Seneca Scott, the cousin of Martin Luther King Jr.'s wife, Coretta Scott King, has slammed the newly unveiled statue of his family members in Boston.
The 20-foot-high $20 million worth statue, called The Embrace, shows the famous hug between the civil rights leaders after Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
While speaking with The New York Post on January 15, Scott slammed the statue stating:
“The mainstream media … was reporting on it like it was all beautiful, 'cause they were told they had to say that. But then when it came out, a little boy pointed out — ‘That’s a p**is!’ and everyone was like, ‘Yo, that’s a big old dong, man.’”He added that if the statute's layout had been shown in the neighborhood earlier, no one would have accepted it.
Last year, Seneca Scott lost the mayoral election of Oakland. His grandfather's brother was Coretta's father. According to him, his grandfather was one of the 25 children of Jeff Scott, one of the wealthiest black landowners in Alabama. He had only met Coretta's father once before he died in 1996.
"This is an eyesore": Twitter backed Seneca Scott's reaction to MLK's statue
After the footage of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King's bronze statue being unveiled in Boston went viral, Twitteratis were left furious. Several users slammed the piece for being "aesthetically unpleasant," "hideous," "obscene," "terrible," etc., since it looked disproportionate from certain angles.
Others were just trying to figure out what the sculptors were thinking when they recreated the embrace of the legendary couple.
Seneca Scott finds the newly unveiled MLK statue to be "insulting"
In an essay penned for the online journal Compact, published on January 15, Seneca Scott blasted the sculpture for being an expensive but empty tribute.
In the piece titled A Masturbatory 'Homage’ to My Family, he wrote:
“For my family, it’s rather insulting. The sculpture is an especially egregious example of the woke machine’s callousness and vanity.”He further continued:
“Ten million dollars were wasted to create a masturbatory metal homage to my legendary family members — one of the all-time greatest American families. … How could anyone fail to see that this … brings very few, if any, tangible benefits to struggling black families?”Boston released a call for artists to build this project in 2017 and eventually chose Hank Willis Thomas, a Brooklyn-based artist.
On the city of Boston's website, it was noted that the sculpture was funded by a public/private fundraising partnership, though the exact amount spent by both parties is unknown. On his website, Thomas wrote about the sculpture, stating:
“When we recognize that all storytelling is an abstraction, all representation is an abstraction, hopefully it allows us to be open to more dynamic and complex forms of representation that don’t stick us to narrative that oversimplifies a person or their legacy, and I think this work really tries to get to the heart of that.”On January 13, the statue was uncovered at an invitation-only event.
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