When soccer fans converge on Dallas this month for World Cup games, the aesthetically inclined ones will encounter a city home to art museums, galleries, and public art. And yet, the city will be missing a major and longstanding public artwork, after conservationist artist’s beloved mural was painted over in May.
Florida-based artist Robert Wyland has filed a $25 million federal lawsuit against FIFA and the owners of the building where his mural had appeared for a quarter-century, who, he says, painted over Ocean Life (1999), one of a hundred murals he painted around the world to raise consciousness about marine pollution and conservation efforts. The eight-story-high, 17,000-square-foot mural showed endangered humpback whales and dolphins and other marine life.
The suit, filed on June 1 in the District Court’s Dallas division by Dallas firm Carrington, Coleman, Sloman & Blumenthal, claims that the destruction of the mural, designated as Whaling Wall 82, violates the artist’s rights under the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA). It names as defendants FIFA, the Canadian company Slate Asset Management, which owns the building at 505 N Akard Street where the mural was created, and 3PZ Property Company, which it names as a Slate subsidiary or affiliate and claims owns the building.
