A mural painted by a high schooler in Grant, Michigan, is "under fire", as NBC News puts it, because it contains symbols from an anime show, the Hand of Mary, and characters wearing clothes in rainbow colors and the blue, pink and white bands associated with gay and trans pride.
At a school board meeting on Oct. 10, parents accused the student artist of promoting witchcraft by including the Hamsa hand as well as the video game character that bears the likeness of a demon. Parents also objected to the use of LGBTQ colors.
Witchcraft! Demons! Gays!
According to local news reports, the girl attended a school board meeting where she was hounded by dozens of angry parents, and left it in tears.
"I put my art up there to make people feel welcome," the student artist said, her voice breaking, in footage captured at the meeting by WZZM-TV, a local news station based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
The response from one local nasty:
"I feel like she did a really good job finding excuses to defend the things she put on," says Katelyn Thompson. "None of us are that stupid."
Not everyone was against her:
Tracey Hargreaves, who has two children in the Grant Public School system, came to the defense of the student artist. "I am a conservative, right-wing, gun-loving American," Hargreaves declared at the meeting. "And I've never seen more bigoted people in my life." In an interview with TODAY.com, Hargreaves said, "The meeting turned into a hate fest. Usually there are 10 people at these meetings, 50 showed up. It wasn't even about the mural … People were talking about how we need to pray the gay away."
She's now being made to remove elements of the mural—which the school insists is something she wants to do.
The narrative around this painting is pretty awful! A kid painted a nice mural for her high school, got screamed at by psychopaths, received minimum viable support from those who approved the design, and what do we get? "Hmmm, controversial art!" headlines, like it's Piss Christ or something.
I hope she gets into the Royal College of Art and never looks back.
