BOSTON — It’s a matter of perspective.
“The Embrace” Martin Luther King Jr. monument downtown is taking flak both for the purportedly pornographic appearance some angles give it and some of the aesthetic choices that went into its creation.
The Embrace is, everyone at least agrees, a striking new statue unveiled this weekend in the Boston Common that depicts the giant bronze arms of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King locked in a hug.
The $10 million creation from the nonprofit Embrace Boston is based on a 1964 photo that shows the couple delightedly hugging after MLK won the Nobel Peace Prize that year. The nonprofit chose this, artist Hank Willis Thomas’ submission for what the memorial should be, and it includes only the couple’s arms and hands, plus a patio around it that displays the names of 65 locals who fought for civil rights. Martin Luther King III then approved it.
The creation was unveiled with much aplomb and in front of a cheering, fenced-off crowd on Saturday, a couple days before the national holiday honoring the famed Black civil rights leader. Many people loved it, as Boston dignitaries hailed it and its subjects, who met in the Hub, with soaring speeches.
But then a video tweeted out by a TV reporter of a particularly unfortunate angle of the tarp coming off captured the raunchy imaginations of America, and a few different shots from other angles provided assorted other material for some guffaws.
Basically, the big statue, to some observers, looks like a couple of different sex acts that the style guide of this newspaper forbids expounding upon.
In Compact magazine, Seneca Scott, a union organizer identified there and in an interview with the New York Post as a cousin of Coretta Scott King, panned the statue as “racist and classist.”
“The new Boston sculpture ‘honoring’ Dr. Martin Luther King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, looks more like a pair of hands hugging a beefy penis than a special moment shared by the iconic couple,” he wrote in the online magazine of, believe it or not, the less explicit of the two most popular sexual interpretations.
Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah slammed the installation for dehumanizing the couple by not including their countenances in what she views as a whitewashing of the famed Black civil-rights leader’s legacy and reality.
“It doesn’t sit well with me that Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King are reduced to body parts — just their arms. Not their faces — their expressions,” she tweeted. “In making MLK a whitewashed symbol of love, the Embrace statue is both safe AND grotesque. Says little about the man, a lot about America.”
“And yes, I’ll say it. From another angle, the statue for real looks like one person is performing disembodied oral sex,” she added, giving voice to the most popular off-color interpretation of a different angle of the statue and continuing on to say that she doubts that that’s what MLK would want people thinking about on his birthday.
Closer to home, Boston radio host Notorious VOG, real name Paul Parara, told the Herald, “It reinforces a lived perception that Black faces aren’t seen in Boston but used as props to further other agendas and conversations.”
Of course, opinions on art are manifest, and the sculpture garnered some rave reviews for its aesthetics and others for its approach.
In Bloomberg CityLab, for example, authors Kriston Capps and Linda Poon wrote that “the message of the piece is intimate and unique. The sculpture celebrates notions of support, care and vulnerability that aren’t usually associated with monumental depictions of heroic men.”
Imari Paris Jeffries, the executive director of Embrace Boston, didn’t respond to requests for comment on Monday, the holiday.
Thomas, the artist, wrote on his website of the piece, “By highlighting the act of embrace, this sculpture shifts the emphasis from a singular hero worship to collective action, imploring those curious enough to investigate closer.”
