Arts Commissioner Who Led NYC Statue Panel Leaving Job

NEW YORK — The New York City arts official who helped lead a landmark review of controversial monuments is leaving his job, city officials announced Thursday.

Cultural Affairs Commissioner Tom Finkelpearl will depart his post after nearly six years in Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration. The Democratic mayor appointed him to lead the arts agency in April 2014.

Finkelpearl ended up in the spotlight in recent years for his role as the co-chair of the Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers, which was tasked in 2017 with mediating a contentious public debate over statues of problematic historical figures.

"He has touched the lives of millions of everyday New Yorkers with the joys of art, history and nature and I thank him for his dedicated service to the City," de Blasio said in a statement.

Finkelpearl will stay on the job through the end of this year, officials said. De Blasio largely declined to discuss the reasons for Finkelpearl's departure at a news conference, but said it was "a mutual decision." The city will launch a national search for his replacement, the mayor said.

Finkelpearl touted his efforts to increase public investments in cultural institutions, particularly in "underserved" parts of the city, and his push to make the staff of those institutions more demographically diverse. His agency commissioned a study that found white people make up 66 percent of the city's cultural workforce while other ethnic groups are underrepresented.

"(W)e've brought the arts into City government itself, trusting artists to help creatively address civic issues," Finkelpearl said in a statement. "... It has been deeply gratifying to witness and support the indispensable role that art and culture play in the lives of all New Yorkers."

Finkelpearl's monuments commission, which he co-chaired with Ford Foundation President Darren Walker, was empaneled amid a nationwide outcry over statues of Confederate leaders that came to focus locally on the monument to Christopher Columbus at his eponymous Midtown roundabout.

The panel decided to leave Columbus in place but commission other monuments to marginalized groups including indigenous people whom the explorer brutalized. The commission decided to remove a monument to J. Marion Sims, an early gynecologist who experimented on enslaved women, from its perch along Central Park.

The city recently picked a new monument by the artist Vinnie Bagwell to replace the Sims sculpture. Officials initially chose a piece by another artist, Simone Leigh, who withdrew her design after a community outcry.

Finkelpearl's agency is also involved in She Built NYC, a city initiative to build more public statues of women. The effort has drawn fire recently because Mother Frances Cabrini — the patron saint of immigrants who got the most nominations from the public — is not among the seven women to whom the city plans to build monuments. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has said the state will build its own Cabrini statue.

De Blasio said a statue controversy had nothing to do with Finkelpearl's departure.