In Providence, controversy has arisen over the mysterious commissioning and subsequent halting of artist Ian Gaudreau’s public mural memorializing Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee killed in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2025. The resulting public outcry provoked Mayor Brett Smiley to weigh in and led to the project’s cancellation following criticism from some members of Providence’s queer and arts communities. Gaudreau cites city overreach for not allowing him to finish his work on private property, while the mayor called the project “divisive” in an interview for WPRI. The uproar is pulling the New England city into MAGA’s culture wars with coverage in the New York Post and Fox News.
Escalating the conflict over the weekend, a plane flew over the city trailing a banner that read “IRYNA WEEPS, SMILEY CREEPS.” It’s still unclear who hired the aerial banner or paid for it.
Last August, twenty-three-year-old Zarutska was stabbed to death while traveling home via light-rail train from her job at a pizzeria. Her suspected killer, Decarlos Brown, had a long arrest record and a history of mental health issues. Security camera footage of the murder went viral, and right-wing figures quickly pounced on the opportunity to amplify the image of a young, blond, white woman on public transit with a Black man towering over her.
Zarutska’s murder has been seized upon by Republican politicians to push for harsher criminal penalties. In October, North Carolina enacted Iryna’s Law, restricting the use of cashless bail and opening the door to reintroduce the death penalty, which has not been used in the state since 2006. President Trump invited Zarutska’s mother and uncle to his January 2026 State of the Union address. “Mrs. Zuretska [sic],” he said, as the camera showed her weeping, “tonight I promise you that we will ensure justice for your magnificent daughter.”
On September 9, 2025, Eoghan McCabe, CEO of the AI customer service company Intercom, posted on X that he would pledge $500,000 to paint fifty memorial murals across the country in Zarutska’s honor. On September 10, he posted that funding for 300 murals had been raised and that they were in touch with 800 artists. Elon Musk and right-wing influencer Andrew Tate both replied to his post with a pledge of an additional $1 million each for the project. The Guardian reported that McCabe’s chief of staff confirmed Musk’s $1 million and McCabe’s $500,000 contributions. Tate’s financial support for the project is unconfirmed.
On September 11, a corporation called Project Freedom 2025 was registered in Delaware, according to Bizapedia. Using that name, McCabe started a crowdfunding campaign on the Christian platform GiveSendGo on October 17, 2025, which has raised more than $100,000 in additional crowdsourced funds to-date. The GiveSendGo page states that the funds will be received by Project Freedom 2025 and links to McCabe’s personal X account.
By December 22, the first four murals funded by Project Freedom 2025 had been completed in Venice, California; Washington, DC; Miami; and New York. More murals appeared across the country in January and February of this year. The murals depict Zarutska in a wide range of styles. In Las Vegas, she appears in a stylized, comic-book-like portrait. In Dallas, she is depicted lying horizontally, like a high-end fashion model. In Washington DC, she oddly evokes the era of Britney Spears’s “Oops!…I Did It Again.”
In addition to painting the mural, Gaudreau coordinated the production of the Providence location of the mural on behalf of the project’s backers, including selecting the location and securing permission from the property owners. On March 4, he posted on his personal Facebook page that he was looking for a wall in Boston to use for one year. The artist, who lives in Providence, has painted large-scale murals before, most notably a 462-foot piece in his hometown of Mansfield, Massachusetts. His work in Providence includes pieces inside the restaurants Los Andes, Moonshine Alley, The George, and Viva Mexico, the latter two of which are located in buildings owned by Providence arts hub AS220.
“A friend of mine sent me a link [to rememberiryna.org] and said they’re looking for mural artists to paint murals across the country,” Gaudreau said in an interview last week. “I applied to that. It had to be something fast.”
Other similar murals appear to be in development in New England. They follow the same pattern of local artists posting images of Zarutska saying their “work was accepted” on local Facebook groups and asking for help looking for wall space.
On March 21, a 40-by-46-foot-vinyl canvas was installed on the side of 19 Snow Street in Providence, a late-nineteenth-century building that houses queer bars The Dark Lady and The Alley Cat, owned by Randy D’Antuono and Buck Asprinio.
The four-story building is prime real estate for a muralist. The south-facing brick wall is adjacent to three uninterrupted blocks of parking lots, so the wall can be seen from a considerable distance. “I chose this wall because I knew that they had temporary art there in the past, and I know I could probably get it approved quickly, seeing as it was private property,” Gaudreau said.
“I talked to the building owners,” he added. “They were up for it and we got it going.”
Gaudreau confirmed in a phone interview on April 7 that he was paid a fifty percent deposit by RememberIryna.org. “It’s essentially a one-girl band,” said Gaudreau about his contact at RememberIryna.org who he only referred to as “Elizabeth.” Gaudreau explained over the phone that Elizabeth, manages the mural initiative with Eoghan McCabe, and is based in California.
The vinyl banner was fabricated by Grand Image, a company specializing in large-format graphics, and installed by Boston Building Wraps, said Gaudreau.
According to both Gaudreau and D’Antuono, the city’s Department of Art, Culture, and Tourism told them that no permitting approvals were required for the piece since the mural was not being painted on historic brick. Gaudreau said via email that the project “was temporarily shut down” on Friday, March 27, but that he believed it would resume once permitting was cleared up the following Monday. The Boston Globe reported that Gaudreau said the project had been cancelled but did not elaborate on how the decision was made. “An inspector from the City’s Department of Inspection and Standards told the artist in person, at the site, that they needed to get a permit in order to move forward with the project. A stop work order was not issued,” said Michaela Antunes, the deputy chief of staff of the City of Providence, in an email.
