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      ‘I want a president who has been gaybashed’: America’s underground anthem

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      ‘I want a president who has been gaybashed’: America’s underground anthem Zoe Leonard wanted a leader who had been on welfare, lost a lover to Aids, and much more. Sadly her plea, penned in 1992 and later displayed beneath New York’s High Line, is just as relevant today‘I want a dyke for president,” reads the opening of Zoe Leonard’s I Want a President. “I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice-president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia.”Originally intended to be published as “a statement” in an underground LGBT magazine, I Want a President was written in the run-up to the 1992 US presidential race. This took place at the height of the Aids epidemic, a medical issue turned political crisis that was, in the previous decade, catastrophically silenced by Ronald Reagan. President from 1981 to 89, Reagan failed to acknowledge Aids until thousands had died. The queer community was in turmoil, in the grip of a disease that took the lives of so many, and stigmatised even more.TopicsArtThe great women’s art bulletinUS politicsLGBTQ+ rightsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      ‘It was opportunistic in the best sense’: how the US constitution inspired an exhibition

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      ‘It was opportunistic in the best sense’: how the US constitution inspired an exhibitionAfter a frenzied auction, a rare first printing of the US constitution was lent to a museum in Arkansas where it’s led to an exhibition on democracy They were eight tense minutes that Austen Barron Bailly will not forget in a hurry.The scene: Sotheby’s auction room in New York. The bidders: Ken Griffin, a billionaire hedge fund manager, versus a group of 17,000 cryptocurrency enthusiasts from around the world. The prize: a rare first printing of the US constitution.‘Many people don’t know this’: the artist shining a light on nuclear testingRead more“It was a nail biter because it was so clearly between these two bidders on the phone,” recalls Bailly, who witnessed the auction last November. “The back and forth and back and forth, and thinking about what it would mean for the US constitution to be owned by a private individual or by this crypto collective, was a pretty interesting, anticipatory eight minutes. Auction is its own form of theatre.”Griffin, an art collector and founder of Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel, prevailed with a bid of $43.2m, a record price for a document or book sold at auction. Sotheby’s immediately announced that he would lend the constitution to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, for public display.The museum, which was founded by Walmart heiress Alice Walton, has about 4,000 works in its collection and is free to the public, made the constitution the centerpiece of an exhibition, We the People: The Radical Notion of Democracy, which opened earlier this month and runs until 2 January.Bailly, who is the museum’s chief curator, says: “The origins of this exhibition were very spontaneous. There was no intention to do an exhibition on the US constitution.“It was truly a response to the moment of the idea that this rare version of an original official edition was to have a new owner and there could be an opportunity to pair the document with works of art in a region of the country that has not seen that before. It was opportunistic in the best sense.”The show could be said to bridge the gap between history and art, between the dead white men of Mount Rushmore and the vibrant community of artists who critiqued America’s imperfect union since the beginning. The rare print of the constitution – one of just 11 known in the world, the museum says – is placed in dialogue with works that shine a different light on the nation’s founding.Among the highlights, organised by Native American art curator Polly Nordstrand, are historical paintings such as John Lee Douglas Mathies’s depiction of Seneca leader Red Jacket and John Trumbull’s portrait of Alexander Hamilton.Original prints of other founding documents, including the declaration of independence, articles of confederation and proposed bill of rights and emancipation proclamation, are juxtaposed with works by artists such as Shelley Niro, Roger Shimomura, Luis C Garza and Jacob Lawrence.Bailly explains: “That gathering of founding documents is truly unprecedented and then we have the opportunity through our collection and special loans to put those words, principles and foundations in conversation with the visual iconography of democracy, portraits of Native leaders, portraits of founding fathers, 20th century works of artists who are documenting and interpreting histories or imagining new futures.