Seven eighteen-foot-high sentinels convene in a circle supporting and nurturing a female form who emerges from the earth in a newly commissioned public art exhibition by Rose B. Simpson

Also in Inwood Hill Park, where one sculpture faces the ancient wood in acknowledgment of Native histories deeply connected to the land; the other looks outward to the Hudson River, part of a trade route that brought settlers who worked to obliterate Native people and practices beginning in the 1600s.

Simpson and other artists of her generation are resetting long-entrenched art historical interpretation around the soaring capacity of figuration. The artist creates sentinels in weathered steel and bronze that lead with angularity and durability; industrial bolts fasten masks forged in bronze to sections cut from ten-foot-long steel sheets. But there is implicit tension within: Simpson constructs planar compositions that at only three-quarters of an inch deep have an exquisite fragility, like that of a towering paper doll flattened over generations and held in place by a folded steel stand. She shapes symbolism in each sculpture, where the Native past is enduring and resonant. The sentinels seem to have an acute understanding of their role as contemporary figures.