King George III Interactive

To mark the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, the Museum of the City of New York opened The Occupied City: New York and the American Revolution in May 2026. The exhibition explores how New York’s diverse population—from revolutionaries and loyalists to enslaved and free Black New Yorkers and Native peoples—shaped the events that gave rise to a new nation.

Through a dynamic mix of historical artifacts, interactive media, and immersive environments, visitors are transported into Revolutionary-era New York, where objects from MCNY’s collection help illuminate the city’s complex and contested past.

KUDOS was commissioned to create “The Toppling of King George III at Bowling Green,” an interactive multimedia installation that reimagines one of the Revolution’s most iconic acts of defiance. Visitors are invited to grasp a pair of hemp ropes and work together to pull down the 4,000-pound statue of King George III, channeling the collective energy of the Sons of Liberty. The statue was later melted down in Connecticut and repurposed into musket balls for the revolutionary cause.

This multimedia installation exceeded our expectations… allowing visitors to experience and understand what the symbolic act meant for the revolutionary people who lived through this time by asking them to work and embody the effort and passion of the Sons of Liberty.

Emerging directly from the gallery wall, the ropes align seamlessly with projected visuals already tied to the statue, blurring the boundary between physical and digital space. Behind the scenes, a custom digitally encoded pulley system generates haptic feedback, allowing visitors to feel the weight and resistance of the monument as they pull.

Because no known visual records of the original statue survive, KUDOS also developed a historically informed digital reconstruction. The team digitized an existing interpretive sculpture of King George III and further refined the model using archival descriptions and historical references to create the most accurate representation possible for the installation.

The exhibition was developed in partnership with the Gotham Center for New York City History.