Making a statue of an icon or a celebrity is a slippery slope.
Just ask the people at Madame Tussauds, which in 2017 got ripped for making a wax statue of Beyoncé that looked nothing like her. But they quickly made up for it by creating another statue afterward that people were far more satisfied with. Madame Tussauds was slammed again recently after revealing its new Nicki Minaj statue.
Now fans are blasting the makers of a Tupac Shakur statue that’s recently surfaced online.
The talk began on Tuesday, Jan. 19, after one Twitter user wrote, “New Tupac statute in Dallas, what’s your thoughts?”
“I feel like they were being sarcastically disrespectful,” one person tweeted.
“This is an insult,” wrote another.
“Tupac was a beautiful young man but the statue looks more like an old man who desperately needs his crutches,” a third comment read.
“Hahahaa. Even pac lookin it at it like wtf?? Lmao,” a fourth person stated.
But it turns out the statue isn’t new, because it once stood at the Tupac Amaru Shakur Center for the Arts in Stone Mountain, Georgia, which the late rapper’s mother Afeni Shakur founded in 1997.
According to Rolling Stone, Afeni sold the property in 2015 for $1.2 million, and the statue was removed.
But in 2017, Jim Burnett, who bought the property and called it the Peace Garden Park and Amphitheater, said he hired artist Nijel Binns to build a new statue of the “All Eyes on Me” rapper. There has been no word, however, that it’s been completed.
After being shot on the Las Vegas Strip on Sept. 7, 1996, Shakur died less than a week later. His mother Afeni passed away on May 2, 2019, in Sausalito, California, of a heart attack.
