A few months ago, during a renovation of Spinner Park in Turners Falls, Massachusetts, a statue in the small brick streetscape was temporarily removed from its pedestal for its own restoration.
"The Spinner" had been erected 35 years ago in honor of women who worked in the area's long-gone textile mills. A local artist saw the empty platform as a way to stage a new tribute to women and their tools.
The fence around the construction site is covered with images of women posing — as if statues — on that empty pedestal. Artist Nina Rossi stands near where "The Spinner" used to be.
"She held a drop spindle and she was kind of Grecian, nymphy looking with drapery and nipples," Rossi said.
The statue's arms are up in the air, one hand holding that spindle, the other appearing to pull yarn from a skein of wool.
In the spring, as "The Spinner" was being taken down, Rossi shot photos for the Montague Reporter, the local paper. Once the pedestal was empty, Rossi said she jumped on it, and from there she came up with the idea for a "pedestal takeover."
"I thought, 'Wow, what a great opportunity, an empty pedestal. I'll invite people to come up and pose with the tools of their trade and we'll have a modern, realistic version of [the statue],'" she recalled.
Rossi is a multimedia artist. Some of her work is on display at a 5-foot-wide gallery she runs just across the street. But she's not a trained photographer, Rossi said, and for the pedestal takeover she used her phone to photograph almost 40 women posing with various items.
"Bev Ketch is the town janitor," Rossi said. "[She’s wearing] her signature apron and rubber boots of some kind," Rossi said.
Turners Falls Town Clerk Deb Bourbeau also took part in the project.
"She's holding an American flag in one hand, and a placard that says, 'Vote!' that's red, white and blue in the other hand," Rossi said.
She pointed out others, and then came to Aredvi Azad.
"She is a sex and relationship coach," Rossi said. "She's holding a sex toy that's not recognizable probably by a lot of people, let's just put it that way."
There's also a grant writer with a laptop, a local forager is watering a plant, a therapist painted a heart on her hand — and everyone is identified by name.
Historian Marla Miller said that’s not the case with so many statues of women in the U.S. and Europe. One study of more than 5,500 statues found fewer than 200 were of identifiable women. Like "The Spinner," many represent concepts like liberty, freedom and motherhood.
"The vast, vast majority of the female form on the landscape are abstract ideas about femininity and values and virtues rather than living historical figures," said Miller, who directs the public history program at UMass Amherst.
Miller herself has walked around Turners Falls and she's been to Spinner Park, she said, but she didn't pay any attention to the statue. It’s hidden in plain sight, she said.
"That's what happens with these kinds of statues," Miller said. "They recede into the background because they are so ubiquitous that you don't really notice them."
While the Turners Falls "Spinner" was erected in 1985 to honor decades of women who worked at the Griswold Cotton Mill, it's allegorical, made from a mold of a 19th century statue by French sculptor Louis Léon Cugnot.
"At that time, he was interested in creating a figure that represented [one of the Greek mythological "fates"] Clotho, who was spinning "Destiny" and so it wasn't intended to be a true-to-life representation of what spinning looks like," Miller said.
Recently there’s been a lot of focus on statues — of Confederate figures and Christopher Columbus. As people pay closer attention to monuments, Miller said they're now wondering: who’s up there?
"Why do they get a monument? And what does that tell us both about the moment in which it was installed and our context today?" she said.
New statues of women are being erected. In New York's Central Park, one of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth together was unveiled earlier this year. A statue of Ida B. Wells is in the works for a park in Chicago.
In this context, Rossi's statue "intervention," as Miller puts it, is important.
Hanging up next to the present-day photos are images of several women who worked in the cotton mills before they closed. Those pictures were taken the day "The Spinner" statue was unveiled in Turners Falls.
All the photos are laminated and hung along the fence with zip ties. So far they've survived several storms. Rossi said, for now, these women are all together.
"They're individuals and tying them together by the same site and the same idea," she said, "you're creating a community."
