Art admirers and history buffs have a chance to own a 30-plus-pound marble Make America Great Again hat for $48,000.
"This is a recording of history," artist Robin Antar told Newsweek. "It makes different conversation with viewers at different times."
Why It Matters
The phrase "Make America Great Again" refers to President-elect Donald Trump's slogan, which started with his 2016 presidential campaign. MAGA, however, also refers to the president-elect's political base. Former President Ronald Reagan used a similar campaign slogan in 1980, "Let's Make America Great Again." Many commentators have called the slogan racist and sexist.
Trump will take office on January 20 after Congress certified his victory on Monday, four years after a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and tried to block Congress from certifying Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election. Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump in November's presidential election, oversaw the session and declared Trump the victor in her role as president of the Senate. The inauguration of the president-elect will now go on as planned.
What To Know
Antar's work is centered around creating visual records of the societal experiences around her. Following the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, Antar bar saw other artists recreating images around the American flag and the Twin Towers. She, however, started to ask, "what is America?"
"America is comfort food, candy, cookies, M&Ms," Antar said. "That's when I started my realism series."
The New York artist has been sculpting since she was 15. She has been on exhibit by herself at the School of Visual Arts in 1997 and most recently at the Pop International Gallery in 2018. She's also been a part of group exhibitions, like the 2015 "Art inspired by Food" exhibit at Gallery Juno and the 2022 "Allied Artists of America Exhibition" at the Butler Institute of American Art. She has also been shown in art fairs across the country and through public sculpture installations.
Antar has created sculptures of work boats, a pencil, jeans, Oreos, a burger, chips and boxing gloves.
The 30-plus-pound Make America Great Again golf cap, which was made in 2016, comes from the one Trump wore on the 2016 campaign trail. The hat was white, so she chose the appropriately colored marble. The blue words were sandblasted by a headstone business, which then spray painted the letters.
Antar said that with the granite base, the sculpture probably weighs closer to 90 pounds.
"It had nothing to do with if I like Trump or hate Trump. That's totally irrelevant, and it's not important to the work," she said. "What I do is record what's going on. If I saw something within the Democratic Party, a symbol, I would have sculpted that too. It doesn't mean I love either party, it just means I'm recording what I see in front of me."
Antar has touched on political symbols in the past, with one sculpture depicting the U.S. Constitution in a knot. She said it was her statement that the world is in "knots and everyone's fighting with each other."
But her artwork hasn't been short of controversy. Antar has had to remove some photos of the artwork on her website and Instagram page, and each time she posts to social media she loses "a couple thousand followers." She said that when her MAGA hat was on display around 2017, she was told she had to take the photos off her website because she was told "customers are threatening to boycott our gallery."
"A couple years later, now, I said 'No. This is what I'm doing,'" Antar said. "This is what's going on in America."
What People Are Saying
Sculptor Robin Antar on her Make America Great Again sculpture: "It had nothing to do with if I like Trump or hate Trump. That's totally irrelevant, and it's not important to the work."
President-elect Donald Trump said in a 2015 interview with MyFox New York: "The line of 'Make America Great Again,' the phrase, that was mine, I came up with it about a year ago, and I kept using it, and everybody's now using it, they are all loving it."
What Happens Next
While the hat sculpture is on sale, Antar said she wants to use it "for a museum show."
"I want the U.S. Constitution, the boxing gloves, the M&Ms and the MAGA hat in a museum show," she said.
Antar said her next piece that she has almost completed is about the victims of the October 7, 2023, attacks that Hamas conducted in Israel. After that, she's using a 24,000-pound of Carrara marble to make a bag of trash.
English (US) ·