Photos and reporting by Stacie Joy
On Wednesday morning, we received a few reader messages along the lines of "There is a sculpture of former President Donald Trump having sex with an American-flag-clad woman in the back of a pick-up truck on Second Street."
Not the usual queries that arrive in the inbox first thing in the morning.
Upon arriving on the scene, we discovered this work by UK-based artist
Alison Jackson, who has long skewered celebrities, politicians, and royals in art and photography, blurring the line between fact and fiction.
As
Artsy noted in 2016: "... past works have pictured Obama having a cigarette, and Bill Clinton getting a nude massage as Hillary delivers a speech on TV. They're uncanny manifestations of stories and personas that are ever-present in the public imagination, visions of what may or may not occur among public figures behind closed doors."
She planned to take the statue to Trump Tower on Wednesday for her latest piece (
she has done Trump-related performance art in NYC in recent years).
"It's a gift for Donald Trump," she told us. "It's quite a gift to leave for him, isn't it?"
According to her
site, "she made the sexually charged sculpture to raise questions about how this powerful leader, ex-President Donald Trump, treats women and gets away with it."
And why was this on Second Street between Avenue B and Avenue C?
Turns out the sculpture staging ground was outside 233 E. Second St., where
Gio Tocco Productions was lending a hand. The address has storage space that Gio Tocco rents.
The pick-up truck bearing the sculpture eventually left for a trip through Times Square and eventually a Trump Tower drive-by over the past two days ...
A copy of this hyper-realistic, life-sized sculpture is also currently
on display at a gallery in London.
... and at the Show Brain-promoted concert in Tompkins Square Park during the afternoon...
