Artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed was commissioned to conceptualize a project honoring Brooklyn abolitionists. The New York Times writes about Rasheed's project proposal as follows:

 

„[S]he wanted to turn the idea of a monument on ist head. She proposed to reinvent the design of the anticipated Willoughby Square Park in Downtown Brooklyn with pavement engravings and bronze placards, which would offer questions and prompts to highlight the borough’s antislavery movement and ist legacy. But the preservationists and activists who, for 20 years, have pushed the city to honor Brooklyn’s abolitionist roots were displeased with Ms. Rasheed’s designs, complaining they were too abstract at a time when women and people of color are fighting to see themselves figuratively represented in New York’s monuments.“ (New York Times, 2021)

 

After hearing from the public and their expressed criticisms surrounding the monument, commissioners voted unanimously in favor of Rasheed's proposal; a project that totals $689,000 and is being led by the Department of Cultural Affairs and the city's Economic Development Corporation (cf. History News Network, n.d.). The development of the art installation is expected to involve community engagement processes in order to collect feedback (cf. NYCEDC, n.d.).

Exactly because Kameelah Janan Rasheed's exemplary monument is a project that has not been realized, but only proposed, it fits in perfectly with the other monuments in this tour. The point, after all, is to illuminate the explicitly 'feminine' in art from a different perspective; in this case, Rasheed's monument allows us to ask how the monument system and other artistic projects would look today had they not been the subject of patriachal opression. Thus, in this context, it is imperative to ask Michel Foucalt's discourse-analytical question, namely what is not even mentioned in discourses. If one considers that female persons were considered marginalized in artistic discourse for hundreds of years, archives of this period are to be read as testimony to power and make it all the more clear what is not present because it has been excluded from discourse. While one might think that this question is exclusively tied to an earlier time, it could be applied just as much in the here and now as in Kameelah Janan Rasheed's example: What, and thus who, is being shown? Who is given power that is thereby taken away from others?