In many ways, the confrontational cover of this issue needs no explanation: Lady Liberty is dead. But when A.i.A. sat down with the artist Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo) to talk about her sculpture Liberté Morte (Dead Liberty), 2025, she shared an enlightening story about how the work extends the lineage of her lexicon.
In 2016, I had a solo show in Paris and decided to consider the exchange that happened between France and the US. I had worked for Liberty Tax, where people would stand outside with signs, wearing Statue of Liberty costumes. For Liberty (Liberté), 2017, I performed as the statue and then restaged it for the 2017 Whitney Biennial in the museum’s outdoor areas. I’d been performing a lot in public spaces, work that stems from my time as a mascot in high school.
I’ve also made work around the color green for years. That interest originated because I thought it was my mom’s favorite color, but later I found out that it actually isn’t. Still, I got to thinking about nature and started seeing green as a ubiquitous color. I also wanted to reduce painting to its most minimal form, and landed on color mixing. Blue and yellow make green, and this combination represents everything from happiness to depression, from sun to sky. It had a lot of connotations that I could use to figure out an aesthetic code, which allowed me to make future artistic decisions.
Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo): Liberté Morte (Dead Liberty), 2025.
Photo Aurelien Mole/Courtesy Balice Hertling, Paris
I started working on Liberty (Liberté) as Trump was on the verge of becoming president, so I wanted to turn this symbol of liberty, freedom, welcoming, and acceptance on its head. I wore the exact same costume worn by performers near those tourism ferries that go to the statue. It had this drooping crown, which encapsulated how the symbol felt then. But despite the droop, people could maybe still have read the work as a sort of celebration. For me, though, the commentary came from the way the costume makes the symbol imaginary. It also dealt with gender: A lot of men perform near the ferry.
It’s been 10 years since the original performance, and with Liberté Morte (Dead Liberty), I wanted to revisit the statue to comment on what’s happening now. It was once a symbol of welcoming people into this country. I wanted to send a very clear message—and using loaded signifiers can be a good way to access a larger audience, since everyone has a relationship to them. I’ve used skeletons in my work before, too; for me, they’re a way to show the human body in its most minimal form.
Then I thought about how I might continue the conversation I’m having with my own history and with the history of this country I reside in. Immediately I envisioned the skeleton encased in ice—Frozen Liberty, 2026, on p. 45—as a way to show the destruction that’s happening through global warming but also evoke how the symbol of ice is being turned on its head, with ICE attacking people consistently. It felt necessary to make a statement. I’ve been thinking a lot about what Nina Simone said—that “an artist’s duty … is to reflect the times”—and I agree.
