This Former Lawyer Quit His Job to Oppose Trump Full Time. Now, He’s Stalking New York’s Art Fairs Posing as the President

You might have spotted him during VIP hours at the Armory Show—Cheeto-orange
skin, trademark bouffant, and that distinctive Queens accent,
voice at once booming and nasal.

President Donald Trump wasn’t hitting up the fairs this week,
but his impersonator, artist and activist Tootsie Warhol, was seemingly
omnipresent, at SPRING/BREAK Art Show and the
Jewish Museum’s Purim Ball on Tuesday, the
Armory Show and the after party at the Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday, and
Independent Art Fair and SCOPE on Thursday. (The final stop will be
today at Art on Paper.)

At the Independent, one exhibitor pulled her phone away from her
ear, and turned to Warhol. “Hi Donald,” she giggled, amused by his
outlandish makeup and pillow-stuffed physique—Trump as caricature,
grotesque and offensive.

“You’re doing a lot of business there, I like to see that,”
Trump/Warhol told her, before turning to the booth assistants.
“She’s making deals, making money—I can tell she’s a star. If the
art market ever totally craps out, you guys should all come to work
for me at the White House. You would be my art advisory team.
We would make the White House look tremendous!”

Such interactions are typical for the artist. “I really try not
to impose myself on people, but people just start laughing,” said
Warhol, who is dressing up as Trump in an effort to denounce the
nation’s president.

He has had plenty of time to perfect his impersonation, first
unveiled at the Whitney Biennial over the summer. The
performance was titled Making the Biennial Great Again,
and was staged every day for two months—mostly outside the
building’s front door, at the museum’s request, so as to not
distract from the work on view.

“By the third day, too many people wanted to take selfies with
me,” Warhol said, noting that the museum welcomes his Trump persona
at festive events like last month’s Whitney Art Party (which got him
featured in both the Daily Mail and
Vanity
Fair).

Warhol began the project in response to what he saw as a major
gap in this year’s biennial. By his count,
there were only two works that directly addressed Trump.

“That is less than one percent of the over 200 works on view,”
he said. “To me, this was like having an art show about art in
America during the Vietnam War and not even talking about the
Vietnam War. I had no training in performance or acting, but I
thought, ‘if they’ve not going to put Trump in the biennial,
I’m going to put Trump in the biennial.’”

He hurriedly threw together a costume—dark suit, white shirt, a
too-long red tie, a terrible wig, and, of course, the garishly
applied makeup. (“It’s professional clown face paint that takes two
showers to get off.”) That’s how Tootsie Warhol’s Trump was
born.

The artist, who also noticed a lack of Trump artwork throughout
the fairs, understands why some artists might be hesitant to make
work about the 45th president. “People don’t want to offend or
alienate half of their collectors!” Warhol said. But as a
self-taught artist, he doesn’t share their concerns.

Until just a few months ago, Warhol, age 35, was a lawyer. He
spent two years as an assistant district attorney in
Brooklyn, assisting victims of domestic violence, and most
recently was at a New York firm working on major litigation and
representing several nonprofits. (He prefers not to disclose his
real name or that of his former employer.) Since November, he’s
been a full-time artist and activist working to oppose Trump. This
week’s appearances are an encore to the biennial performance.

“We have to do everything we can do beat Trump, because it is so
hard to beat an incumbent,” said Warhol, who actually had the
chance to meet the president with one of his former firm’s clients
the week of the inauguration in 2017, shaking Trump’s hand in the
lobby of Trump Tower. A photograph of the encounter made the front
page of the New York Times
website. “It was a surreal experience and it changed my life.”

Warhol’s first works were prints, made from photographs of his
encounter with Trump, the images crudely defaced. They have titles
like Self portrait with orange person (Thumbs Up)—an
image originally taken by former Trump aid (and
infamous The Apprentice contestant) Omarosa
Manigault Newman.

A former Spanish and American history major, Warhol has no art
training to speak of, but he’s been involved in New York art
institutions for years, as a member of MoMA’s Junior Associates,
the Guggenheim’s Young Collector’s Council, the Whitney
Contemporaries, and the Frick Fellows.

“I joined those groups the minute I heard about them and I
maxed out my credit card,” Warhol recalled. “I just realized that I
really love art!”

And despite his legal training, Warhol remains convinced that
his art is his best tool in fighting the Trump administration.
Having met the man for himself, he believes that encountering his
version of Trump’s thinly veiled sexism, homophobia, and
racism, can change people’s minds about the president.

“I think by feeling the real hatred face-to-face makes a
difference. It’s not just something that you see on TV where you’re
like ‘well, that doesn’t really effect me,” he said. “All of a
sudden you have this guy who is channeling Trump, and that
toxicity—it starts to feel a lot more real.”

The post This Former Lawyer Quit His Job to Oppose Trump
Full Time. Now, He’s Stalking New York’s Art Fairs Posing as the
President appeared first on artnet News.