For his latest series of projections, cast on three sites around downtown D.C. last night, artist Robin Bell says he aimed to be matter-of-fact.

“I was trying to figure out the most straight forward way to talk about what’s going on,” Bell says. “The president is a known racist, that’s well-beyond documented, and he’s clearly shown himself to be a Nazi sympathizer.”

So that’s what he and a team projected onto the Trump International Hotel: “The president of the United States is a known racist and a Nazi sympathizer.” It continues: “This is not a drill.”

“We wanted to make a message that was so concretely clear and 100 percent factual, and that in itself is heartbreaking,” Bell says. “I think at this point we can all clearly say this is where we’re at … It’s a sad day, but that’s really what is going on.”

THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES IS A KNOWN RACIST AND NAZI SYMPATHIZER from Bell Visuals on Vimeo.

The roughly 20-minute projection is the seventh time that he has made a figurative mark on the building.

The first time, in November, he saw an opportunity and projected “Experts agree: Trump is a pig” on the spot (a reference to the late 1980s campaign by the activist group Positive Force declaring the same of Reagan’s attorney general, Edwin Meese). Bell returned several more times to the hotel before the world took widespread notice when he projected “Pay Trump bribes here” and the full text of the emoluments clause.

Bell has a long history of putting up activist protest projections around D.C., including adding poop emojis to a new Subway building in Mount Pleasant and illuminations in support of abortion rights on the Supreme Court building. Most recently, he worked to draw attention to Afghanistan at the end of July, casting the message “Stop The #WarMachine” at the Department of Veteran Affairs.

In May, he cast images of Attorney General Jeff Sessions dressed in KKK garb onto the Department of Justice building. A variant of Sessions’ own words was projected alongside: “I thought the KKK was ok until I learned they smoked pot.”

“We try to take issues that are really not clear cut in a visual example, and try to make it accessible,” Bell said at the time.

Thursday night’s projections all directly referenced recent events in Charlottesville, in which white supremacists descended on the town to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Clashes erupted between white men who were chanting racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic slogans and counterprotesters. An alleged Nazi sympathizer drove a car into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others.

Bell projected a memorial to Heyer, the day after her memorial, on the Newseum building, which features the text of the First Amendment.

“It’s a very appropriate place,” Bell says. “Heather Heyer died while using her First Amendment rights, speaking out.”

Heyer’s mom said today that she considered meeting with President Trump after his prepared statement on Monday, two days after the incident, but that she has changed her mind after hearing his unscripted remarks on Tuesday, in which he claimed the “alt-left” was just as responsible for the violence.

“It’s not that I saw somebody else’s tweets about him. I saw an actual clip of him at a press conference equating the protesters like Ms. Heyer with the KKK and the white supremacists,” Susan Bro said Friday morning on Good Morning America.

Bell also headed last night to the statue of Albert Pike, who was honored for his contributions to the Freemasons but had previously served as a Confederate general. At vigils in the wake of Charlottesville, hundreds of people marched from the White House to Judiciary Square to protest the statue’s continued presence in D.C.

“I was pretty shocked that it’s here,” Bell says. So he added a scissors and a dotted line that read “Remove racism above the line.”

Mayor Muriel Bowser and more than half the D.C. Council have also called for its removal, a decision that can only be made at the federal level. “We believe the National Park Service should remove the Pike statue and seek public input on which historical figure should replace it,” a spokesperson for Bowser says.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton said in a statement today that she plans to meet with Park Service officials “to discuss an approach to the Pike statue’s removal.”

Another protester, Anthony Torres, also headed to the site today, putting up a sign that calls members of the Trump administration “modern Confederates.”

Bell’s projections on Thursday marked an important first for him: they were paid for entirely by small-scale donations.

The artist and filmmaker has long paid his team—he had five people with him last night—either out of his own pocket for personal protests or from budgets paid for by advocacy groups (like a large-scale projection on the Environmental Protection Agency headquarters commissioned by the 350.org and the Sierra Club).

But after being asked “How can I help?” so many times earlier this year, Bell put up a button on his website, and visitors started contributing $5 here, $20 there. It all added up to fund the three works last night.

The goal of such projections is a community-wide call to action.

“None of us can sit on a soapbox and be like I’m better off. No matter were we stand we’re all in this shitstorm together,” Bell says. “It’s going to be some work to get out of it, but we’re all responsible.”

Previously:
D.C. Projection Artist Skewers Jeff Sessions On DOJ Headquarters This Time
‘Pay Trump Bribes Here’ Projected Onto The Trump Hotel
‘Experts Agree: Trump Is A Pig’ Projected On Trump Hotel

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