“It’s a diverse array of style, media, approach and perspectives and that’s really exciting. People can come to this show and see for themselves these fundamentals, both artistic and political.”The show – complemented by educational and public programming including panels, workshops, student tours and teacher resources – arrives at a moment when history, like seemingly everything else in America, seems to divide more than it unites.The New York Times’s 1619 Project reexamined the legacy of slavery, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton cast actors of colour as the founding fathers and the police murder of George Floyd prompted the removal of numerous Confederate statues.There has been a predictable rightwing backlash. Go to the website of the 1776 Project political action committee (PAC) and you are greeted with an invitation to “Report a School Promoting Critical Race Theory.” The PAC claims it is “promoting patriotism and pride in American history” as opposed to Marxist social engineering.Bailly says: “We don’t shy away from the complicated history and we seek to be very direct in providing fact and truth and those multiple perspectives. We have important works by artists of all backgrounds in the exhibition. We look, too, at the ways in which the cycles of American history and the struggles to form that more perfect union are a persistent part of our nature as a nation.“To me, one of the truest signs of patriotism is to care so much about your country, its principles, its documents, its fundamentals that you’re willing to criticize them to make sure that they work. There are always different ways to tell a story. What’s important is that there can be different biases or emphases within a story, but trying to strike some sort of balance is very critical for us.”Even the founding documents themselves, while sacred to many, are hardly beyond reproach. The declaration of independence’s resounding phrase, “all men are created equal”, does not mention women. The constitution’s “three-fifths clause” allowed enslaved people to be counted as three-fifths of free citizens.The chief curator adds: “What we find extraordinary is the recognition from the moment of the writing of the constitution that it was an imperfect document. We as a nation and artists and even founders of the constitution themselves embrace or acknowledge and work through those imperfections – thus the amendments, thus the bill of rights, thus the constant search for equality and justice.“These documents are the pillars and the cornerstones, flaws and all, of what guides us and we can constantly return to them. It’s those principles and the ostensible protection from the abuses of power that we the people have a responsibility to uphold, defend and fight for when they are not not upheld.”Surely one of the most important aspects of such an exhibition is its location. Donald Trump beat Joe Biden by more than 27 percentage points in Arkansas in the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s former White House spokeswoman, Sarah Sanders, is poised to become the state’s governor.Arkansas is bordered by red states Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma. And in Bentonville, where Walmart was born and has its headquarters, a Confederate monument stood for more than a century until its removal in 2020. All in all, it does not seem the most fertile ground for a museum show interrogating the heroic version of the American story.But Bailly comments: “What we want to do is present contextually the conditions for the creation of these documents: the people, the places. We want to create a human-centric approach so that anybody coming in, no matter what his or her views are, will find some point of connection and may find connections that they haven’t thought about before.“We don’t dare to try to indoctrinate or direct or say, ‘You need to think like this.’ But we want to provide historical and artistic evidence that can allow people to inform their own thinking and ideas and perspectives. If they change, they change, if they don’t, they don’t. But we want to create that space for discovery, creativity, engagement.”
      We the People: The Radical Notion of Democracy is now on view at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, until 2 January.
