'Artist' Transforms Lee Circle Into Tax-Funded TURD (LA)
Raúl de Nieves called it his ‘Gesture of Love‘
(It looks like low-rent yard art - DD)
For more than 130 years, a bronze statue of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee stood atop a 60ft-tall column at the centre of what became known as Lee Circle, a traffic roundabout in central New Orleans. That column had sat empty since 2017, when the Lee statue and three other Confederate monuments were removed by the city, but in late October the artist Raúl de Nieves transformed the space now known as Harmony Circle with a gesture of love. The Mexico-born, New York-based artist’s temporary intervention as part of the sixth edition of the Prospect New Orleans triennial (until 2 February 2025) includes a steel heart topped with a crown atop the column and four bright, beaded tree sculptures on the surrounding decorative urns.
De Nieves remembers visiting Lee Circle for the first time in 2007 and locals telling him “this is the most racist place in New Orleans”, so when the opportunity to transform the space for Prospect came about he “felt very intimidated but also rewarded, as someone who comes from an immigrant background and is a queer person of colour”…