Anti- Trump painting is full of it
The moment artist Andrew Kong Knight could not take any more of what he feels is Donald Trump’s bull—, he headed to the hills of Hayward, looking for cattle and carrying a shovel and a bag.
When he found what he was looking for, at a ranch watering pond, he manned the shovel while his fiancee, Alani Taiara, bravely held the bag, and a viral media sensation was on its way. The finished product is an acrylicon- wood painting of the yellowhaired Republican frontrunner giving the Nazi salute. But that image is everywhere. What makes Knight’s work unique is the three- dimensional mouth that spews dried bull manure strung on a wire.
Knight turned the vomiting action into a series of still photographs pieced together like animation. He posted it to Facebook, and thousands of shares later, his point has been made.
“As an educator, I was feeling embarrassed and shocked by Trump’s comments during the debates,” he says from his classroom at Hayward High School, where he is in his 20th year as an art teacher. “The blatant sexist and racist remarks he was making I could not believe were coming from a candidate for highest office.”
A working artist and muralist who grew up in Hayward, Knight worked for three months on the piece, which he informally has titled “Bulls... t Trump,” and his reward is that national TV news outlets picked it up, shared it and tweeted it. The ABC News site alone brought in 960 comments, mostly negative, as is always the case with the Internet.
But Knight knows the silent majority is out there, and plans to market the Trump work as a poster, with the slogan “Make America Hate Again.” The poster should be available next week at his website, at www. andrew kongknight. com. Proceeds will go to causes that the candidate seems to stand against, like immigrant rights.
“I don’t want to stand by idly while someone represents our country in a negative way,” says Knight, who has to step into the hallway because he is not allowed to say anything partisan in the classroom. “If he becomes president, I just want to know in my heart that I did what I could to prevent that.”
Ever since high school, at James Logan in Union City, Knight has done political art, owing to his mother, Clara Kong, an activist in the farmworkers struggle.
In 1994, he did a mixed- media work of a real American flag riddled with bullet holes, bloodcolored paint dripping from the holes. That won an American Illustration Award and was later licensed as the album cover of “New World Disorder,” by the heavy metal band Biohazard.
“The Trump piece will be bigger than that because of the Internet,” he predicts. “If he gets the nomination. I see it just growing and growing.”