A Bronze Tribute to Motherhood Rises in Prospect Park

If you’ve accessed Prospect Park from Grand Army Plaza in the last few weeks, you’ve probably noticed a bronzed tangle of a sculpture on the triangular patch of grass connecting the East and West Drives. The piece is actually part of New York City-based artist Molly Gochman’s ongoing Monuments to Motherhood (2025) series, and for anyone who hasn’t taken a closer look yet, there is a free, family-friendly Mother’s Day celebration this weekend centered around the sculpture and its symbolism.

From noon to 4pm on Sunday, May 11, park-goers and their loved ones can participate in a variety of Mother’s Day activities, ranging from caregiving crafts, nature walks to observe mother birds taking care of their babies, and activating the “Monument to Motherhood” sculpture through touch and sound.

Gochman conceived of the installation for one of NYC Parks and the Prospect Park Alliance’s Art in the Parks exhibitions, unveiled on April 22 and on view through next May. Monuments to Motherhood consists of sinuous cast-bronze structures meant to honor and memorialize caregivers of all forms. In an artist’s statement, Gochman notes that the seamless, intertwining forms evoke the appearance of an embrace.

The use of bronze is meant to recontextualize a material that often immortalizes and commemorates men’s violent victories and losses during warfare and other conflicts. Positioning the work across from the Grand Army Plaza directly addresses that truth. When viewing it from the south, one can perfectly frame the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch in the soft, shining curves of Gochman’s sculpture.

Gochman told Hyperallergic that she chose to work with the looping shape to “express the structure and persistence of caregiving and motherhood — the continuous, often unrecognized actions that uphold our daily lives.”

She noted that her initial maquettes rested on cups and bowls from her kitchen, explaining that the resulting negative space developed from everyday objects “reinforces the idea that care work, though often overlooked, is essential and foundational.”

Gochman also touches on the fact that as of March last year, only eight of NYC’s 150 public monuments to historical figures represented women. One might ask whether an abstract representation of maternal labor and caregiving does much to rectify these shortcomings; on the other hand, we’ve also seen how more representational monuments to women have been brutalized in the last year alone.

“As a conceptual artist, I wanted to move beyond the individual narratives we often see in the monument landscape and instead honor the act of caregiving as a shared human experience,” the artist said. “The openness of the sculpture speaks to the presence of care, even when it isn’t visible.”

This isn’t Gochman’s first Art in the Parks exhibition. Last year, her interactive installation “UKR|RUS” (2024) was situated in Asser Levy Park between Coney Island and Brighton Beach between October and December. She created the public work from reclaimed wood, rubble, and ground marble to symbolize both destruction and reconstruction amid Russia’s ongoing and deadly invasion of Ukraine.

Monuments to Motherhood is meant to be an accessible and tactile experience, inviting visitors to immerse themselves in the negative space and interact with the sculpture.

On a recent sunny morning, passersby’s responses were brief but broadly positive, as the sculpture is situated between biking and running lanes. Craning necks, quick snaps on iPhones, and peeking eyes shifting off the path to identify what golden glint is dancing in one’s periphery were the most common seconds-long gestures of acknowledgement.

Three preschool teachers and their gaggle of four-and-unders gathered to look at Gochman’s sculpture. The grown-ups read the artist’s plaque and cut it into bite-sized pieces for the children — they were quite possibly the perfect audience for a work like this.

“We had been watching this as it was being built, and the kids were asking us, ‘What is this about?’” one of the teachers, Malado Nyangamukenga of East New York, told Hyperallergic

“And to now know that it’s about both them and us, as caretakers, is very encouraging,” Nyangamukenga continued. “There are a lot of preschools around here, so this is the perfect place for it.”

A mother pushing her toddler in a stroller pulled over to take a glance. “When mommy and daddy take you to Burning Man, this is what it’ll look like,” she told her child before pushing off toward the Plaza.

Asked what she thought about the work itself, Nyangamukenga clarified that while she doesn’t have children herself, she takes care of her nieces and nephews in addition to her work with the school. She quipped: “The sculpture looks like a rollercoaster to me, and that’s exactly what motherhood is — so I love it.”