Illma Gore: 'If anyone is going to be threatened by a small penis, it's Trump'
Artist whose painting of nude Trump went
viral gives her account of being the target of his campaign’s hate machine and
being physically attacked in LA
It is said that art is not what you see, but
what you make others see. When it comes to my nude
painting of Donald Trump, some say I’ve made them see too much. But I
believe the human body is the ultimate work of art.
For two months I have
been under attack by Donald Trump and
his supporters for painting the presumptive Republican nominee with a small
penis. I’ve received death threats, rape threats and anonymous phone calls
demanding I remove the image from my social media accounts or risk going to
court. And last week, as I
was walking in my neighborhood in Los Angeles, a Trump supporter punched
me in the face…
I published my
portrait of Trump on Facebook on 9 February, and could have never anticipated
what the next few weeks were going to hold. Within 24 hours, my work was on the
front page of Reddit and banned from Facebook. In three days, it had been
viewed over 50m times. A few days after that, I was slapped with a Digital
Millennium Copyright Act take-down notice – a legal complaint filed by a third
party through Facebook, arguing their copyright was being violated by me.
When I started
painting in January, I felt that if anyone would be threatened by a fictional
small penis it’s Trump. But I didn’t anticipate that he would turn his dislike
into such a personal affront, even going so far as to defend his penis size during
the Republican debate on 4 March.
The body I painted is
not fictional – it is a portrait of a friend. In portraying his body with
Trump’s face, I wanted to raise questions about how we think about gender: if I
painted Trump with a massive penis, why would we then take it as a signal that
he is powerful? Why would a small penis be viewed as effeminate? And what is
wrong with effeminacy to begin with?... read more:
