LUSHSUX Continues to Cause Controversy With Politically Charged Street Art

Lushsux’s own tumblr account says it all: “Graffiti’s Number 1 arsehole”. Whether this statement is true or not is up for debate, but one thing’s for sure – he’s done a pretty good job recently at getting the world’s attention with some particularly controversial street art.

Some big art accounts have helped spread Lush’s politically-charged statements, resulting in millions of video views and thousands of retweets:

The council threatened @lushsux with a fine if he didn’t remove his mural of Hilary. This was his response.Thoughts? pic.twitter.com/Wb7VVT6szk

— streetartglobe (@streetartglobe) August 1, 2016

It all came to a head when Lush painted a mural of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton wearing a star-spangled swimsuit with $100 bills tucked into it. Lushsux said he got the idea from a meme on the internet and wanted to paint it so “the virality of the meme has now turned into the virality of the wall.”

However, not everyone shared his vision of the art he was trying to create. “We believe that this mural is offensive because of the depiction of a near-naked woman, not on the basis of disrespect to Hillary Clinton, and it is not in keeping with our stance on gender equity,” said Stephan Wall, chief executive of the Maribyrnong Council (where the mural was located).

Lushsux remained confused: “I don’t quite understand why that is offensive by any means. She is not naked.”

Lushsux briefly had his instagram account removed (it’s currently set to private), while he was given 10 days to remove the “offensive” mural by the council, which is exactly what he did. In its place, he created a painting of a Muslim woman wearing a niqab.

“I could have done her pantsuit that she always seems to wear in different colors, but I tried to think of a way to counter the narrative that they are saying something is offensive – a woman who is not even naked is offensive,” the street artist explained.

In the bottom left corner of the new mural, Lush wrote: “If this muslim woman offends u, u r a bigot, racist, sexist, islamophobe.”

However as is usually the way, the council had the last laugh. The most recent image of the wall now shows a council worker covering the entire mural up in black paint.

What’s next Mr Lush?

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