A Milwaukee suburb is removing a statue for changes after a Jewish blogger said it included anti-Semitic messages. Matt Sweetwood, who is based in New Jersey, was visiting his daughter and son-in-law in Milwaukee earlier this month when he toured the Village of Shorewood, known for its lakeside views.
Shorewood is also the site of Spillover II, a sculpture by Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa, who uses combinations of metal capital letters as his material. Spillover II, which was paid for by a private donor, depicts a crouching man gazing at Lake Michigan.
Sweetwood said on his blog that he discerned the following phrases in the statue: “FRY BAD JEW,” “DEAD JEW” and “CHEAP JEW.”
The post went viral and led to calls from residents to remove the sculpture. Plensa will pay to have the work done, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on Nov. 13.
US gallery owners who feature his work, speaking on his behalf, said Plensa never intended the messages discerned by Sweetwood.
“Plensa uses alphabets as conceptual metaphors for cultures; the letters from each alphabet are utilized to create a skin of an anonymous figure with each letter’s placement entirely at random,” Paul Gray of Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago and Mary Sabbatino of Galerie Lelong in New York told the Journal Sentinel.
Click for Anglin's comments. Pithy as they are, I couldn't bring myself to paste something wrongly hyphenating a verb and preposition combo. NN
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