Over the past few months adults and children alike have delighted in discovering colorful knit creatures devouring Donald Trump across the city. 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.
Frustrated with the Trump administration and social injustice, including the separation of families at the border and police violence, d’Eustachio needed a creative release. “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. The work featured a knit Trump entangled in the tentacle of a giant pink cephalopod. 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.
“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. It’s not actually about Donald Trump” but about the entire “administration, the patriarchy, and racism…. More than just one person is a monster, and getting rid of Trump is not going to fix the situation.” she noted. “It’s just very easy to knit a Donald Trump.”
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. “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. 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. That piece, Eat the Monsters #3, is included in the current exhibit, complete with a new Trump. “Someone is either a critic or really likes it, I don’t know. Someone might have a shrine of Donald Trump somewhere,” she mused.
Raised near Washington, DC, d’Eustachio received her BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Always creative, she took up knitting at the age of five. “My mom and my grandmother don’t knit, but my great grandmother was such an incredible knitter that they really wanted someone [in the family] to knit, so my mom learned a very basic knit stitch just to teach me,” she recalled. Today, she sells knitting patterns and has had items produced by an organic children’s clothing company.
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. "I knit this huge lion with a smile on its face and flowers and put it on the fence,” she said. “Every night when I walked home at 1am, there was this big lion there. It made it a lot better.”
“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. “I think sometimes [knitting is] not taken as an art form because women do it and you also don’t learn it at an art school, you learn it in your home,” she continued. “It should be an art. Folk art is an art form.”
“I’m realizing more and more that I want to stand up for knitting as an art form because I think it goes hand-in-hand with protest art,” she continued. “It’s a very feminine craft and because of that it’s also a great way to kind of stand up to the man with it. It’s a great protest form because it comes from the home, so it’s an art form of the people.”
After debuting her cheerful lion in Flatbush, d’Eustachio began hanging various inspirational messages and charming critters throughout the city, including a wolf, whose gaping mouth is about to swallow the diamond-shaped window of a construction barrier. “I really like site-specific art,” she said. “Through the window you could see the skyline…. I walked by it for a whole month before I made the wolf. I was like it needs something eating it!” The wolf hung at the site of a former gas station on Union Street for weeks until one day it disappeared. “Every single staple was carefully picked out and the wolf was gone,” d’Eustachio said. “Someone came and adopted it, I guess.”
The artist takes the disappearance of her works in stride. “You make public art and you put it out into the world. I feel you can’t get too grumpy about people taking it,” she said. “I’d rather it get stolen and enjoyed, maybe not immediately, but a couple of weeks in. If someone steals it then it’s going to live in a good home,” she said, adding that after a few months the works begin to get worn by the elements anyway.
For her current show, the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club gave d’Eustachio a hand in installing an eight-foot-long pink alligator “victoriously devouring Donald Trump” along the Carroll Street Bridge, not far from the Dredgers' boathouse where the exhibit is on view. As a small team in a canoe installed the piece, a woman passing “just burst into laughter,” d’Eustachio said. “This is why public art is so important, especially during the pandemic.”
She hopes all of the works in her exhibit evoke a similar response and inspire people to take action. “I think laughter is really important right now,” d’Eustachio said. “I also think anyone can eat the monsters…. Speaking out right now is incredibly important.... I think the takeaway message would be that everyone can go home and eat the monsters in their lives.”
Made by Ellie
Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club Boathouse, 165 2nd Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn
On view from Oct. 24 through Nov. 29, 2020 (see gowanusdredgers.org for hours)
A series of programs will accompany the Made by Ellie exhibit in the coming weeks. If you missed the opening reception on Saturday, check out the Dia de los Muertos celebration happening this Friday (Oct. 30) where d’Eustachio will collaborate on a community ofrenda. More info here.