Difference Makers | living
working for 25 years for city offi als and agencies. In 2014, she helped found Monumental Women, an allvolunteer organization whose goal was to get more artwork honoring women to the city. “It is not easy to donate a work of art to the city of New York,” Elam said. “It was not easy to take the long and bumpy bureaucratic roller coaster ride through the minefield of ew York City government, as we traveled through the Parks Department, the Central Park Conservancy, the Public Design Commission and every single community board surrounding Central Park. But we persisted and obtained approval from them all.” The group raised $41.5 million in private funding. “In 2020, we broke the bronze ceiling with our Women’s Rights Pioneer Monument honoring Sojourner truth, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the fi st statue of real women in Central
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Park’s 167-year history,” Elam said. Three years ago, the organization issued a request for proposals from artists. Out of that design competition, Meredith Bergmann was chosen. Bergmann, trained at the Copper, has sculpture in the New York Library Collection, at the campus of Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina and the Commonwealth Avenue Mall in Boston. “Her design evolved during the approval process,” Elam said. “The Monumental Women Board decided the statue would include Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth, because they were all New Yorkers and contemporaries fighti g for equality and justice. They often spoke on the same stages and attended the same meetings. Our board felt it was only fitti g they should share the same pedestal.”
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