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      Profusely Illustrated review: Edward Sorel and all the golden ages of New York magazines

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      Profusely Illustrated review: Edward Sorel and all the golden ages of New York magazines A memoir by a man who has drawn caricatures for the greatest editors is a treasure trove of the American mid-century modernAt 92, Edward Sorel is the grand old man of New York magazines. For 60 years, his blistering caricatures have lit up the pages of Harper’s, the Atlantic, Esquire, Time, Rolling Stone and the Nation. He is especially revered for his work in Clay Felker’s New York in the late 60s and for work in the New Yorker under Tina Brown and David Remnick.A life in cartoons: Edward SorelRead moreHe has also worked for slightly less august titles, like Penthouse, Screw and Ramparts.He is one of the foundational New Yorkers. Like Leonard Bernstein or E B White, Sorel absorbs the rhythms of the rambunctious city, using them to create an exaggerated, beguiling mirror of all he has experienced.A very abbreviated list of his memories includes the Great Depression, Hitler and Mussolini, the Red Scare, Joe McCarthy, Lee Harvey Oswald, both Bushes, Clinton, Obama and Trump.His memoir begins with a political frame. Like the unreconstructed lefty he is – he voted for Ralph Nader twice – he announces that he will show how the crimes of the previous 12 presidents made possible the catastrophe of Donald Trump.He gives the CIA and the military industrial complex all the shame they deserve for an unending parade of coups and wars – from Iran, Guatemala and Chile to Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. But he promises “these exposés will be brief”, so “it will only hurt for a few minutes”. On that he keeps his word.What gives Profusely Illustrated its charm and its power – besides 177 spectacular illustrations – are Sorel’s tales of New York, beginning with a childhood spent in a fifth-floor walk-up in the Bronx with a father he despised and a mother he adored.Sorel spares no one, especially his “stupid, insensitive, grouchy, mean-spirited, fault-finding, racist” father, who he dreamed of pushing in front of a subway train when he was only eight or nine.“When I grew older, I realized how wrong that would have been,” Sorel writes.“The motorman would have seen me.”The first riddle that tortured him was why his amazing mother married his revolting father. She explained that a few months after her arrival in New York from Romania, at 16, she started work in a factory that made women’s hats. When one of the hat blockers noticed on her first day that she hadn’t left for lunch, he loaned her the nickel she needed. Later, the same blocker told her he would kill himself if she didn’t marry him. So that was that.During a prolonged childhood illness that confined him to his bed, Ed started making drawings on cardboard that came back with shirts from a Chinese laundry. When he went back to school, the drawings were admired by his teacher at PS90, who told his mother young Ed had talent. She enrolled him in a Saturday art class at the other end of the city, the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and then another at the Little Red School House, at the bottom of Manhattan.At Little Red, thanks to the generosity of one Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, all the students were given a wooden box containing oil paints, brushes, turpentine and an enamel palette.It was Ed’s “to keep so I could paint at home” – and it changed his life.He gained admission to the highly competitive High School of Music and Art, and then to tuition-free art school at Cooper Union. But his teachers did nothing but delay his success: the fashion for abstraction was so intense, he wasn’t allowed to do the realistic work he loved.The Bronx boy who had been Eddie Schwartz was transformed after he discovered Julien Sorel, hero of Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black. Julien was “a sensitive young peasant who hated his father, was appalled by the corruption of the clergy in 19th-century France, and was catnip to every woman he encountered”.Five years later, Eddie changed his name to Sorel.With Seymour Chast he founded Push Pin Studios, which after Milton Glaser joined, became the hottest design studio in New York. Sorel didn’t last long but when Glaser founded New York magazine with Felker a few years later, Sorel got the perfect outlet for his increasingly powerful caricatures.His book’s pleasures include interactions with all the most important magazine editors of the second half of the last century, including George Lois, art director of Esquire in its heyday under Harold Hayes.Gay Talese had written what would become a very famous profile, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. The crooner had refused to pose for the cover, after Lois told him he wanted a close up with a cigarette in his mouth and a gaggle of sycophants eagerly trying to light it.Lois asked Sorel for an illustration. It was an assignment that would give him “more visibility than I had ever had before”. He panicked and his first effort was a failure. But with only one night left, his “adrenalin somehow made my hand turn out a terrific drawing of Frank Sinatra”. It launched Sorel’s career. The original now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.Gay Talese: ‘Most journalists are voyeurs. Of course they are’Read moreThe Village Voice, New York’s original counterculture newspaper, gave him a weekly spot. Sorel inked a memorable portrait of the New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal as a tank shooting a too-liberal columnist, Sydney Schanberg, after Schanberg was fired for attacking the news department from the op-ed page.Tina Brown chose Sorel to do her first New Yorker cover. When Woody Allen and Mia Farrow split up, Sorel imagined a Woody & Mia Analysts Convention.If you’re looking for a bird’s eye view of the glory days of magazine journalism, illustrated with drawings guaranteed to make you nostalgic for great battles of years gone by, Profusely Illustrated is perfect. When you’re done, you’ll be ready to rewatch Mad Men all over again.
