A Guide To The Anti-Trump Art You Can See In New York Right Now

Clever street art won't last forever. But neither will Donald Trump's presidency.
Maria Baranova-Suzuki

In this time of darkness, largely caused by a Donald Trump–shaped shadow, flickers of light are important. If only we knew where to find them.

It’s been a year since the momentous 2016 election and the anointing of a new White House resident. We figured it’s as good a time as ever to revisit the slew of anti-Trump art that’s cropped up in New York City, giving those who didn’t vote for our current president a dose of solidarity. What follows here is a guide for the angry-but-still-adventurous in NYC who are willing to trek through the city’s boroughs for an in-person glimpse at protest art.

If you’re a disgruntled tourist visiting the city temporarily, you can avoid the pricey traps and the conventional stroll past Trump Tower, and enjoy these varied works of art instead. And if you’re a New Yorker, these attractions are practically on your doorstep. You could fit in a therapeutic stop at Washington Square Park on your lunch break.

Most important, this list is a work in progress. We plan on updating the guide as new works arrive, and we’ll rely on you, dear readers, to help us make sure this list is comprehensive. (If you create anti-Trump art, please let us know.) At the end of the day, these works might not last forever, but hopefully they’ll be a useful reminder to you that neither will Trump’s presidency.

Current Locations

1. The clock counting down Trump’s remaining hours in office

Colombina Valera

Location: Barney’s Long Island City studio on the Queens waterfront.

Artist: A group of artists, many of whom are anonymous, that includes Brandon Stosuy, Matthew Barney, Jade Archuleta-Gans, Jane Lea and Kenzan Tsutakawa-Chinn. “We see it as a civic project, like the national debt clock, and not a personal project, so we don’t want to attach specific names to it at this point,” Stosuy said in an email to HuffPost.

How long will the work be on view? The clock will cease to exist when Trump is no longer president.

How far away is this from Trump Tower? About 20 minutes by subway.

2. The boxing gym with a symbolic target

Overthrow Boxing Club

Location: 256 Grand Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (The company is looking to expand to other cities.)

Artist: John Gagliano created the artwork for Overthrow, where you can actually book boxing classes and work out. The image on the left shows a garage door at Overthrow, while the center photo features the gym’s punching bags. The image on the right will be on forthcoming merchandise. The image gracing the garage door can also be found on shirts at Overthrow’s 9 Bleecker Street location in Manhattan.

“Originally, when Trump was just running for office, the image seemed like a funny play on a guy that had no chance of winning the presidency,” owner Joey Goodwin told HuffPost over email. “The morning after the election, I can remember feeling an incredible sense of sadness. Like, what the hell just happened? This guy has no business being the leader of the free world. The image has now become a serious rallying cry for Overthrow and what we stand for. Our values simply do not align with the current administration.”

How long will the work be on view? Indefinitely.

How far away is this from Trump Tower? About 40 minutes by subway.

3. The Brooklyn street art expressing a very familiar feeling

Adam Fujita

Location: Near the Jefferson L train station in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Artist: Adam Kiyoshi Fujita and Annica Lydenberg. “We’re completely exhausted by the incompetency in Washington and it’s a top-down problem,” Fujita told HuffPost over the phone. ”We definitely had a direct agenda to address [Trump] and to address the administration.” Fujita has created other murals across the Bushwick area that similarly respond to the election. You can see more of his work on Instagram.

How long will the work be on view? Unclear. In the past, Fujita’s works in the same location have lasted a few weeks to a few months. But he said that given the response to his work, he’ll probably leave this one up longer.

How far away is this from Trump Tower? About 45 minutes by subway.

4. Ai Weiwei’s commentary on being a good neighbor

Spencer Platt via Getty Images

Location: Underneath the arch at Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. More of the artist’s “fences” can be visited across the city.

Artist: Ai Weiwei created the arch, a part of his “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors” project. When asked whether or not the project is a direct reference to Trump’s border wall advocacy, the director and chief curator of Public Art Fund, Nicholas Baume, told HuffPost that “Ai Weiwei’s work is extraordinarily timely, but it’s not reducible to a single political gesture.” So while the arch might not be strictly anti-Trump art, it will likely function as such for the many Americans who have a fixed idea of what “fences” mean.

