An outside sculpture by the artist Shahzia Sikander on the College of Houston (UH) has been vandalised within the wake of anti-abortion protests on campus. The 18-ft-tall bronze depiction of a mythological feminine determine was beheaded early within the morning on 8 July throughout the throes of Hurricane Beryl energy outages throughout Texas. In accordance with The New York Occasions, campus officers knowledgeable the artist that they’d obtained footage of the incident; they haven’t but confirmed if the destruction was associated to the activists.
“The harm is believed to be intentional,” Kevin Quinn, government director of media relations at UH, advised the Occasions. “The College of Houston Police Division is at present investigating the matter.”
Sikander is a Pakistani American artist whose work explores the postcolonial implications of id. She is a recipient of the celebrated MacArthur “Genius” Award, and a survey of her work is being proven in tandem with this 12 months’s Venice Biennale. The vandalised statue, Witness (2023), one of many artist’s first public installations in a virtually three-decade profession, had come underneath mounting hearth by right-wing teams, particularly the anti-abortion organisation Texas Proper to Life, which deemed the work “Satanic” after its unveiling in February 2024. The piece depicts a ram-horned girl whose limbs dissolve right into a tangle of roots, held aloft by a hoop-skirt armature. Her lacy collar has been interpreted as an allusion to the one worn by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late US Supreme Court docket justice.
Witness, a commentary on ladies’s bravery within the face of injustice, took on an more and more charged which means within the context of Roe v. Wade’s repeal in 2022. After a critically acclaimed five-month show in New York’s Madison Sq. Park, the statue made its method to UH, the place protests led directors to cancel a chat by Sikander and shelve an accompanying video work by the artist.
Sikander advised the Occasions that the beheading was a “very violent act of hate, and it ought to be investigated as a criminal offense”.
In a remark to ARTnews, Quinn introduced UH’s intention to restore the harm performed to Witness, noting that the college has been involved with Sikander to get the piece mounted “as rapidly as attainable”. Sikander, however, advised the Occasions that she didn’t need to “‘restore’ or conceal”, as an alternative that she wished to “‘expose,’ go away it broken. Make a brand new piece, and plenty of extra.”
The Witness defacement is only one of various examples of politically motivated artwork vandalism this month alone—a sculpture of the Virgin Mary giving beginning to Jesus was beheaded at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Linz, Austria, on 1 July after being branded by native conservative teams as “blasphemous”. In Charlottesville, Virginia, an outside banner exhibition on the town’s Downtown Mall mounted to rejoice the sixtieth anniversary of desegregation within the US was minimize down from the bushes to which it had been secured.
