From the moment he was elected president, Donald Trump has inspired protest on the streets and has proved to be a muse for a range of controversial artworks.
A fair amount of that art has focused on emasculating or physically exposing Trump, seemingly in response to his air of extreme masculine braggadocio. Trump routinely spoke on the campaign trail of “stamina” and not-so-subtly assured voters of the fitness of his manhood during one of the Republican debates.
In August, a self-styled “anarchist art collective” installed eight life-sized Trump statues in US cities titled The Emperor Has No Balls. The series depicted the then candidate naked and obese with a small penis, no testicles and covered with veins and red rashes.
The statues followed another phallocentric rendering in paint by the Los Angeles artist Illma Gore. It hung in a UK gallery and attracted bids of more than £100,000 ($127,000) before anonymous copyright filings threatened to sue Gore if it sold.
Trump art has also drifted towards the scatological, including the street artist Hanksy’s Donald Dump, a mural painted in New York in 2015. Not to be left out of the potty party, the artists William Duke and Brandon Griffin offered up a photoshopped image of Trump’s lips as a urinal around the same time.
Perhaps the most controversial piece of Donald Trump art has been the image of the comic Kathy Griffin holding a bloodied replica of Trump’s severed head. Griffin later apologized, saying she “went too far”.
Not all Donald Trump-inspired art is negative in tone. The conservative visual artist Jon McNaughton has a series of Trump sketches with quotes including “I would bomb the shit out of them” that the artist says “will make you laugh, think and cheer”. McNaughton has perhaps gained the most attention for a painting of Barack Obama standing on the constitution while other former presidents look on, aghast, which the conservative TV host Sean Hannity purchased after the election.
