Exclusive | Nutty professor who held machete to Post reporters neck tapped by NYC for $407K art installation: Piece of junk

The unhinged ex-CUNY professor who savagely held a machete to the neck of a New York Post reporter now has a permanent, taxpayer-funded art installation in the Bronx.The NYC Department of Cultural Affairs ignored Shellyne Rodriguez’s infamous past by green-lighting a $407,000 budget for her 23-foot-tall brick, steel and terracotta Marxist monstrosity called “Phoenix Ladder: Monument to the People of the Bronx.”It was unveiled in November along Grand Concourse and Morris Avenue — a little more than two years after she copped a wrist-slap plea deal with Bronx prosecutors for her assault on veteran New York Post scribe Reuven Fenton.The permanent work, commissioned by the city through the Percent for Art program, is sandwiched in a thicket of residential buildings and hailed as a testament to the borough’s resiliency after the arson spree during the tumultuous 1970s.The monument– which already has cracks along its foundation — is adorned with images of the phoenix, a mythological symbol of rebirth; a series of piercing eyes; four clenched fists signifying black power/socialist solidarity, and the home borough letters “B” and “X.” On top of the structure is an ascending black ladder without an end.

“If abolition is not solely about what we dismantle, but also about what we build in its stead, then what monuments or points of gathering will we, the collective body of the dispossessed who make life on the periphery of empire, make for ourselves as stewards of our own histories and futures,” she told Hyperallergic in November.The installation was first commissioned in 2018 through the city’s Percent for Arts program, which sets aside 1% of budgets for city-funded construction projects to create new artwork, as part of a now-completed $62.5 million reconstruction of the Grand Concourse.A panel of local elected officials, art experts and community board members chose Rodriguez, who pocketed $81,400, as 20% of the budget for each piece of art ...