On a recent afternoon, in SoHo, a Stella McCartney saleswoman showed a customer a handbag made from a grape-based vegan alternative to leather. Down the street, a woman was overheard saying, “I needed a hat ’cause I knew I was gonna get all oily from that massage!” Nearby, a product designer named Angie Fan looked around and said, “Every day, I get more convinced that New York is a simulation. I walk around, and I’m, like, this is not real.” Fan held an iPad and pulled up an augmented-reality app, called Kinfolk. “It’s like we’re adding another layer on top,” said Fan, who helped develop it.
“We’re adding a simulation to the simulation,” a colleague named Idris Brewster said. Brewster is a co-founder of the Kinfolk Foundation, an organization attempting to remake the city’s streetscape with an app. In 2017, Brewster was working at Google, and he was among the many local activists who tried and failed to persuade lawmakers to remove the towering statue of Christopher Columbus on Fifty-ninth Street. “We were, like, ‘All right, we lost that one,’ ” Brewster recalled. “So we started creating monuments.” Each was fashioned not from bronze or marble but from bits and bytes in the cloud, visible only on screens using augmented reality. “You can build hundreds of digital monuments for the price of one physical one,” he said. He believes that in a nation where there are ten times as many monuments honoring mermaids as honoring U.S. congresswomen, and where statues of Robert E. Lee outnumber those of Frederick Douglass, having more diverse monuments makes more sense.
Brewster, who is Black, quit his day job to focus on the foundation. “We’re trying to find a way to put Black, brown, and queer voices out in public spaces, so they can be celebrated,” he said. With Kinfolk, users can place an animated statue of Frederick Douglass on a park bench or summon Sojourner Truth’s floating likeness for an afternoon picnic. Biographical information is a tap away: “Often described by historians as elderly and without sexuality, Sojourner was actually a tall and nimble dancer who enjoyed alcohol.” The subjects of Kinfolk’s other digital monuments include Maya Angelou, Buddy Collette, the Haitian general Toussaint Louverture, and Shirley Chisholm, the first Black congresswoman. (In the physical world, after nearly five years in development hell, New York City recently approved designs for a thirty-two-foot-tall yellow-and-green Chisholm monument, by Prospect Park.)
This week, without permission from the city’s bureaucrats, Kinfolk is placing four new statues around town. The installations were created in collaboration with the Black artists Hank Willis Thomas, Pamela Council, Derrick Adams, and Tourmaline. Thomas’s piece is a three-hundred-foot Afro pick in the East River, looming over the Brooklyn Bridge. Adams designed two huge statues representing Alma and Victor Hugo Green, who, in the nineteen-thirties, began publishing the “Green Book” travel guide, which identified businesses around the U.S. that welcomed Black customers. Tourmaline explained, of Kinfolk, “It’s kind of like Pokémon Go. You didn’t know it was there—until you did.”
Brewster added, “Some people call it Wokémon Go.” (Niantic, the firm that built Pokémon Go, collaborated on the project.)
Brewster and his colleagues met Tourmaline on Greene Street, in SoHo, to beta test her location-based monument—a thirty-foot augmented-reality sculpture of a Black transgender woman named Mary Jones, who, in the eighteen-thirties, lived and worked at a nearby brothel before being sentenced to five years in prison for stealing a client’s wallet. After her trial, she was taunted and mocked as a “Man-monster.” Tourmaline, who is a Black trans woman, said, “She was proof of our existence hundreds of years ago. She was living loud and proud.”
Jones used to live on the block. “There’s no marker, there’s no anything to denote that history,” Brewster said.
Brewster handed Tourmaline the iPad, which displayed a glitchy map of the city with pins marking the location of each new statue. Tourmaline, who wore high-heeled boots and carried a green Telfar handbag, clicked on the pin denoting Mary Jones’s statue, then pushed a button that read “unlock the monument.” The iPad’s screen switched over to a camera view: actual cobblestoned street (Mercedes delivery van, porta-potty, e-bikes), actual crowded sidewalk, all overlaid with a larger-than-life digital depiction of Mary Jones in a white dress, holding a sunflower in one hand and a wallet in the other. Tourmaline said, “She’s here! She’s present.”
The artist closed the app, eyes welling. “I remember a time when this history was so buried that it wasn’t accessible,” she said. Later, a maintenance man took a smoke break, oblivious of the fact that he was standing precisely in the spot where Mary Jones stood. ♦
