The Art That We Keep Or Destroy
The Mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, has called for the removal of a mural of Iryna Zarutska, a young Ukrainian refugee whose brutal murder was caught on video, because, according to Mayor Smiley, because of its “misguided, isolating intent”. Providence has a BLM street mural covering three blocks and a “Love is a Many Gendered Thing” mural, but Mayor Smiley urged supporting artists “whose work brings us closer together rather than divide us” and remembering Irina’s murder divides us. Unlike BLM and “Love is a Many Gendered Thing” which bring us together. In New York City, a mural of the murdered woman was vandalized after being up for less than two weeks. In Chicago, it was vandalized in less than a month. But not all murals and acts of iconoclasm are created equally or treated equally. Over in Milwaukee, a 74-year-old rabbi was sentenced for vandalizing a terrorist mural depicting the Star-of-David as a swastika. According to media reports, the Muslim ‘artist’ had to be removed f...