Joseph Reginella (born 1971) [1] is a sculptor from Silver Lake, Staten Island. Described by The New York Times as the "Banksy of monuments", he has created a number of sculptures memorializing fictional events, including when a giant octopus pulled the Staten Island Ferry into the Hudson River in 1962 and when a stampede of elephants crossing the Brooklyn Bridge in 1929. [2] [3] [4]
Reginella began sculpting at the age of 14 in 1985; he is self-taught. [5] He moved from Staten Island to New Jersey in the mid-1980s, but returned to Staten Island in 1993. [1] He has worked as a commercial artist since 1994. [5] He designed the memorial to the September 11 attacks at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center. [5]
Since 2015, he has installed 6 sculptures in Battery Park that commemorate made-up historical incidents. [6] The sculptures are made of Styrofoam and plywood but painted and finished to look like granite. [4] The dates that the fictional events occurred at times to overlap with well known, real historical events; the Brooklyn Bridge elephant stampede occurred on the same day as the Wall Street crash of 1929. [4]