Earlier this week, the US Division of Homeland Safety posted an image on its X account of an oil portray depicting a person and a girl within the Outdated West holding a child inside a coated wagon. DHS added a caption: “Bear in mind Your Homeland’s Heritage.”
The work depicted was the portray New Life in A New Land, by Morgan Weistling, an American painter who primarily creates life like work of American frontier life. Previous to turning to wonderful artwork in 1998, he was an illustrator for movies and video video games.
However DHS didn’t get permission to share the picture, Weistling mentioned in a brand new publish on his web site. It reads, “Consideration: The latest DHS publish on social media utilizing a portray of mine that I painted a couple of years in the past was used with out my permission.”
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An extended, since-deleted message, initially posted to his web site and his social media accounts, referred to as the utilization “a violation of my copyright on the portray.”
“It was a shock to me and I’m making an attempt to assemble how this occur and what to do subsequent,” he wrote, in line with the New Republic.
Whereas Weistling didn’t seem happy by DHS’s utilization of his work, he does appear to have not less than some political alignment with the Trump administration. Weistling appears to have an ongoing partnership with conservative evangelical nonprofit Deal with the Household—which has been one of many longest and most aggressive opponents of abortion entry and LGBTQIA+ rights—to promote prints of his work via Focus’s on-line retailer.
One of many prints on provide is a replica of the portray posted by DHS. There it’s titled A Prayer for a New Life, with the textual content noting that it “celebrates the worth of life regardless of the numerous hazards a younger household would have confronted on their journey via the pioneer west.”
Simply two weeks earlier, DHS posted a distinct picture of a portray, which equally confirmed an idyllic view of American life, this one from a distinct interval. That was a piece by Thomas Kinkade, Morning Pledge, which shows a mid-century suburban neighborhood.
