[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/GettyImages-2246113415.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tA statue of Christopher Columbus was installed early Sunday on the White House grounds, as part of President Trump\u2019s effort to restore the explorer\u2019s public standing after monuments to him were removed across the country in 2020.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe sculpture was placed on the north side of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building facing Pennsylvania Avenue, according to the\u00a0New York Times.\u00a0<\/em>It is a replica of a statue that protesters in Baltimore\u00a0tore down\u00a0and dumped into the Inner Harbor during the racial justice protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020.<\/p>\n \n\tFragments of the original were later recovered from the water by a team organized by the Maryland artist Tilghman Hemsley. His son, Will Hemsley, used scans of the salvaged pieces to produce the replica, a project that received $30,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities during Trump\u2019s first term. For years, the finished statue sat in the artist\u2019s studio, with no clear destination.<\/p>\n \n\tThat changed as the administration began planning events around the upcoming 250th anniversary of American independence. The statue was transferred to the federal government and installed overnight behind fencing near the West Wing.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cIn this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero, and President Trump will ensure he\u2019s honored as such for generations to come,\u201d a White House spokesman, Davis Ingle, said in a statement.<\/p>\n \n\tThe move revives a debate that has simmered since 2020, when more than 30 Columbus statues were removed nationwide, either by protesters or local officials. Critics have for years pointed to Columbus\u2019s role in the enslavement of Indigenous Ta\u00edno people and the broader violence and population collapse that followed European colonization. That criticism wasn\u2019t based in the United States alone. Last year, in Spain, two climate activists\u00a0defaced a painting\u00a0of Columbus at the Naval Museum in Madrid with red paint. Supporters, including many Italian American groups, view the monuments as symbols of heritage and recognition tied to their own history of discrimination in the United States.<\/p>\n \n\tThat tension over how to remember the past has not faded so much as migrated from streets to institutions. In Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art recently staged \u201cMonuments,\u201d a widely debated exhibition that brought decommissioned Confederate statues into the gallery, placing them alongside contemporary works, including a\u00a0major sculpture\u00a0by Kara Walker assembled from parts of a dismantled monument. Rather than resolve the question of what to do with such objects, the show underscored how unsettled their meaning remains\u2014even after they\u2019ve been removed from public view.<\/p>\n \n\tMany of the Columbus statues removed in 2020 were originally donated by Italian American organizations in the late 19th and 20th centuries, including the Baltimore monument, which was dedicated in 1984 with remarks from President Ronald Reagan. Efforts to find a new home for that statue after it was recovered stalled amid concerns that its display would reignite local tensions.<\/p>\n \n\tBasil Russo, president of the Conference of Presidents of Major Italian American Organizations, who helped facilitate the statue\u2019s transfer, framed the installation as a reversal. \u201cThis is Columbus making his comeback from the darkest days that existed five to six years ago,\u201d he told\u00a0the Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n\tEdward Lengel, a former chief historian of the White House Historical Association, said the installation reflects a broader shift in how the grounds are being used. \u201cWhat this administration is doing,\u201d he said, \u201cis turning it into a partisan battleground.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/christopher-columbus-statue-white-house-grounds-1234778529\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/GettyImages-2246113415.jpg?w=1024″] A statue of Christopher Columbus was installed early Sunday on the White House grounds, as part of President Trump\u2019s effort to restore the explorer\u2019s public standing after monuments to him were removed across the country in 2020. The sculpture was placed on the north side of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building facing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1845599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1845599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1845599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1845599\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1845599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1845599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1845599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}