Marc Massaro design
The approved new Wooster Square monument.
A Wooster Square Park arts committee has raised $225,000 so far to help put up a new Italian heritage-celebrating sculpture in place of the long-gone Christopher Columbus statue — and is still looking for donations for a goal that now tops $300,000.
Wooster Square Monument Committee Co-Chair Bill Iovanne shared those updated numbers with the Independent on Tuesday, following up on an email press release that his group sent out on April 1.
The fundraising — which official began on March 1 — is in support of “Indicando la via al futuro,” or“Pointing the way to the future,” a statue designed by Branford-based artist Marc Massaro. The final approved design depicts an Italian father and mother with their younger son, pointing skyward, and older daughter, who holds a book and wears a cross.
The statue will replace the sculpture of Christopher Columbus, which the city removed from Wooster Square Park in June 2020 amid that summer’s Black Lives Matter protests and a broader reckoning with Columbus’ brutality toward the Native Taíno people.
On Tuesday, Iovanne said that the committee has raised a little over $225,000 in cash and pledges to the project so far.
“Our original fundraising goal was $300,000. Costs for materials have increased since we began this project almost three years ago, so we will need to raise a little more money to cover the increased materials cost and have a contingency to maintain the project once we dedicate it,” he said in an email comment provided to the Independent.
Click here to donate to the project.
Committee Co-Chair Bill Iovanne, Jr.
The committee also announced in its April 1 email press release that it will be dedicating the brownstone path behind the sculpture and the garden plantings around the plinth in honor of fellow committee co-chair Laura Florio Luzzi, who passed away last September.
“Laura was so very proud of her Italian heritage and keeping family traditions and our culture alive. She worked so hard, even through her illness, to see that this project received approval not only by the Boards and Commissions, but more importantly, by the community that she loved so much,” Iovanne is quoted as saying in that press release.
Massaro’s statue will be life sized, cast in bronze, and placed in front of the existing ex-Columbus-statue pedestal, which has been in the park since 1892.
The press release states that “contributions of $5,000 and higher will be acknowledged on a plaque that will be mounted to the pedestal that supported the former Columbus statue. All other contributions will be recognized in a journal that will feature personal stories and photos of generations of immigrant families who settled in New Haven and Wooster Square. The committee seeks wide engagement with all who wish to acknowledge their links with this important period of New Haven’s history.
“The committee is also interested in collecting personal ephemera and other memorabilia, and recollections from the greater community, to be shared on our website and our Facebook page. WSMC seeks to honor our ancestors and call attention to the important stories they tell.”
Donations to the project should be made payable to the Wooster Square Conservancy, a local 501(c)3 non-profit that is acting as the committee’s fiduciary.
While this is certainly a step in the right direction from the Columbus statue, why are we not creating space for art and historical monuments dedicated to the indigenous people of this land first? Replacing the statue of a colonizer with one of european immigrants still skips over the origins of the land in Wooster Square and surrounding areas as a seasonal fishing and water transport area for the Quinnipiac People and other nearby indigenous tribes.