Milo Strain
Arkansas Times
February 7, 2025
Cult leader’s name on Little Rock public art outlasts tenure of city official who said it would be replaced
Brittany Nichols, former marketing manager for the Little Rock Parks and Recreation Department, has accepted a job with Metroplan.
This tidbit of news flew under our radar when the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette first published it last week, but we bring it up now as Nichols’ role at the department informs our ongoing, if sporadic, coverage of a strange quote attributed to a cult leader on a piece of public art in Little Rock.
The quote is attributed to a man named Andrew Cohen, and it is engraved on a basalt column that stands in Inspiration Plaza, the newest piece of public art installed in Riverfront Park in downtown Little Rock.
Learn more here about Cohen’s ... activities leading a cult called EnlightenNext, and read a statement from Nichols assuring us that Cohen’s name would be replaced with “Anonymous.”
A lot has changed since we pressed the department for comment on the bizarre quote in July. Donald Trump began his second presidential term. David Lynch is gone. Nichols works at Metroplan.
Andrew Cohen’s name, though, has been a rock-solid constant through a period of intense and rapid change.
Will it outlast the parks department’s next marketing manager? Time will tell.
When we last checked in with the parks department in December, staff were still looking for a contractor that could work on basalt and did not have a timeline for replacing Cohen’s name.
Little Rock Communications Director Aaron Sadler confirmed yesterday that the city’s plan is still to remove Cohen’s name and added that it had been covered “until such time as it can be removed.”
Because Inspiration Plaza is a short walk from the Arkansas Times’ office, we’ve periodically checked in on the status of the quote since our first story ran last summer. In December, after we asked the city when it planned to address the matter, we discovered Cohen’s name had been covered with a piece of tape. The tape disappeared shortly afterwards. Following our recent conversation with Sadler, the name was re-covered with tape.
No comments:
Post a Comment