[ad_1]
“Someone’s clearly hurting. Someone really has a lot of anger, and that’s kind of what we don’t need right now,” Dana Alexander Kaleta, a resident on Milwaukee’s east side, told CBS 58 on Tuesday.
Kaleta stood over what was once a tranquil piece of street art: three koi fish painted on the sidewalk. Now they were defaced, twice over a few days, with the word “f*g” spray-painted next to them.
Related
“Really, it’s upsetting,” she said.
The peaceful fish, painted in their natural colors of black, orange, and white, are the work of Jeremy Novy, a onetime art student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Novy adds a black shadow under the stenciled koi, creating a 3D effect that makes the fish look like they’re floating.
Over 20 years, Novy has painted his trademark koi all around the world. Hundreds of his fish can be found in Milwaukee.
Never Miss a Beat
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
Not long ago, a homeowner in Kaleta’s neighborhood asked Novy to make her sidewalk one of his koi canvases.
“She really wanted them to be something for everybody, people in the neighborhood, people that pass by,” Novy said. “Just to bring them a little moment of joy.”
“A lot of people really enjoy and resonate with this image of the koi being a very peaceful, not political, thing in the world,” the artist added.
But recently, the koi were erased from the sidewalk, covered over in black paint. Novy said he and the homeowner thought the perpetrator might be someone who thought the art was graffiti.
Novy repainted the fish over the weekend, but just a day later, the koi were defaced again.
This time, the fish were spraypainted with fluorescent green paint, with the gay slur added next to them.
“They’re just the black, orange, and white koi. They don’t actually have rainbow coloring in them,” Novy said. “There’s nothing around them that signifies a nod or giving honor to my community, the queer community.”
The artist said he doesn’t know if he was the target of the defacement, but added, “I am gay. To call me a f*g is a personal insult. It’s a slur word.”
“That is not a message I’d expect in my backyard,” Kaleta said, calling her neighborhood “very accepting.”
Novy said he and his patron are strategizing on ways to keep the next set of koi safe on the sidewalk, but there’s only so much they can do.
“With public art, you really can’t control who interacts with it, ” he said. “You just hope that the person is nice and having a good day.”
Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.
[ad_2]
Source link
