.

This is why the bare chest matters. It is not a minor detail. In a monument where other figures are clothed with care, the absence of clothing becomes an argument. It can suggest labor, exposure, dependence, exoticism, humility, or bodily utility. It can separate the Black figure from the civic dignity granted to those around him.

Once Felsen pointed this out, the monuments became less like fixed civic objects and more like arguments in stone.

Quiet arguments.

Old arguments.

Arguments that had learned to pass as scenery.

brooklyn as an outdoor museum

The fact that the Brooklyn Museum organized this tour for patrons matters.

It shifted the museum out of the building and into the city. Brooklyn itself became the gallery, the archive, the object lesson. There were no white walls, no label copy, no climate-controlled silence. There was wet pavement, spring grass, umbrellas, traffic, trees, stone, bronze, and the strange intimacy of looking together in bad weather.

That kind of looking changes things.

A museum teaches us how to stand before an object. A city teaches us how easily we walk past one.

On this Saturday, the two forms of attention met. We were moving through Brooklyn with a museum’s seriousness, but without the museum’s protections. The works were exposed to rain, time, soot, birds, trees, indifference, and ordinary passage. They had been sitting in public view for decades, in some cases for more than a century, saying what they had always said to anyone who knew how to read them.

Most of us had not known how.

That is the point.

The question of Black representation in visual culture also runs through The Hard Work of Black Joy, our studio visit with Derrick Adams.

the absence of black women

The tour also raised another fact that lingered: among the Black representational figures we saw, there were no Black women.

That absence matters, too.

It creates a second silence inside the first. Black men were present, but diminished. Black women, in this particular set of monuments, were not present at all. If the monuments used Black male figures to signify service, emancipation, labor, or assistance, they did not even grant Black women that symbolic space in the works we encountered.

Absence and subordination are different injuries.

The afternoon contained both.

That is one reason the experience resisted easy moral satisfaction. It was not enough to say, “Look, Black figures are here.” Of course they are here. Black people have always been here. Black labor, Black life, Black suffering, Black resistance, Black intelligence, and Black presence are not footnotes to Brooklyn’s history.

The more difficult question is what kind of presence public art allowed them.

Were they subjects?

Or were they symbols?

Were they people?

Or were they props?

The answer, in these monuments, was often painful.

rain as a method of seeing

The rain gave the afternoon its own discipline.

No one lingers casually in a spring downpour. You either commit to the act of looking, or you leave. Umbrellas tilt. Glasses fog. Notes dampen. Shoes darken. The city becomes more reflective, more cinematic, and less forgiving.

The monuments, too, changed in the rain.

Stone deepened. Bronze darkened. Inscriptions became harder to read, then suddenly clearer when the light shifted. Water collected in creases and folds. Faces seemed more severe. Figures at the margins appeared and disappeared depending on where one stood.

It was a strange gift, this weather.

A sunny afternoon might have made the walk pleasant. The rain made it serious. It turned the search for small figures into an act of attention, and attention into a kind of respect.

Not reverence for the monuments, exactly.

Respect for what they reveal.

when the background starts talking

Felsen’s work matters because it does not treat monuments as inert decoration.

His book, New York City Monuments of Black Americans: A History and Guide, traces monuments and memorials across the five boroughs, telling the stories of the people represented, the works that contain them, and the circumstances that allowed — or limited — their public commemoration. It is both a guidebook and a corrective: a way of making visible what the city has often placed low, small, or out of direct view.

On the tour, his interpretive method was generous but unsparing.

He showed us where to look. Explained how these figures came to be included. He helped us understand the visual codes — scale, placement, clothing, gesture, posture, role — through which public sculpture communicates social hierarchy without needing to announce it.

This is not a small thing.

Most monuments depend on speed. They rely on the passerby registering the big idea and moving on. Heroism. Sacrifice. Mourning. Nation. Liberty. Gratitude. Victory. Loss.

But when one slows down, the background starts talking.

And sometimes the background tells the truth more clearly than the central figure does.

This essay belongs beside our spring walk through Père Lachaise, where monuments, weather, and mourning become their own language.

once seen, not unseen

A city is not only made of buildings, parks, bridges, museums, restaurants, and streets. It is made of instructions about what to notice.

Some of those instructions are explicit: signs, plaques, dedications, names. Others are compositional. They tell us where to look first, where to look last, and what does not require looking at all.

That is why a tour like this matters.

It changes the order of attention.

It asks the museum patron, the art lover, the passerby, the collector, the citizen, and the photographer to confront a basic civic question: what has been placed in the background so consistently that background has begun to feel natural?

The answer is not only historical.

It is visual.

And once seen, it cannot be unseen.

faqs:

what is “in brooklyn’s war monuments, black men are cast in the background” about?

This post is about Black representational figures in Brooklyn war monuments, seen during a rain-soaked Brooklyn Museum patron tour led by David Felsen. It examines how Black male figures appear in public sculpture — often small, secondary, unnamed, and visually placed in roles of service rather than civic honor.

who is david felsen?

David Felsen is the author of New York City Monuments of Black Americans: A History and Guide, a book documenting 30 publicly accessible monuments, statues, and plaques representing Black Americans across New York City. His research and interpretation shaped the Brooklyn Museum patron tour described in this essay.

are these brooklyn monuments actually monuments to black men?

Not usually. One of the central points of the essay is that these are often not monuments to Black men, but war monuments in which Black men appear. Inclusion inside a monument is not the same as being centered, named, honored, or remembered as the subject of public commemoration.

why are black figures in brooklyn war monuments hard to find?

Many of the Black figures discussed on the tour are small, secondary, or placed away from the heroic center of the composition. Some function almost like hidden-picture discoveries, requiring viewers to look closely before noticing how the figure has been positioned within the monument’s larger story.

what do black figures in civil war monuments reveal?

Black figures in Civil War monuments can reveal how race, emancipation, service, gratitude, labor, and citizenship were represented in public art after the war. Their scale, clothing, gesture, and placement show how public memory often acknowledged Black presence while limiting Black agency.

why does clothing matter in public sculpture?

Clothing in public sculpture communicates status, dignity, rank, and belonging. When some figures are shown in uniforms, formal dress, or noble drapery while Black figures are bare-chested or plainly dressed, the monument creates a visual hierarchy that shapes how viewers understand power and personhood.

what book should readers consult to learn more?

Readers should consult David Felsen’s New York City Monuments of Black Americans: A History and Guide, which documents monuments and memorials across New York City and explains how Black Americans have been represented in public commemorative art.

sources + further reading

• David Felsen book — New York City Monuments of Black Americans: A History and Guide.
• NYC Parks monuments archive — Public art data
• Black Gotham Experience
• Brooklyn Museum programs
• Green-Wood Cemetery history