A public park in Virginia was closed for a time Thursday morning after eight effigies clad in clown costumes and Ku Klux Klan robes were hung from a tree there early Thursday morning, according to KTLA sister station WTVR in Richmond.
The artist collective behind the “Ku Klux Klowns” installation, INDECLINE, said it is a response to the “white nationalist uprising” that emerged in the U.S. this year.
The group chose to install the spectacle in a Richmond park named for Joseph Bryan, an infamous slave trader who was deeply involved in the largest slave auction on U.S. soil. He was also twice elected by Georgians to the U.S. House of Representatives.
The park was also chosen because of its ties to Gabriel’s Rebellion, an attempted slave revolt in 1800 that ended in the hanging of its 26 participants, the organization said.
Richmond is also symbolic as the former capital of the Confederate States of America, as well as the capital of the state in which a woman protesting white supremacy was brutally killed this August.
INDECLINE, active since 2001, made headlines last year after erecting a series of statues depicting then-candidate Donald Trump in the nude in several cities across the U.S. in a work titled “The Emperor Has No Balls.”
And in March of last year, they were behind the names of black Americans killed by police that were pasted over celebrities’ names on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The covert group is made up of graffiti writers, filmmakers, photographers and “full-time rebels and activists,” according to its website.