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Ciara O'Rourke
By Ciara O'Rourke October 20, 2020

Photo shows an art project, not a Trump protest

If Your Time is short

  • This photo shows an art project, not a protest.

 

Protests have become a hallmark of 2020, but an image of women exposing themselves that’s being shared on Facebook doesn’t show a demonstration against President Donald Trump.

The post claims otherwise. 

"This is not a joke," it claims. "They gathered to scream at Trump through their vaginas. These are people who want to control the government and teach your kids."

This post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) 

A reverse image search showed that this photo has been online since at least August 2016, before Trump was elected. 

Featured Fact-check

It was posted on Reddit in 2017 with this description: "This is a project called Raising the Skirt to celebrate the diversity of vaginas."

In 2018, it was being recast as a Trump protest.

In reality, the image shows art, not a protest. It appears in a gallery of 2014 art projects in the United Kingdom on the website for the Live Art Development Agency. The caption says: "From Nicola Canavan’s DIY Raising the Skirt in collaboration with photographer Dawn Felicia Knox." 

In September 2016, the magazine Dazed published an interview with Canavan, an artist who created a series of portraits of women for her "Raising the Skirt" project, which in part aimed to change public perceptions about the female body.

According to an archived About page on the Raising the Skirt website, the project began as a three-day workshop funded by Live Art Development Agency. Photographer Dawn Felicia Knox documented workshops, according to the site. It had nothing to do with Donald Trump.

We rate this Facebook post False.

 

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Photo shows an art project, not a Trump protest

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https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/oct/20/viral-image/photo-shows-art-project-not-trump-protest/
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