UD student’s 9-foot Edward Snowden statue at DCCA

WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) - When Business Insider wrote about University of Delaware graduate student Jim Dessicinos statue of Edward Snowden appearing in New Yorks Union Square Park last month, the reporter noted that none of the dozen passers-by they talked to could identify who the statue depicted.

For Dessicino, a 29-year-old Atlantic City, New Jersey, native, it could have been a blow to his confidence as an artist, having spent months creating the 9-foot, 220-pound figure out of gypsum cement, clay, steel and foam.

But just hours earlier when he was unloading the statue from a van to bring it to the Manhattan park, he heard a man on the bustling New York streets shout, Oh, my God! Is that Edward Snowden?

In a stroke of pure coincidence that is still hard to believe, that man happened to be with journalist/activist/blogger Glenn Greenwald, whose reporting last year in Britains The Guardian first disclosed the secret U.S. surveillance programs using leaked documents from Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor.

The person most closely associated with Snowden, now living in Russia, just happened to be having breakfast with fellow journalist Jeremy Scahill at Coffee Shop restaurant when Dessicinos van pulled up and the super-sized Snowden popped out.

I thought, You have to be kidding me. I wasnt convinced it was him, but then I walked up to him and it was Glenn Greenwald, Dessicino says. And (Greenwald) was more confused than I was about all of this. He was dumbfounded, but really excited and happy to see it.

After the chance meeting, Scahill took a photo of Greenwald with the statue and posted it to Twitter, writing, So, @ggreenwald & I were having breakfast & a truck pulls up with a statue of Edward Snowden.

Greenwald, who lives in Brazil and was visiting New York to attend the premiere of the documentary Citizenfour at Lincoln Center that night, soon retweeted it.

The result was a hectic few hours for Dessicino, whose statue is currently greeting museum-goers at the entrance of the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts (200 S. Madison St., Wilmington) through Jan. 4. (The statue even has its own Twitter account: @EdSnowdenStatue.)

Reporters from publications like the New York Daily News, Vice and Buzzfeed descended on Union Square to report on the statue. As Dessicino did one interview after another, representatives from the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation soon arrived and told Dessicino he had to remove the statue since he didnt have a proper permit.

Originally posted here:
UD student's 9-foot Edward Snowden statue at DCCA