A statue depicting a bare-breasted Hillary Clinton wearing only an open blouse and white panties—with satyr hooves instead of feet, and a Wall Street banker poised to suckle from her breast—appeared at the Bowling Green Subway station near Wall Street in New York on 18 October. It was removed within two hours. According to the New York Post, an employee at the nearby National Museum of the American Indian took offence to the statue, broke it in front of a young man who claimed to be the artist and contacted the police, who demanded its removal. “I hope they put you in cuffs!” the putative artist was quoted saying to the iconoclast, who identified herself as “Nancy”.
The museum confirmed in a statement that Nancy is an employee and that they are “aware of the incident”, but that she “was acting as a private citizen who was personally offended by the statue. The museum does not condone the actions and management is currently evaluating the situation with the employee.” The artist’s identity, however, is uncertain; he claimed to be 27-year-old Anthony Scioli, but when a journalist from the Daily Beast tracked Scioli down, he stated that he could “not confirm nor deny being this particular artist of interest”.
The statue was presumably a response to the unflattering nude sculpture of Clinton’s rival in the US presidential race, Donald Trump, which popped up in New York’s Union Square on 18 August. While the Post quotes complaints of a perceived double-standard in reactions to the depictions of the Clinton and Trump statues, the Daily Beast’s Erin Gloria Ryan points out: “what is so challenging about a depiction of a powerful but despised woman as fat and grotesque? Haven’t men used women’s bodies to demean and shame them for thousands of years?”