How long will the work be on view? Until Feb. 11, 2018.

How far away is this from Trump Tower? About 20 minutes by subway.

5. The inspirational messages hidden among Manhattan tourist traps

Maria Baranova-Suzuki

Location: In many spots around Times Square in Manhattan. (You can view a map of the project’s locations here.)

Artist: Artist group House of Trees, along with artists Anne Carson, Carrie Mae Weems and Wangechi Mutu are a part of “Word on the Street.” The project “began around the time of the Women’s March this past January,” House of Trees members Jennifer and Amy Khoshbin explained in a statement to HuffPost. “We wanted to encourage others, specifically females, to feel empowered with a platform for open dialogue regarding many ongoing issues happening in our country.”

The duo elaborated:

Working within a sibling-run arts collective House of Trees, Amy Khoshbin asked writer Anne Carson to respond to the tumultuous political landscape with her text. In our image-obsessed culture, in which language is relegated to mostly passive, 140 character blasts, we wanted to focus on text responses with something substantive and powerful.

We are using Times Square advertising space to promote the language and imagery of the resistance movement ― a huge undertaking in Times Square, the international hub for glowing ad space. This fall, House of Trees is not only working with Anne Carson & Amy Khoshbin, but also with two of the most influential contemporary Black female artists, Carrie Mae Weems and Wangechi Mutu. In the wake of a wave of white nationalism, we hope having their empowering messages in such a public forum will play a role in the possibilities of changing culture.

House of Trees has employed female refugees in Texas to fabricate the original felt banners ― the objects of resistance. We value these women, their hard work, their importance in our country, and we want to help support these female refugees and their families in an increasingly hostile cultural landscape.

How long will the work be on view? Until February 2018. The group has plans to create art for other areas, too.

How far away is this from Trump Tower? About 15 minutes by subway.

6. The Brooklyn mural depicting the man “behind” Trump

Spencer Platt via Getty Images

Location: Outside a bar called The Levee in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Artist: Damien Mitchell created “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” which he debuted in February. “It’s meant as a reflection of the news cycle that we’ve been hearing for the last couple of weeks,” Mitchell told amNewYork at the time.

How long will the work be on view? It’s unclear, but Mitchell has made two other murals for the location in the past. This, too, might eventually be rotated out.

How far away is this from Trump Tower? About 40 minutes by subway.

7. The Queens mural with a reminder about immigration

Vincent Versace

Location: Welling Court Mural Project in Astoria, Queens.

Artist: Joaquin Avila, who has been living in the United States for about two years and originally hails from Cuba. Much of his work focuses on social issues.

“This mural represents strength and power in unity,” Avila explained through a translator to HuffPost. “America is great with us, with immigrants. My message is a very real one of struggling immigrants who feel trapped by the oppressive tendencies of our leaders. I wanted to take Donald Trump’s message and play with it, change the context.”

“I used maps, colors, words, and the Captain America symbol [to] try and get at the heart of the public by using characters they already recognize but in a different way, to awaken their conscience,” Avila added. “I want to highlight how fantastic and magnificent this country is when our different cultures are united.”

How long will the work be on view? Until June 2018.

How far away is this from Trump Tower? About 40 minutes by subway.

8. Ron English’s Trumpty Dumpty

Barcroft Media via Getty Images

Location: Near the Jefferson L train station in Bushwick, Brooklyn. It happens to be across the street from the “Everything is Not OK” piece.

Artist: Ron English, who’s done other Trump work that can be seen on his website.

How long will the work be on view? It’s unclear how long it will last, given its high vantage point above the street. That said, the piece has already been slightly affected by what appears to be white paint.

How far away is this from Trump Tower? About 45 minutes by subway.

9. Molly Crabapple’s mural monster

Molly Crabapple

Location: Welling Court Mural Project in Astoria, Queens.

Artist: Molly Crabapple created “The Bore of Babylon.” “This is not just about one man,” Crabapple told The New Yorker in September. “That’s why I needed to draw the entire structure.” (For more on Welling Court’s political murals, head to Brooklyn Street Art.)

When will it disappear? Unclear.

How far away is this from Trump Tower? About 40 minutes by subway.

