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Miami Police are looking for the perpetrator of the vandalization of four large sculptures by Costa Rican artist Jorge Jimenez Deredia displayed in a park and there is a $25,000 reward for anyone who helps capture him.
“They can’t override the efforts of an artist and the city of Miami,” Jimenez Deredia told EFE Wednesday by phone from Costa Rica.
Four of the 14 sculptural groups in the exhibition “A Bridge of Light,” which opened last month at the Maurice A. Ferrer Park, were covered with graffiti last Thursday night.
The vandalized works were restored a few hours later, after the police took samples of the fingerprints found, to start the investigation.
Officials in Bayfront, the area of Miami where Maurice A. Ferré Park is located, offered a $25,000 reward for the author or authors of the graffiti, which, according to the police, bear the mark of a graffiti artist, so they hope that someone knows who it is and reports it.
The Costa Rican sculptor told EFE that it was a “pure act of vandalism” that caused him “much disappointment” because he did not expect something like this to happen and in reference to the author said that there are other ways of expressing oneself when one wants to say something and it is not admissible to “go over the head of an artist”.
Jiménez Deredia, the first Latin American artist to place one of his works in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, resides in Costa Rica and Italy and is recognized for his ability to fuse the classical sculptural tradition with elements of Mesoamerican culture, such as the spheres of the Boruca people.
The exhibition “A Bridge of Light” opened last October 12 and will remain at the Maurice A. Ferrer Park until March 31, 2023.