      Profusely Illustrated is published in the US by Knopf
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      Andres Serrano on his Capitol attack film: ‘I like that word, excruciating’

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      InterviewAndres Serrano on his Capitol attack film: ‘I like that word, excruciating’Janelle ZaraThe provocative artist has made a shocking new ‘immersive experience’ for the one year anniversary of the 6 January attack Andres Serrano is not known as an especially political artist. The 71-year-old’s photographs are more accurately described as transgressive, perennially summed up with a singular point of reference: Piss Christ, his 1987 photo of a crucifix submerged in his own orange-tinted urine, which has over the years sparked multiple instances of national outrage. In the photographic series that followed, including The Klan (1990), The Morgue (1992), Shit (2007), and Nudes (2009), Serrano’s work has remained as provocative as it is aptly named.“I like to make the kind of pictures where you don’t need much more than the title to tell you what you’re looking at,” the artist said over the phone. As for his perpetual association with a single, 34-year-old work of art, he doesn’t mind: “Piss Christ is a good soundbite – easy to remember and repeat.”‘I was there’: Democrat recalls horror and fury on day of Capitol attackRead moreSerrano’s latest work, Insurrection (2022), takes a decidedly more political tone, having debuted in CulturalDC’s Source Theatre in Washington this week, the one-year anniversary of the Capitol attack. As the artist’s first-ever film, Insurrection offers a grim portrait of the United States, stitched together from found footage of the 6 January riot. True to the transgressive nature of Serrano’s practice, it zooms well past the point where ordinary news media would cut away: we get extended cuts of the sheer spectacle of violence, the smashing of windows, the prolonged attempt of one adrenalized horde of men to force its way past another. The frenzy climaxes with an uncut, closeup sequence of Ashli Babbitt’s death, and her subsequent martyrdom in a eulogy by the former president. Much of Insurrection is nothing short of excruciating to watch.“I like that word, excruciating,” Serrano says. “What I intended to make was an immersive experience that takes you to Washington DC on January 6 in real time.”In close collaboration with the London-based organization a/political, Serrano began working on the film in April, feeling compelled to respond to the day’s events on multiple levels. He was appalled by the racial dynamics that played out on the Capitol steps, as white rioters who had broken into a federal building were gently escorted out: “Black people get killed for a lot less than storming the Capitol, and these white people got treated with kid gloves.”To him, the Capitol insurrection was also an extension of Donald Trump’s legacy of divisiveness and fraud, a subject the artist had begun to explore in his 2018 installation The Game: All Things Trump. The former president’s widely accepted version of events – that these were righteous citizens protesting a rigged election – represented not only a triumph of fake news, but his continued hold over the Republican party.“This guy has to be commended for having the charisma that Hitler had with the German people; there are Americans who don’t believe it really happened, and Republicans who say let’s forget about it and move on,” Serrano says. “I wanted to make a film that anyone would have a difficult time walking away from saying ‘We should forget about it.’”Spanning 75 minutes, Insurrection comprises news clips and smartphone footage culled from around the internet, alongside archival imagery dating back to the riots of the Great Depression. The score is a mix of American ballads that range from Bob Dylan’s You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere to a children’s rendition of the historic civil war song, Battle Hymn of the Republic. As rioters march toward the Capitol steps, the incessant repetition of “glory, glory hallelujah” emphasizes the role that Christianity, a recurring theme in Serrano’s practice, plays in validating violence in American mythology. “There are groups of people who believe they have the right interpretations of Christ, not only in how they should live their lives, but how the rest of us should live ours,” he says. “They’re going into battle like Crusaders in their holy war.”The musical interludes and title cards interspersed throughout – “D.J. Trump Presents Insurrection”; “The Killing of Ashli Babbitt” – were inspired by Birth of a Nation, a 1915 silent civil war film condemned for its heroic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan. The inclusion of these historical references is a reminder, according