Prof. Christian Giroux

It’s “provocative in a good way.”

That’s the assessment Prof. Christian Giroux offered to Quartz about a new Melania Trump statue recently erected in Trump’s home country of Slovenia.

Giroux, a sculptor and associate professor of studio art in U of G’s School of Fine Art and Music, told the publication that the statue is an example of folk art, an art movement in which a true likeness is not necessarily the sign of a fine sculpture.

He said folk art “reveals something essential about our reality and ourselves that more photographic (i.e., ‘realistic’) representations cannot.”

Giroux has collaborated with Daniel Young since 2002 on sculpture, public art and film installations. Their work explores the modernity of the mid-century and how it intersects with the production of space and the built environment.