The granddaughter of Norman Rockwell slammed Donald Trump’s administration for “selling this segregationist view of America” by means of its use of her grandfather’s iconic work.
“Norman Rockwell was antifa,” Daisy Rockwell defined to The Bulwark, referring to the umbrella time period that’s turn out to be a right-wing bogeyman of kinds to discuss with left-wing activism.
(Antifa is a decentralized, progressive motion that opposes fascism and racism. Trump designated it as a “home terrorist group” in September following the assassination of Charlie Kirk.)
Her feedback observe a number of cases the place the Division of Homeland Safety used work by her grandfather — who famously depicted the “4 Freedoms” and tackled racism, violence and segregation in his work — to name on individuals to “defend” and “defend our American lifestyle” amid its mass deportation agenda.
One in every of Norman Rockwell’s most iconic work depicts Ruby Bridges, the primary Black scholar to attend a whites-only faculty in Louisiana, being escorted by U.S. marshals as they stroll previous a racist slur written on a wall.
In an opinion piece for USA Right this moment final month, Daisy Rockwell and different relations confused that, if the artist had been nonetheless alive, he’d be “devastated” to see that the issue Bridges confronted nonetheless plagues society many years later and that his work “has been marshalled for the reason for persecution towards immigrant communities and folks of shade.”
Rockwell instructed The Bulwark that her household was “upset” by the posts as her grandfather “was actually very clearly anti-segregationist.”
In a 1962 interview, the artist defined, “I used to be born a white Protestant with some prejudices that I’m constantly attempting to eradicate. … I’m offended at unjust prejudices, in different individuals and myself.”
Final month, Daisy Rockwell and different relations declared that it’s time to observe within the artist’s footsteps and “stand for the values he actually wished to share with us and all Individuals: compassion, inclusiveness and justice for all.”
