What began as an effort to add female representation to the statues in Central Park has turned into a racially and politically charged exercise in iconoclasm. Now, a New York painter is lobbying to tear down a statue of a poet for the crime of being male.

At a recent City Hall hearing in New York City, Hank Willis Thomas, who serves on Bill de Blasio’s Public Design Commission, argued, “There are what, five or six [male] statues that I think could easily be replaced by individual statues of each of these women.”