Monument Mondays - Jesse Pallotta

UNCENSORED, Public art by, for, and in remembrance of women by Penny Peace, Inquisitive Viewer of Art

Marsha P. Johnson Memorial by Jesse Pallotta. Christopher Park, 38-64 Christopher Street, New York, New York.

Monument Mondays - June 6, 2022*

Jesse Pallotta | Marsha P. Johnson Memoria

Kudos to New York City where on August 24 a memorial sculpture of the LGBTQ rights advocate, performer, and drag queen Marsha P. Johnson was unveiled, the city’s first statue of a Transgender person. August 24 would have been Johnson’s 76th birthday.

Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson, a fixture on Greenwich Village’s Christopher Street for more than 30 years, was a central figure in gay rights activism including at the protests following the June 28, 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay club located on Christopher Street. The Stonewall protests galvanized the gay rights movement not only in the United States but around the world.

Since Johnson’s death under suspicious circumstances in 1992 (her body was found in the Hudson River near the Christopher Street piers), she has been praised for her calls for social and economic justice and for her advocacy on behalf of AIDS patients and homeless Transgender youth.

A quote by activist Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt is engraved on a plaque below the memorial: “History isn’t something you look back at and say it was inevitable, it happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities.”

We welcome your comments, questions, or recommendations.

For more information: https://ucnj.org/mpj/about-marsha-p-johnson/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo0nYv9QIj4

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• Repost from October, 2021.