Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Art

Anish Kapoor Calls Out the NRA For Using His Sculpture in a Political Ad

Anish Kapoor, a renowned sculptor of Indian-Jewish descent who won last year’s Genesis Prize, viciously denounced the National Rifle Association nearly a year after the organization used footage of his iconic Cloud Gate sculpture in a now-infamous political advertisement. According to the Washington Post, the sculpture appears briefly on screen in last year’s “clenched fist of truth” advertisement, while NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch rails against liberals for “[using] their ex-president to endorse the resistance.”

In his statement, released in collaboration with the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, Kapoor condemned “the NRA’s nightmarish, intolerant, divisive vision” that “perverts everything that Cloud Gate — and America — stands for.” Kapoor holds copyright over the use of Cloud Gate’s imagery, but he stated it was “not worth the effort” to sue the NRA, which he called “aggressively legalistic.”

Image by Getty Images

Kapoor argues that the ad “plays to the basest and most primal impulses of paranoia, conflict and violence.” The point of these scare-tactics, he said, was “to create a schism to justify its most regressive attitudes. Hidden here is a need to believe in a threatening ‘Other’ different from ourselves.”

Kapoor was born to a Hindu father and a Jewish mother in India, and considers himself Jewish. In 2017, he won the Genesis prize. He donated the $1 million reward to five NGOs that aid refugees.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.