Descending Liberty Back Story: origin of Violated Liberty

I woke up in Paris on November 6, 2024, and within a few hours it became clear. Despite experiencing the chaos and divisive practices employed during his first term in office AND despite his explicitly stated intentions to rule as a vindictive tyrant with little regard for the values and institutions enshrined in our Constitution, by a small majority, my fellow citizens had elected Donald Trump--for a second time. I felt like I’d been punched in the gut and that Liberty herself had been beaten, raped, battered, and violated. How could this be my country? I dissolved in sobs, as though someone dear to me had suddenly died.

An image of a battered Statue of Liberty came instantly to mind. I saw her walking through the Grand Palais where I was scheduled to visit Paris Photo. I heard Nirvana’s song, “Rape Me” playing, a defiant insistence that whatever you do to me, I will still be here, enduring the attempts to destroy me. I saw her looking up in anguish at her representative standing proudly in the middle of the Seine near the Pont de Grenelle in Paris. I saw her lying prone and sobbing at the foot of her representative in New York Harbor, a gift from the French to the United States in recognition of how vitally the United States represented this idea of liberty—freedom.

I heard this battered statue of Liberty, freed from her pedestal—or was she thrown?—wailing through the streets of the world a heartbroken rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, the National Anthem of the United States.

I set to work to bring her to life.

The first incarnation took place in Paris on November 8. I dressed as a bloodied and dirtied Statue of Liberty and made a first attempt at special effects makeup to show the beating she’d recently taken (I got better makeup and better at making bruises and contusions later.) It was cold as I literally ran, tears streaming, through the streets from Montparnasse to the Grand Palais, with “Rape Me,” playing from the karaoke microphone I carried in the guise of Liberty’s torch. I did it for me and people like me, without regard for documenting this performance, a way to give form to the raw emotions and anguish resulting from the still fresh news. I walked through the Paris Photo fair, an impromptu guerilla performance, receiving stares, sad “thumbs up”’s, a few “mon dieu”’s, and countless snapshots. As I prepared to leave and run back home, I decided to ask a stranger to photograph me so that I might have at least one photograph as testament.

Violated Liberty was born. The project’s current working title is Descending Liberty. It continues to develop. Some manifestations are here on the site. Others will come. It has become a tour of reckoning, an attempt to understand what Liberty represented, how Liberty failed and was failed, and how, and indeed if, she can be rehabilitated.