to Serrano, that “history repeats itself in specific ways.” The insurrection was not a novel event, but another instance of division within a nation that never recovered from civil war, he adds, citing the widespread refusal to accept Biden’s presidency as a resonant parallel. “There are also a lot of people who’ll never accept that the north won, and who’d love to go back to the good ol’ days. Donald Trump was there to tell those people what they wanted to hear.”Despite the symbolic criticism embedded throughout the insurrection, Serrano is actually reluctant to speak poorly of Trump, whom he photographed in 2004 for his America series. “This guy is a massive showman; he’s incredible at it, and I could see why he’s gone this far in life. He did not wreak damage on America – America was damaged already.” As for the Capitol rioters, he refuses to condemn anyone, nor say that they belong in jail: “I tried to humanize this crowd, to show their faces and hear what they’re saying. That’s what gives a work of art power: when you let people speak for themselves.”Serrano makes an important distinction in his practice: while provocation is essential to bringing art to life, he is not in the business of political messaging, telling his viewers what or how to think: “A lot of times I look at work, particularly paintings or pictures on the wall, and I’m not particularly moved,” he says. “The one thing I always try to do, whether it’s photographs or with this film, is to give you something to react to. I’m not concerned too much about how you’re going to feel about it, good or bad, but the important thing is that you’re not indifferent. You can’t walk away from it, and say, ‘I didn’t feel nothing.’”TopicsFilmArtUS Capitol attackUS politicsinterviewsReuse this content More

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      The secret history of Sesame Street: ‘It was utopian – it’s part of who we all are’

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      In 1970, David Attie was sent to photograph the birth of the kids’ landmark TV show as part of a cold war propaganda drive by the US government. But these newly found images are just one part of the programme’s radical historyby Steve Rose“I’m still pinching myself that my dad, my own flesh and blood, had Ernie on one hand and Bert on the other,” Eli Attie says. “It is like he got to sit at Abbey Road studios and watch the Beatles record I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Attie’s father was the photographer David Attie who, in 1970, visited the set of Sesame Street in New York City during its first season. His images lay forgotten in a wardrobe for the next 50 years, until Eli recently discovered them. They are a glimpse behind the curtain of a cultural phenomenon waiting to happen. Here are not only Bert and Ernie but Kermit, Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch with his original orange fur (he was green by season two). And here are the people who brought these characters to life, chiefly Jim Henson and Frank Oz, the Lennon and McCartney of Muppetdom. What also stands out in Attie’s images are the children visiting the set. As in the show itself, they are clearly so beguiled by the puppets, they completely ignore the humans controlling them.Eli himself was one of those visitors, although he has no memory of it. “I was in diapers, and as the story goes, I was loud and not to be quieted down, and was yanked off the set,” he says. His parents and older brother Oliver at least made it into the photos. Oliver was even in an episode of the show, in the background in Hooper’s Store, Eli explains, with just a hint of jealousy.Fifty-two years and more than 4,500 episodes later, Sesame Street remains the premier address in children’s entertainment. It is still watched by hundreds of millions around the world, and broadcast in more than 140 countries. One attempt to statistically measure the show’s impact on American society failed because nobody could find a large enough sample group who hadn’t watched it. Sesame Street’s place in US culture was bizarrely underlined last month when Big Bird announced on Twitter: “I got the Covid-19 vaccine today! My wing is feeling a little sore, but it’ll give my body an extra protective boost that keeps me and others healthy.” He was promoting the rollout of vaccinations to five- to 11-year-olds, but Big Bird’s tweet, combined with Sesame Street’s recent introduction of a new Korean American muppet, has prompted a conservative backlash. Texas senator Ted Cruz responded: “Government propaganda … for your 5 year old!” Cruz later doubled down, tweeting a cartoon of the Sesame Street characters sitting around the Thanksgiving dinner table, with a dead, cooked Big Bird in place of a turkey.Others piled in. The influential Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) expressly