Since the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s commission of My Neighbor’s Garden, I have entered a charged and ancient form of sculpture: public art. My world is irreversibly altered; I must disrupt my accumulated epistemic position. This privilege warrants locating new productive sculptural arguments with patriarchy, no more referencing domestic spheres or indulging in overly romantic Italian American identification. Things have changed; it’s all public now. Postminimalism, queer abstraction, and an early education in figuration will launch thinking anew. I will frame Rome’s long, ample history of public art to reimagine traditional materiality, from Etruscan bronze to Baroque stone. Of interest are those Italian sculptors whose neoclassicism propagated the nationalism of the Risorgimento and their US counterparts who came to study the classics in pursuit of similar ends. I cannot share their politics, but we’d all agree—public sculpture is only understood in person.