by: 
KathleenYWOCLC
KathleenYWOCLCThursday, March 25, 2010 at 2:42:00 PM EDT
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**Cross Posted from ChoiceUSA**
I am currently in Mexico on vacation right now so I haven’t been able to check out this mural in person yet, but when I go back to New York City I am going to check out this mural and re-blog my thoughts on it. Conveniently the mural is in my neighborhood of Times Square/Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan.
The 42nd Street Mural Sofia Maldonado is located in Times Square area at 215 West 42nd Street Between 7th and 8th Avenue. It is a 92 Feet x 12 Feet Mural which is Acrylic on plywood mounted on a construction fence.
It is a project of the Times Square Alliance & The Cuban Artist Fund with support by The Rockefeller Foundation and The Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
The artist, Sofia Maldonado was born in Puerto Rico in 1984 and moved to New York City in 2006 to attend the Master of Fine Arts program at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Her artwork draws on her Cuban and Puerto Rican heritage and her personal interests with fashion trends, the Latina female aesthetic, and various street culture elements such as skateboarding, graffiti, and music.
Maldonado’s statement on the mural is as follows:
My artwork intends and aims to represent brave, strong, and tough women who have to overcome struggles in their daily lives and sometimes impose themselves in a male-dominated world. In a post-feminist society these women can own their bodies in a powerful way without being depicted negatively. While a student in Puerto Rico, I painted murals in diverse boroughs of the island. I started to notice that in these communities, women were not being heard and/or represented in the media.
As an artist, I understand the importance of interacting with the locals before painting a mural in their neighborhood. My previous public art project in Hartford, Connecticut, commissioned by Real Art Ways, was placed in a Puerto Rican community. The community identified with my characters and did not feel offended. Women that worked at a nearby nail-art salon decorated characters in the mural by applying their aesthetic with acrylic nails designs, painting long eyelashes, glitter eye shadow, bright lipstick, tattooing their names and adorning their bodies with piercings. Through the Real Art Ways project I had the opportunity to collaborate with women whose ideals of beauty are far from that of mainstream society. I was able to pick up on the life experiences that lead these women-- and others in similar positions--to their personal aesthetic choices, which I later intended to communicate with the New York audience in this mural piece commissioned by the Times Square Alliance.””There has been quite a bit discussion surrounding this piece. Some people say that Maldonado’s work is "as much a fetishist cliché as it is an artistically poor attempt at realism" because it “includes morenas with too-tiny tank tops holding their saggy breasts".
-From the Artist, Sofia Maldonado
This mural has also brought about a protest! Some believe it is a "step backward for Latinas and black women".
Tell me what you think! Let’s have a discussion on this!
Check out this video coverage surrounding the mural:
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