banned Big Bird and other Sesame Street characters from its next conference, and CPAC organiser Matt Schlapp called for PBS, which broadcasts the show (although new episodes now air on HBO Max), to be defunded. “They just won’t stop in their push for woke politics,” he complained. Arizona state senator Wendy Rogers went even further, declaring: “Big Bird is a communist.”Beyond the optics of beating up on universally beloved children’s characters, in the context of David Attie’s images, these takes could hardly be more wrong. Attie had been commissioned to photograph Sesame Street by Amerika, a Russian-language magazine funded by the US state department and distributed in the Soviet Union. Essentially, it was a cold war propaganda project. Soviet officials would regularly return copies of Amerika to the US embassy unsold, saying their citizens were not interested. In truth, the magazine was so sought after, it became a black-market commodity, explains Eli Attie. “One embassy official said to me they had traded two copies of Amerika for these impossible-to-find ballet tickets in Moscow at the time,” he says. So Sesame Street was used as government propaganda, just not in the way Cruz and Rogers might imagine.You could say that Sesame Street had a political mission from the outset, as the new documentary, Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street (to which Attie’s book is a companion piece), lays out. One of the show’s co-founders, the broadcaster Joan Ganz Cooney, was involved “intellectually and spiritually” with the civil rights movement. The other, psychologist Lloyd Morrisett, was concerned about a widening education gap in the 1960s US, which was leaving behind socioeconomically deprived children, particularly African Americans. These children were often spending long hours at home watching television while their parents were busy working. Instead of jingles for beer commercials, Cooney and Morrisett reasoned, why not use television to teach them literacy and numeracy?With an $8m federal grant, the newly formed Children’s Television Workshop spent two years researching how to make content that would not only be educational but entertaining. That’s where The Muppet Workshop came in (even if the hippy-ish Henson was initially distrusted by his more academic colleagues). Not to mention the songs, the anarchic comedy sketches, the surreal animations, and the improvised child-with-muppet segments. The whole thing was an experiment. Nothing like it had been done before and there was no guarantee it would be a success, but everyone seemed to be on the same page.As Cooney puts it in the documentary: “We weren’t so worried about reaching middle-class children but we really, really wanted to reach inner-city kids badly. It was hardly worth doing if it didn’t reach them.” This explains why the show was set on an ordinary New York street – a radical move for children’s TV, a familiar place for the target audience. Equally radically, the show was multicultural and inclusive from the start, with white, Black and Latino actors alongside non-human characters of all colours. Even the title sequence and the guests reflected the US’s diversity (the first season featured James Earl Jones, BB King, Mahalia Jackson and Jackie Robinson). As the long-running writer and director Jon Stone said of the show’s inclusive approach: “We’ve never beaten that horse to death by talking about it; we simply show it.”Sesame Street has taught kids about all manner of life topics. Not only racism (most recently with the introduction of two new African American characters, post-Black Lives Matter) but also poverty, addiction, autism, HIV and Aids, public health (Covid was not Big Bird’s first jab, he also got a measles vaccination in 1972), and gentrification (in 1994, the street was under threat of demolition from a loud-mouthed property tycoon named “Ronald Grump”, played by Joe Pesci). Sesame Street has even tackled the concept of death: when Will Lee, who played storekeeper Mr Hooper, died in 1982, the show featured a wrenching segment in which neighbours, clearly tearfully, explain to Big Bird that Mr Hooper is dead and is never coming back.It wasn’t just “inner-city kids” Sesame Street was popular with. While his father was working, Eli Attie’s artist mother would also put him and his brother in front of the TV to watch it so she could paint. “There was a block of hours that it was on public broadcasting stations in the New York region. So she just thought: ‘Hallelujah. I can place them here, they’re entertained,’” he says. “We were learning to count, we were learning to spell and we were learning a kind of comedy: we both became fans of Monty Python and standup comedy and I’m sure this was the gateway.” Attie went on to become a TV writer and producer, working on shows such as The West Wing, House and Billions.Sesame Street’s inclusive, humane, progressive agenda has always had its enemies. Mississippi broadcasters refused to air the first season back in 1969 on account of the show’s desegregated setting (they backed down after a few weeks). In the past decade, the conservative chorus of disapproval has been getting louder. Before Cruz and co, the show and PBS have been targeted by the likes of Mitt Romney, Fox News, and, inevitably, Donald Trump.