Mural of Muslim Woman Defaced in Brooklyn: 'After 9/11, People Don't Want to See That'

Vandals pockmarked a street portrait of a Muslim woman in Brooklyn, August 2015. Photo courtesy of Not a Crime

See also: ‘Rosewater’ Journalist Slams Brooklyn Art Vandals: ‘They Finished the Iranian Government’s Job’

A towering portrait of jailed Iranian artist and activist Atena Farghadani — painted, 28 feet high, onto the side of a building in Red Hook, Brooklyn, earlier this summer — was riddled with red paintballs by neighborhood vandals last month.

This, according to Not a Crime, the organization that commissioned it.

Not a Crime is a project of Maziar Bahari, the Iranian journalist who famously spent 118 days in jail after appearing on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”

And the Red Hook building that was targeted, located at Colombia and Woodhull streets, is owned and occupied by local resident Wylie Goodman. She was sitting inside her building when the vandals attacked, she told the New York Times.

At first, she thought the paintballs were bullets.

Goodman had agreed to let world-famous South African street artist Faith47 use her outside wall as a canvas for a portrait of 29-year-old Farghadani, an activist and artist currently jailed in Iran for drawing a cartoon that allegedly insulted the supreme leader.

In the Brooklyn mural, Farghadani, painted in smudges of gray, wears a Muslim hijab and is missing a mouth.

The portrait is now tentatively scheduled for removal on Wednesday, Sept. 30 — three weeks earlier than planned — because it was bothering some of Goodman’s neighbors.

Four or five neighbors were particularly upset by the mural, Goodman told Patch.

“Art is very subjective, and I understand why there were a range of reactions to the mural’s content, especially when people were not informed it was going up beforehand,” Goodman said in an email. ”As an individual, and in collaboration with the organization, we could have done a better job to listen to neighbors and address their concerns upfront to reduce tensions.”

One of those neighbors — a man who did not wish to identify himself — told the New York Times that the mural was insensitive to 9/11 survivors.

“After 9/11, people don’t want to see that,” he said, reportedly adding that some on the block associated the image with the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. “People around here are saying, ‘After what they did to us, let’s worry about our own instead of somebody’s right to put up art.’ ”

Amid the neighborhood controversy, the artist herself, Faith47, has also reportedly requested that the mural be removed.

“If an Islamic person who lives in the neighborhood walks past that wall and sees the image splattered by a red paint gun, essentially it’s a message of war, death, intolerance,” she wrote in an email to the Times. “I hate for my work to have any part in that.”