“I didn’t really think of it as art right away, and I didn’t really think of it as valid street art because it’s not graffiti,” she said of her early works. “Every night when I walked home at 1am, there was this big lion there. ![]() "I knit this huge lion with a smile on its face and flowers and put it on the fence,” she said. She installed her first public art piece in her Flatbush neighborhood two years ago because she felt uneasy walking past the dark yard of a vacant lot late at night. Today, she sells knitting patterns and has had items produced by an organic children’s clothing company. “My mom and my grandmother don’t knit, but my great grandmother was such an incredible knitter that they really wanted someone to knit, so my mom learned a very basic knit stitch just to teach me,” she recalled. Always creative, she took up knitting at the age of five. Raised near Washington, DC, d’Eustachio received her BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Someone might have a shrine of Donald Trump somewhere,” she mused. “Someone is either a critic or really likes it, I don’t know. That piece, Eat the Monsters #3, is included in the current exhibit, complete with a new Trump. A work she installed at Grand Army Plaza in August-a pink crab with the president in its claw-had its Trump likeness stolen just weeks later. “In the last couple of months, people have been stealing just the Donald Trump off of all my art, and even when I go and put another Donald Trump up, they’ll often steal it again,” she said. Her little orange figures with wispy yellow hair are so arresting that many of the knit presidents have been taken from her public art pieces. “It’s just very easy to knit a Donald Trump.” More than just one person is a monster, and getting rid of Trump is not going to fix the situation.” she noted. It’s not actually about Donald Trump” but about the entire “administration, the patriarchy, and racism…. “I tried to choose these animals that could potentially be monsters in our eyes but have them not being the monster in the picture-Donald Trump being the monster,” d’Eustachio noted. According to the artist, the series addresses “what we think monsters are and who really is the monster in our lives. She followed that with a dinosaur feasting on the president and the series grew to include a menagerie of woolen creatures comically chomping on the Commander in Chief. The work featured a knit Trump entangled in the tentacle of a giant pink cephalopod. “It just felt like no matter what I did, nothing would help, but I wanted to express my fury without being super violent so I put up an octopus,” she explained at the opening of her debut exhibit on Saturday. Artist Ellie d’Eustachio began this public art series, Eat the Monsters, to bring some humor and cheer into our lives during a challenging year.įrustrated with the Trump administration and social injustice, including the separation of families at the border and police violence, d’Eustachio needed a creative release. Over the past few months adults and children alike have delighted in discovering colorful knit creatures devouring Donald Trump across the city. Ellie d'Eustachio, Eat the Monsters #9, 2020
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