Past Pieces

Kara Walker’s “Christ’s Entry into Journalism”

Kara Walker / Sikkema Jenkins Co New York

Kara Walker had a show earlier this year at Sikkema Jenkins & Co that New York Magazine’s art critic Jerry Saltz called “the best art made about this country in this century.”

One of the featured works on view was “Christ’s Entry into Journalism,” which depicts nearly 100 different figures representing various parts of American history. In the bottom left corner Walker placed a Black Panther-esque character giving the Black Power salute while holding the severed head of Trump. On the president’s forehead appears a swastika. Although not on display in a public location, Walker also notably contributed a drawing to The New Yorker, which reimagined the famous painting of George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware with Trump as Washington.

A large ice sculpture that hoped Trump’s reign would melt away

Spencer Platt via Getty Images

David Datuna installed this 10-foot ice sculpture in Union Square on June 8. It melted within hours and was designed as a response to Trump’s claims that he would pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement.

This very subtle piece by Hanksy

Eduardo Munoz Alvarez via Getty Images

Hanksy created this image, which ended up getting painted over in January after a complaint from the city. Here’s a retrospective statement the artist posted on Instagram recently:

Dump Trump 2015. Better or worse, I’ll be known for this piece of crap for quite some time. I painted it long before the current tire fire that is the Trump administration. It made headlines, appeared on bootleg merch from Canal St to Los Angeles and was replicated countless times at protests across the country. Simple or otherwise, people connect to imagery. It was a cartoon piece of shit because Trump’s a human piece of shit. Straightforward w/o being overtly graphic. My friends and I toured the country with it. Some flew, many drove. We went to the early primaries and called it #DumpAcrossAmerica. I was so ready for him to lose. For him and his human slug family to slither into the shadows of shame. But he didn’t and here we are. Looking back, it’s partly responsible for my current mindset. There’s a reason people voted for him and there’s a reason he was elected.

Bosco Sodi’s wall in Manhattan

TIMOTHY A. CLARY via Getty Images

Mexican artist Bosco Sodi titled this work “Muro.” It lasted for one day in Washington Square Park on Sept. 7. The wall was over six feet tall and eight feet long, made of clay timbers made by Sodi in his Mexico studio.

The sculpture that guessed at Trump’s anatomy

Spencer Platt via Getty Images

This statue by Indecline, titled “The Emperor Has No Balls,” was briefly installed near a Union Square subway station, while identical counterparts graced other cities. It appeared in NYC in August 2016, before the election.

The giant inflatable Trump rat

Drew Angerer via Getty Images

This 15-foot-tall rat appeared right outside Trump’s Fifth Avenue apartment in Trump Tower on Aug. 14, a day the president was scheduled to visit his former home. The married BravinLee art gallery owners, John Lee and Karin Bravin, created the piece and ended up bringing it to Washington, D.C.

The messages beamed on Trump’s hotel

YouTube

On Aug. 7, artist and activist Robin Bell projected various anti-Trump messages on the Trump Soho Hotel. The projections called to question Trump’s ties to Russia and President Vladimir Putin.

“Last night was a very sight specific projection on the Trump Soho because this is where we believe that some of the money that was laundered via the Russian government [was invested] and where some of the investors of that hotel came from,” Bell told artnet News.

A comprehensive exhibition of Trump’s tweets created by “The Daily Show”

TIMOTHY A. CLARY via Getty Images

Trevor Noah and correspondents from “The Daily Show” debuted “The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library” in June. The pop-up exhibit was located around the corner from Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue and lasted several days.

The project included various statues, electronic displays, altered portraits and other multimedia material you’d expect from a museum, as well as some you wouldn’t. “You can sit on a gold shitter!” “Daily Show” correspondent Jordan Klepper told HuffPost at the event.

The feelings New Yorkers wrote down on Post-It notes

Andrew Lichtenstein via Getty Images

Artist Matthew Chavez organized this project, called “Subway Therapy,” at the Union Square subway station, one of the most central traffic hubs in the city. After Trump won the election, New Yorkers wrote their thoughts on colorful Post-It notes and attached them to the wall. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo later announced that the New York Historical Society would preserve the sticky notes.

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