American Merchant Mariners' Memorial

The American Merchant Mariners' Memorial was conceived in 1976 and, after an extensive competition in 1988, artist Marisol Escobar, known as Marisol, was chosen to develop its design. Situated offshore from the north end of Battery Park and just south of Pier A, it stands on a rebuilt stone breakwater in the harbor. Its bronze figural group and boat are based on an actual World War II event in which a Nazi U-boat attacked a merchant marine vessel and, as mariners clung to their sinking ship, the Germans photographed them. Marisol developed studio sketches from that photograph and then fashioned a clay maquette as her winning proposal, and the work was dedicated on October 8, 1991. Born in Paris and raised mostly in Venezuela, Marisol studied art in Paris and Los Angeles before moving to Greenwich Village in the 1950s, where she was influenced first by abstract expressionism and later became known for highly stylized boxy sculptured figures. Inspired by pre-Columbian and American folk art as well as pop art, she developed satirical assemblages in the 1960s that commented on American society, while her later public work often employed traditional figurative techniques. In 1967 she exhibited Three Figures in the city's parks exhibition Sculpture in Environment, and she later produced designs for an unrealized monument to the Brooklyn Bridge's engineers, the Roeblings, as well as this memorial. Chaired by AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland, American Merchant Mariners' Memorial Inc. sought to honor the thousands of merchant ships and crews pressed into military service since the Revolutionary War. In World War II alone, an estimated 700 American merchant ships were lost and 6,600 mariners died. Drawing on the faded wartime photograph and the harbor's tides, Marisol created a work of unsettling realism in which one figure beside the boat is submerged during each tidal cycle, intensifying its emotional force while honoring the thousands of merchant mariners who have died at sea in the course of the nation's history.

New York, New York · United States