“Sesame has never been a political show; it has been a very socially relevant show,” says Trevor Crafts, producer of the Street Gang documentary. Although the political climate today has echoes of the 1960s, when Sesame Street was created, he feels. “It was a very similar time. There was a lot of social unrest, and here we are again. It just shows that you need something like Sesame Street to sort of increase the volume of good in the world. And also to know that through creativity, you can make change. Positive change can occur if you’re willing to see a problem and try to fix it and do it creatively.”Where some might see a political agenda, many more would simply see a model for the kind of society the US would like to be. “I think it showed everybody: ‘This is who we should be in our hearts,’” Eli Attie says. “It was utopian. It was optimistic, it was challenging and smart. And it didn’t talk down to children.” As well as a family album, his father’s photos capture that spirit of playful idealism. “I see now that’s part of who I am,” he says. “And it’s part of who we all are.” TopicsChildren’s TVUS televisionTelevisionPhotographyThe MuppetsArt and design booksfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Inflated ego: Trump baby blimp joins Museum of London collection

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      The the Donald Trump baby blimp, a 6-metre-high inflatable caricature that became a symbol of UK protest against the US president, has secured its place in history at a leading museum.The helium-filled balloon, paid for through crowdfunding, depicts the outgoing president as a snarling orange baby wearing a nappy, with its tiny hands clutching a smartphone. It first took to the skies above Parliament Square during protests over Trump’s first presidential visit to the UK in 2018.It was present again on his state visit in 2019, and has also been flown in France, Argentina, Ireland, Denmark and various locations in the US.Now, after a global tour, the Trump baby, designed by Matt Bonner, and constructed by Imagine Inflatables of Leicester, has been acquired by the Museum of London. It will be conserved and could be displayed as part of the museum’s protest collection, which includes artefacts from the Suffragette movement, climate-crisis rallies and peace activism.The creators of the effigy said they hoped it served as a reminder of the fight against the “politics of hate”.“While we’re pleased that the Trump baby can now be consigned to history along with the man himself, we’re under no illusions that this is the end of the story,” they said in a statement to PA Media.“We hope the baby’s place in the museum will stand as a reminder of when London stood against Mr Trump – but will prompt those who see it to examine how they can continue the fight against the politics of hate.“Most of all, we hope the Trump baby serves as a reminder of the politics of resistance that took place during Trump’s time in office.”On the blimp’s first outing in 2018, Nigel Farage called it “the biggest insult to a sitting US president ever”. Trump himself said: “I guess when they put out blimps to make me feel unwelcome, no reason for me to go to London.”Sharon Ament, the director of the Museum of London, said: “Of course the museum is not political, and does not have any view about the state of politics in the States.” But the blimp touched on a typical British response, she said: satire. “We use humour a lot. And we poke fun at politicians. This is a big – literally – example of that.”The blimp had just arrived at the museum, she said, squashed into a suitcase. “It is timely, because it’s coming to us in the final days of President Trump being President Trump … the most ironic and fitting thing now is that it’s currently in quarantine in the museum. All objects have to be put into quarantine before they go into the collection because they could have insects.”The museum is a fitting home for the effigy, which is “a response from Londoners”, she said. “It was born in London … it was an extraordinary and imaginative idea.”“This large inflatable was just a tiny part of a global movement,” said the blimp’s creators. “A movement that was led by the marginalised people who Trump’s politics most endangered – and whose role in this moment should never be underestimated.” More