Members of the local queer community have been vocal online about their disapproval of the mural and, specifically, the right-wing financing of the campaign. Haus of Codec, an organization providing transitional housing for queer youth, removed itself from a fundraising food truck drag brunch scheduled for the Dark Lady on Sunday, March 29. “The mural being displayed on the side of the Dark Lady’s building, funded by Elon Musk and friends, sends a message that perpetuates harm towards a community that has been the backbone of Providence for decades,” the organization said in an Instagram post.
Gaudreau said he had known about controversies surrounding the murals being installed in other cities, particularly in Chicago, where some local Ukrainian leaders protested the unauthorized use of Zarutska’s image.
Ukrainian-American advocate Dr. Mariya Dmytriv-Kapeniak is quoted in a February 5, 2026, Chicago Sun-Times article, saying that if “someone really cares about war refugees, there’s a lot of work you can do to help them other than to paint a mural without the family’s permission and just sign a poor girl’s name on it.”
Gaudreau alleges he intended to address the criticism within the mural itself, but the project’s preemptive halt prevented that from happening.
“But then the mayor came out and voiced his displeasure with the mural, and then the candidate running against him also voiced his displeasure for the mural, which I think is kind of a bummer,” Gaudreau said. Mayor Smiley issued a statement on Sunday, March 29 that the funders of the project had divisive goals.
“I don’t think this would have gotten half the attention that it did [on a different building]. I didn’t know that Elon had said complicated things about the LGBTQ community,” Gaudreau shared in a phone interview.
D’Antuono and Asprinio were unavailable for an interview, but D’Antuono did answer some questions via email. He said that he had seen one preliminary rendering of the mural. He remembered the Zarutska murder and knew there was a national campaign happening, but said that was the extent of his knowledge. He also confirms Gaudreau’s version of what happened with permitting.
“I worked with certain City departments to be absolutely certain I was following the correct installation protocol,” D’Antuono said. “I received approval to proceed.”
The city disagrees.
“The mural that was partially completed at 19 Snow Street was not commissioned or funded by the City of Providence,” Mayor Brett Smiley’s office said in an emailed statement. “The property owner did not register the work with the City or seek any required approvals. The work was partially completed on canvas and it is our understanding that the owner now intends to take the work down.”
The mural had a total budget of $10,000 from RememberIryna.org. “I got paid money to get things going and to buy the supplies I needed,” Gaudreau said, citing that the vinyl alone cost $4,000. There is also the installation company, the scissor lift, the rented parking space to park the scissor lift, and more. “All that money has been spent,” he said. The property owners were not compensated for the use of their wall for the mural, but they did grant permission for its installation.
“As it stands, I worry this mural intends to use a tragedy to sow division, while avoiding the political realities it brings with it,” said Erin McCutcheon, a professor of art history at the University of Rhode Island, in a written statement. “Providence is also navigating the aftermath of our own local tragedy in the wake of the Brown University shooting and loss of members of our community. I’d love to see more public art that fosters a sense of reflection and care that speaks to our shared, localized grief.”
In a phone interview with Boston Art Review, Gaudreau cited concerns about censorship and his own freedom of expression, “my free speech is totally being stifled,” he said.
Many people in Providence incorrectly assumed the mural had been commissioned by The Avenue Concept, an arts organization that has produced dozens of murals around the city since 2014, including several large-scale murals downtown. In response to the community response to the mural, The Avenue Concept and AS220 are hosting a panel and community forum meant to invite public dialogue about the role of public art as a “tool for influence” according to an Instagram post co-published by the organizations. Gaudreau was invited by the organizers to join the panel.
After public backlash and the removal of the first mural, NBC WJAR reported that Gaudreau received an offer from Francois Karam, co-owner of Opa the Phoenician, to paint a mural on his restaurant’s external wall. “I’ve known Ian [Gaudreau] for over ten years now,” said Karam in a phone interview. “I’ve been a fan of his art for a little while. I actually bought one of his first pieces.”
While the single-story restaurant is located on busy Atwells Avenue in the Federal Hill neighborhood, the building lacks the scale and sightlines of the original site. The new mural is in an alley. “I reached out to Ian and told him our background being immigrants, [that] we have a wall at our restaurant that we’d love to offer if he was interested, and we managed to make it work.” He said that as an immigrant who arrived with his family from Lebanon a quarter century ago, he also wanted to pay tribute to another immigrant American.
Karam does not seem concerned about backlash, though he acknowledged that negative feedback is inevitable. “The LGBTQ community was upset because Elon Musk funded that,” Karam said about the removed mural on Snow Street. “Our mural has no relationship with that. It’s something that Ian and I worked out together for the price of a dollar.”
Mayor Smiley has not commented on the new mural.
Gaudreau began work on April 3 and spent much of April 4 painting the new mural which stylistically bears little resemblance to his original mural’s design. He said he has spent several days on it so far and hopes to complete it by Thursday. When it’s done, it will be the first Iryna Zarutska mural completed in New England.
The original mural will be taken down this week, pending availability of the installation company. Gaudreau still hopes to find a new home for it.
