The Palm Springs City Council has announced a tentative plan for relocating the controversial Seward Johnson sculpture Forever Marilyn, a major step towards resolving litigation that itself seems to be dragging on, well, forever.
The current placement of the enormous sculpture—on a public street leading to the Palm Springs Art Museum, as if it’s a museum project—has in recent years drawn spirited protests as well as a lawsuit from leaders in the local art and design community. They see the giantess with her white dress blowing up above her waist as cheeseball, sexist or both, and filed a lawsuit against the city in 2021 for improperly closing that street to traffic when installing it in that location.
According to Palm Springs mayor Jeffrey Bernstein, the city council has reached “an agreement in principle” to relocate Forever Marilyn to a nearby green space, noting that they expect to “have finalisation of the specific location with the Downtown Park in the next 30 days”. The agreement involved two parties: PS Resorts, the hotel consortium that owns the sculpture, and the Committee to Relocate Marilyn (Crema), which had filed the suit against the city and PS Resorts.
“We are thrilled that the parties have reached a compromise,” said Adam Lerner, the museum's director. “We’re happy that our residents and tourists will continue to enjoy the sculpture, but the street will be cleared for an unobstructed view of the museum—an iconic building by one of the premier desert modern architects,” he said, referring to E. Stewart Williams.
The Crema lawsuit was originally dismissed by a lower court. An appeals court reversed that judgment in 2023, sending the matter back to the lower court, where the case is still pending. But not if this new plan takes place. As the mayor, Bernstein, toldan ABC affiliate last week: “This has already cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for the city and PS Resorts.” He added: “In the end, nobody wants to keep on paying lawyers, and that’s really what was happening.”
The 26ft-tall, 15-ton sculpture by was created in 2011 by Johnson, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune (Johnson died in 2020). It first made a cameo in Chicago, where art critic Abraham Ritchie dismissed it “creepy schlock by a fifth-rate sculptor”. From 2012 to 2014, it was installed in downtown Palm Springs and became a hit on social media.
PS Resorts bought the sculpture in 2020 to drive tourism and planted it on Museum Way, the street in front of the art museum, the following year.Detractors found it offensive for many reasons, not the least of which was that Marilyn was essentially flashing museum visitors, including thousands of schoolchildren.
There was also a fair amount of feminist outrage. Based on a famous image from the 1955 movie The Seven Year Itch, the sculpture shows the actress smiling widely as she stands over a subway grate and her white dress flies up. The reality was much uglier: the filming of the scene in midtown Manhattan took Monroe three hours and 14 takes, with crowds clamouring to see the celebrity and her flesh, and it ended with her abusive husband Joe DiMaggio storming off the set. She showed up to work the next day with bruises.
“This artwork is misogyny in the guise of nostalgia,” said Elizabeth Armstrong, who was the museum’s director from 2014 to 2018, before the sculpture went up. “It’s an out-of-date fantasy or delusion of a few men who remember the good old days in Hollywood—those were not good days for women.”
Trina Turk, the fashion designer who co-founded Crema, posted an update this weekend on a GoFundMe page announcing the new plan and thanking contributors for their “time and money” supporting the lawsuit. But she also sounded a note of caution. “There are still many details to be resolved, and a legally binding agreement to be worked out,” she wrote. “We will not consider this a done deal until the statue is moved to its new location.”