46. Witness by Thomas J. Price at Marcus Garvey Park

Witness by artist Thomas J. Price at Marcus Garvey Park. Photo by Adam Reich. Courtesy of The Studio Museum in Harlem.
Witness by artist Thomas J. Price at Marcus Garvey Park. Photo by Adam Reich. Courtesy of The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Situated within Marcus Garvey Park is Witness, artist Thomas J. Price’s first solo U.S. museum presentation. Witness features one monumental work titled The Distance Within, a nine-foot bronze sculpture depicting a young Black man looking down at his cellphone. Presented by the Studio Museum in Harlem, Witness celebrates ordinary blackness and asks its audience to consider the function of monuments as defining the familiar. The form of The Distance Within was inspired by Price’s earlier work Network, which was presented in 2013 in the U.K. and drew from the real people who lived and worked in the artist’s neighborhood of Brixton in South London.

In reference to the sculpture, Price stated that he wanted to “interrogate [notions of] presence, movement, and freedom. Whom do these spaces belong to? And what bodies are provided more or less autonomy to move with liberty through public [space]?”