“Me too wax Lincoln… meeeee too,” one social media user quipped
Not even a wax statue that honors Abraham Lincoln is off limits from the brutal summer heatwave.
The 3,000-lb. statue, which rests outside Garrison Elementary in Washington, D.C., began to melt over the weekend amid near-triple-digit temperatures, according to USA Today, the BBC, and Newsweek.
Lincoln’s head was the first to start melting, followed by a leg and a foot, as the BBC reported. Eventually, the staff at CulturalDC, a non-profit organization that commissioned the figure, decided to “purposely remove” the statue’s head to “prevent it from falling and breaking.”
In a statement on their website, the group said that although the figure, which is officially named “40 Acres: Camp Barker,” was always meant to “be burnt like a candle and to change over time,” the soaring temperatures really did a number on the statue.
“With this record-level heat, Lincoln has slumped into his chair more than ever anticipated!” the group wrote. “All that wax is leannnnnnnning back under the weight of 2024 and the state of our warming planet.”
As for the future, the group said they can’t “guarantee he’ll be sitting up straight for the months ahead,” adding, “but who really will be?”
The melted figure has unsurprisingly become the subject of plenty of jokes online.
“Me too wax Lincoln… meeeee too…” wrote one person on social media, while another captioned a photo of the melted sculpture, “How your email finds me.”
Artist Sandy Williams IV told Newsweek that although they expected the sculpture to melt eventually, they weren’t “expecting this version of the artwork to melt in this way.”
“I always joked that when the climate got worse, and we were living in weather hot enough to melt these sculptures, that this work would then become environmental art. I did not expect for that day to be this past weekend,” the artist added.
There aren’t any plans to “repair the installation,” Curator and Executive Director of CulturalDC Kristi Maiselman told USA Today, though it will be removed before school begins again in August.
Maiselman shared that private collectors and galleries have offered to purchase the statue, but there isn’t “a concrete decision on where the piece will go next.”
