Thomas J Price

Thomas J Price
Bornc. 1981 (age 44–45)
EducationChelsea College of Arts
Royal College of Art
OccupationSculptor
Known forReaching Out (2020), Moments Contained (2022)

Thomas J Price (born c. 1981) is a British sculptor. Reaching Out, his first individual full figure representation of a woman, has been shown as part of the art project The Line in the East End of London. He was also selected to create an artwork, unveiled in 2022, commemorating the Windrush generation for Hackney Town Hall.

Price studied at Chelsea College of Arts and the Royal College of Art. There have been major exhibitions of his work at the National Portrait Gallery, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto. On 8 May 2025, Price's 12-feet bronze statue of a black woman, Grounded in the Stars, was unveiled in New York City's Times Square and was on view there until 17 June 2025.

Works

Reaching Out

Statue of a standing woman looking at her phone
Reaching Out (2020)

Reaching Out is 9 feet (2.7 m) tall and weighs 420 kilograms. "I want this sculpture to be an opportunity for people to connect emotionally with an image of someone they might not have noticed before," Price said.

The sculpture was on Three Mills Green near Stratford, east London. This was the first statue in the UK of a black woman by a black artist. The Guardian reported that there are only two other statues of black women in the UK.

Price wrote in TIME about the legacy of colonial monuments and the removal of the statue of Edward Colston. Within the article, he said, "White artists are putting themselves forward to create replacement sculptures of slave owners with no sense of irony. That's a saviour complex, and that exemplifies what is wrong, when even the solution doesn't involve the Black experience."

Moments Contained

Moments Contained at Rotterdam Centraal station

In 2022, Price returned to the fictional character depicted in Reaching Out with the statue Moments Contained, which was unveiled at the forecourt of Rotterdam Centraal station in the Netherlands. The statue depicts the unnamed young black woman with her hands in her pockets. Price explained, "You can see the knuckles slightly pressing through the fabric. And I think, there's also this sense of containing oneself. And that potential energy that's there. And the emotion or the psychological tension, that's just ready to emerge from this piece." At the unveiling the statue, the former mayor of Rotterdam Ahmed Aboutaleb said he expected it to become the city's most photographed image. "She's not a heroine, a character with an illustrious past. She is the future, our future, and this city is her home."

Not all responses to Moments Contained were positive. Rosanne Hertzberger, writing in NRC, was critical, describing its subject matter as just "someone ordinary" and that "The group to which she belonged was marginalized and therefore she is now overcompensated", and that the statue is "offensive to people who have actually done something heroic". Marjolijn van der Meijden, project leader at Sculpture International Rotterdam, instead said, "This is a statue about softness. It doesn't stand on a plinth and isn't an exalted representation of someone exotic. It's just yourself, how you are, not a 'super' version."

Grounded in the Stars

Grounded in the Stars was a 12-foot (3.7 m)-tall bronze sculpture temporarily installed in Times Square, New York City, in 2025.

Ancient Feelings

In September 2025, the 3-metre tall bronze statue was installed outside the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney where it remained until April 2026. Commenting on Ancient Feelings, Christopher Allen, national art critic for The Australian newspaper, described Price as "one of those international artists who specialise in producing bland, forgettable and yet pseudo-political works on a very large scale" and described a version of Reaching Out shown in Florence, Time Unfolding, as "triviality".

A Place Beyond

Price's latest work, A Place Beyond, was installed outside the V&A East in London's Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park ahead of the gallery's opening in April 2026. The Guardian's Catherine Slessor described the 5-metre bronze female statue – Price's tallest – as "a fictionalised young everywoman, mobile phone in hand, scanning the horizon... somehow in perfect synchronicity with O'Donnell & Tuomey's building", while the same newspaper's art critic Ben Eastham called it "the quintessence of east London youth, executed at the scale of Michelangelo's David".

References

  1. 1 2 Vanessa Thorpe (19 July 2020). "Sculptor unveils 'black everywoman' as UK row over statues and race grows". The Observer. London. Retrieved 19 July 2020.
  2. ↑ Alexander Hall (8 May 2025). "Times Square touts new statue of 12-foot-tall Black woman as 'stark contrast' to statues of White men". Yahoo!. Retrieved 14 May 2025.
  3. 1 2 3 Mark Brown (5 August 2020). "Sculptor's black 'everywoman' erected on public art walk in London". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 25 June 2023. Retrieved 5 August 2020.
  4. ↑ @TheLineLondon (11 August 2022). "Reaching Out by Thomas J Price will be leaving The Line on 26th August. We invite you to visit and celebrate this remarkable piece, the third public sculpture to depict a black woman in the UK, while it remains on our route for the next two weeks!" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  5. ↑ Thomas J Price (17 June 2020). "Taking Down Statues Isn't Enough. We Need to Radically Rethink How We Celebrate Power". Time. as told to Suyin Haynes. Archived from the original on 17 June 2020. Retrieved 17 June 2020.
  6. ↑ "Thomas J Price on Moments Contained". Hauser & Wirth. Archived from the original on 4 June 2023. Retrieved 25 June 2023.
  7. 1 2 Senay Boztas. "'It's every woman, it's us': Rotterdam falls for British statue of ordinary black woman". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 28 June 2023. Retrieved 25 June 2023.
  8. ↑ Rosanne Hartzberger. "Het standbeeld van een jonge, zwarte vrouw op Nikes in Rotterdam is een belediging". NRC. Retrieved 25 June 2023.
  9. ↑ Keh, Andrew (18 May 2025). "Times Sq. Sculpture Prompts Racist Backlash. To Some, That's the Point". The New York Times. Retrieved 25 March 2026.
  10. ↑ Winnie Stubbs (29 September 2025). "A stunning 3-metre bronze statue has been unveiled on the edge of Sydney Harbour". Time Out Sydney. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  11. ↑ Allen, Christopher (17–18 October 2026). "From failed Sydney arches to Ai Weiwei, modern public art has lost all meaning (print: Empty gesture)". The Australian. pp. 12–13. Retrieved 23 October 2026.
  12. ↑ Catherine Slessor (15 April 2026). "V&A East Museum architecture review – from ceramics to codpieces, this is a honey-coloured treasure trove of human ingenuity". The Guardian. Retrieved 17 April 2026.
  13. ↑ Ben Eastham (15 April 2026). "V&A East collection review – a dazzling wealth of inspiration to fire up the geniuses of the future". The Guardian. Retrieved 17 April 2026.