NYC GEORGE FLOYD STATUE TO BE RELOCATED AFTER VANDALISM

Mon 26 July 2021:

A statue of George Floyd that had been defaced in Brooklyn has been cleaned and is on its way to Union Square in Manhattan.

On the Juneteenth holiday, the artwork was unveiled in a Flatbush Avenue location. It was vandalized with black paint and a white nationalist group’s logo five days later, on June 24.

But members of the group that installed the statue painstakingly cleaned it, and local residents and one of Floyd’s brothers gathered around it this week to bid farewell ahead of its long-planned move to Union Square as part of an exhibition in September.

“I heard the news about the vandalism. I was so proud that I got word that Flatbush held it down. They really supported us, looked out for the statue, looked out for the spirit of my brother,” Terrence Floyd said at the gathering.

He added to news reporters: “You try to stop us, but you can’t stop us. And we still gonna continue, with love.”
Andrew Cohen of Confront Art, the group behind the statue, said people spent hours cleaning off the paint with toothbrushes and hands.

“The only method that worked was really, really putting the elbow grease into it,” he said. The statue is going back to a studio on Monday for further cleaning.

No arrests have been made in the vandalism.

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