RISE is a proposed temporary public installation for the empty pedestal in Boston's Park Square, where Thomas Ball's Emancipation Group stood for 141 years before its removal in December 2020. The sculpture fills the triangular green surrounding the base with 1,200 orange property stakes, commonly used to mark private land, repurposed here as symbols of collective action. Spaced on a 14-inch grid and varying in height from one to eight feet, the poles form a wave that crests upward toward the empty pedestal, each one representing ten signers of the petition that brought the statue down.

Where the Emancipation Group placed a single great man on a pedestal above the people, RISE inverts the monumental tradition entirely. Rather than celebrating an individual from above, the sculpture honors collective power from below, abstractly enacting what Frederick Douglass called for in 1876, when he wrote that he wanted to see a monument depicting the formerly enslaved "not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man." The proposal was submitted to the City of Boston's 2025 UnMonument grant cycle; although RISE was not selected, a separate submission to the same cycle was awarded funding.