A statue of Christopher Columbus was installed early Sunday on the White House grounds, as part of President Trump’s effort to restore the explorer’s public standing after monuments to him were removed across the country in 2020.
The sculpture was placed on the north side of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building facing Pennsylvania Avenue, according to the New York Times. It is a replica of a statue that protesters in Baltimore tore down and dumped into the Inner Harbor during the racial justice protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
Fragments of the original were later recovered from the water by a team organized by the Maryland artist Tilghman Hemsley. His son, Will Hemsley, used scans of the salvaged pieces to produce the replica, a project that received $30,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities during Trump’s first term. For years, the finished statue sat in the artist’s studio, with no clear destination.
That changed as the administration began planning events around the upcoming 250th anniversary of American independence. The statue was transferred to the federal government and installed overnight behind fencing near the West Wing.
“In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero, and President Trump will ensure he’s honored as such for generations to come,” a White House spokesman, Davis Ingle, said in a statement.
The move revives a debate that has simmered since 2020, when more than 30 Columbus statues were removed nationwide, either by protesters or local officials. Critics have for years pointed to Columbus’s role in the enslavement of Indigenous Taíno people and the broader violence and population collapse that followed European colonization. That criticism wasn’t based in the United States alone. Last year, in Spain, two climate activists defaced a painting of Columbus at the Naval Museum in Madrid with red paint. Supporters, including many Italian American groups, view the monuments as symbols of heritage and recognition tied to their own history of discrimination in the United States.
That tension over how to remember the past has not faded so much as migrated from streets to institutions. In Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art recently staged “Monuments,” a widely debated exhibition that brought decommissioned Confederate statues into the gallery, placing them alongside contemporary works, including a major sculpture by Kara Walker assembled from parts of a dismantled monument. Rather than resolve the question of what to do with such objects, the show underscored how unsettled their meaning remains—even after they’ve been removed from public view.
Many of the Columbus statues removed in 2020 were originally donated by Italian American organizations in the late 19th and 20th centuries, including the Baltimore monument, which was dedicated in 1984 with remarks from President Ronald Reagan. Efforts to find a new home for that statue after it was recovered stalled amid concerns that its display would reignite local tensions.
Basil Russo, president of the Conference of Presidents of Major Italian American Organizations, who helped facilitate the statue’s transfer, framed the installation as a reversal. “This is Columbus making his comeback from the darkest days that existed five to six years ago,” he told the Times.
Edward Lengel, a former chief historian of the White House Historical Association, said the installation reflects a broader shift in how the grounds are being used. “What this administration is doing,” he said, “is turning it into a partisan battleground.”
