page_title: Zurab Tsereteli
section_title: Projects
hierarchical_section_title: Zurab Tsereteli / Projects
caption_attribution_description: Statue of Christopher Columbus in Sevilla
context_page_description: Zurab Konstantinovich Tsereteli is a Soviet/Russian painter, sculptor and architect known for large-scale and at times controversial monuments. Tsereteli has served as the President of the Russian Academy of Arts since 1997.
context_section_description: The statue of Peter the Great in downtown Moscow which, at 94 meters, is the eighth tallest statue in the world. Popular legend states that the Statue was initially of Christopher Columbus, but that after being rejected by the US Government, its head was replaced, and it was sold to the Russian government as a nautical statue of Peter the Great. In November 2008, it was voted the tenth ugliest building in the world by Virtual Tourist.
  A statue known as Birth of the New World depicting Christopher Columbus. The statue was rejected by the US government when Tsereteli attempted to have it installed there in 1992, in connection with the 500th anniversary of his voyage. The municipal government of Cataño, Puerto Rico, consented to having the statue built in their town, but later was unable to garner enough public support and funding. On August 15, 2008, the private contractor in charge of building a series of facilities for the 2010 Central American and Caribbean Games announced that the corporation had bought the structure and will build it in the municipality of Mayagüez, expecting to assemble it in time for the games. After this project was abandoned, the statue was moved to the municipality of Arecibo, where its assembly began during the spring of 2014. The statue was unveiled in Arecibo on June 14, 2016. A smaller twin statue named The Birth of a New Man was given by Russia in 1993 and was assembled in Seville, where it is popularly known as Huevo de Colón (Columbus' Egg).
  The statue of St. George at the Moscow War Memorial and several versions of the same subject in Moscow and elsewhere. The foremost among these is a sculpture using sections of scrapped US Pershing II and Soviet SS-20 nuclear missiles.  The sculpture, entitled Good Defeats Evil is on the grounds of the UN building in New York City. The sculpture is a 39 foot high, 40 ton monumental bronze statue of St George fighting the dragon of nuclear war.  It was donated to the UN by the Soviet Union in 1990.
  A 9-1/2 meter tall, 2 metric ton treble clef covered in mozaic gold that tops the cupola of the Moscow International House of Music. The sculpture rotates like a weathervane.
  His Tear of Grief (actually titled To the Struggle Against World Terrorism) features a 40-foot teardrop suspended in the fissure of a 106-foot bronze rectangular tower.  The monument includes the names of all the victims of the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania, as well as the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. At the ground breaking for the massive project, Vladimir Putin was present and called the sculpture “a gift from the people of Russia.” It was erected at the tip of the decommissioned Military Ocean Terminal, now rechristened The Peninsula at Bayonne Harbor, in Bayonne, New Jersey (after nearby Jersey City first accepted, then declined, the free monument) and was dedicated on September 11, 2006. The artist, Bill Clinton, Michael Chertoff, New Jersey Senator Jon Corzine, and a 9/11 widow all spoke at the dedication ceremony.
  On September 25, 2006, another Peter the Great statue by Tsereteli was installed on Vasilievsky Island, St. Petersburg, in front of the Pribaltiiskaya Hotel. The sculptor had originally wished it to be placed in front of the historic Manege next to St. Isaac's Cathedral, but this was turned down because of risk of damage to Quarenghi's building.
  The Chronicle of Georgia (or History Memorial of Georgia)
  Other offers of statuary by Tsereteli rejected by intended recipients in recent years include a statue of Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill next to Livadia Palace in Yalta (Ukraine), Magellan (Uruguay), the Colossus of Rhodes (Greece), Franklin D. Roosevelt (New York) and Balzac (France).
caption: The Birth of a New Man in Seville
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