Artist Brian Andrew Whiteley’s “Trump Tomstone,” a fake tombstone belonging to the Republican presidential candidate which caused a media frenzy when it appeared in Central Park in March, will go on display Friday at an art gallery in Brooklyn.
The mock tombstone — which features the name “Donald J. Trump” alongside the date “1946 — ” and the epitaph “Made America Hate Again” — will be on display at the Christopher Stout Gallery in Bushwick beginning Friday and running through Sunday, October 9, according to the gallery’s website.
The tombstone first appeared in the middle of the night one night in March, just after more than a thousand activists and supporters of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign had participated in a demonstration in Central Park, as Breitbart’s Lee Stranahan reported.
In a brief interview with the New York Daily News this week, the 33-year-old Whiteley said the tombstone — which was seized and later released by the New York Police Department and led the Secret Service to visit the artist — was intended to make a “pointed statement” about the “hateful” nature of Trump’s campaign.
“I was surprised at how few artists were speaking out about Trump,” Whiteley told the Daily News. “I never worked in the political sphere before. People ask me, ‘How could you do this — you have kids?’ I tell them, ‘I did this because I have kids.’”
The tombstone will reportedly be displayed on a raised platform along with a photo from Central Park and a gravestone rubbing.
“The exhibit feels like an opportunity for pro-Trump people to come and cause trouble, so we’ll have security,” Whiteley told the paper.
The Christopher Stout Gallery is opening its second year of programming with the Trump tombstone exhibit. The gallery describes itself as a “contemporary art gallery showing subversive and difficult work by New York City artists.”
“We delight in serving as a platform for discourse on work that is challenging to authority paradigms, feminist, queer, anti-establishment, hyper-aggressive, mystic, and/or joyously sexual,” the gallery wrote on its website.
Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum