The unhinged ex-CUNY professor who savagely held a machete to the neck of a Put up reporter went on a rambling tirade after being known as out final week for her new $407,000 taxpayer-funded monument critics ripped as “junk.”
Tone-deaf Shellyne Rodriguez painted herself as a sufferer, whining in a Hyperallergic.com column about “violent fascist” oppressors out to get her.
She by no means mentions “machete” or exhibits regret for her 2023 assault on Put up scribe Reuven Fenton.
“This isn’t my first encounter with the tabloid, however a continuation of a focused assault, which has every little thing to do with the fascist seizure of life that’s all our actuality now, however for Black, Indigenous, and colonized folks globally has all the time been current, albeit at simmering temperatures,” the 48-year-old wrote.
In her column, titled “Why My Public Artwork Drives the Proper Nuts,” she claims her media “disaster was not born yesterday, and since its inception, my everlasting public art work has stored the rating,” referring to her 23-foot-tall brick, metal and terracotta Marxist monstrosity known as “Phoenix Ladder: Monument to the Individuals of the Bronx.”
It was unveiled in November alongside Grand Concourse and Morris Avenue — a bit greater than two years after she copped a wrist-slap plea cope with Bronx prosecutors for her assault on the veteran journo.
The monument– which already has cracks alongside its basis — was first commissioned in 2018 by the town’s P.c for Arts program — which units apart 1% of the finances for city-funded development tasks for brand new art work — as a part of a $62.5 million reconstruction of the Grand Concourse.
Rodriguez, a self-proclaimed black Marxist, pocketed $81,400 of the undertaking’s $407,000 finances as an “artist charge.”
The polarizing piece is adorned with photographs of the phoenix, a mythological image of rebirth; a sequence of piercing eyes; 4 clenched fists signifying black energy/socialist solidarity, and the home-borough letters “B” and “X.” On high of the construction is an ascending black ladder with out an finish.
It’s alleged to be testomony to the borough’s resiliency after the arson spree throughout the tumultuous Nineteen Seventies.
Nonetheless, many neighborhood residents ripped it as an eyesore, together with Frankie Santiago, who advised The Put up final week, “It appears like a bit of junk.”
Within the column, Rodriguez claims she turned a “goal” of “right-wing media” solely after making headlines as a then-Hunter Faculty adjunct artwork professor in Could 2023 for flipping out on pro-life college students on the Manhattan-based CUNY campus.
She failed to say she menaced Fenton, who was merely doing his job and knocking on her Bronx residence door to ask concerning the incident.
She additionally bizarrely claimed “White Christian supremacy is on the fascist march and finishing up a race cleaning marketing campaign” and that “regardless of these obstacles” she was someway capable of full Phoenix Ladder in November – seven years after being commissioned.
“She is an homage to the folks of the Bronx, a lighthouse for our collective futures, and our witness.” she wrote.
“It’s no shock that these reactionary forces are appalled by it. They perceive that this monument is constructed on their ruins.”
The NYC Division of Cultural Affairs, which oversees this system, has refused to remark about Rodriguez’s outrageous, headline-making previous or whether or not it thought-about pulling her finances after she threatened to “chop” up a reporter.
The nutty professor was instantly fired by Hunter after the assault. In February 2024, she was axed from one other instructing gig at Cooper Union for anti-Israel screeds. Her web site doesn’t spotlight any present tasks.
