A controversial work of art featuring male genitalia that was rejected by the Whitney Museum for fear it would offend High Line toursts is now on display at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Here's what it looks like:
The Whitney Museum rejected the sculpture that they commissioned from artist Charles Ray for the public plaza outside their new building, out of a concern that the statue's nudity would offend tourists on their way to the High Line, several reports said.
Whitney director Adam Weinberg and chief curator Donna De Salvo were both fans of Ray’s "Huck & Jim," which was inspired by the Whitney's identity as a museum of American Art, and the classic American story "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."
But doubts “seeped in,” according to the New Yorker:
They stemmed from the museum’s growing concern that this particular image of a naked African-American man and a naked white teen-ager in close proximity, presented in a public space with no other art works to provide context, might offend non-museumgoing visitors — thousands of whom pass through the area every day on their way to or from the adjacent entrance to the High Line.
Weinberg reportedly told Ray that the museum would display the sculpture indoors, or even outdoors on a terrace.
But Ray balked, insisting that the setting, and the nudity, were fundamental to the scene the sculpture depicts, in which Huck and the slave he runs away with, Jim, lie naked on a raft debating where stars come from.
The “race issue,” as well, was important to the statue’s significance, Ray told the New Yorker:
“Huck never questions slavery. Toward the end of the book, he worries that by helping Jim to escape he’s really stealing the property of his Aunt Polly, who has never done him any harm, and that he’ll probably go to Hell for it. And then he says, ‘All right, I’ll go to Hell, but I won’t turn him in.’ That is a great American moment, and it still means something today.”
