{"id":6745,"date":"2025-07-19T00:14:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-19T00:14:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/6745\/"},"modified":"2025-07-19T00:14:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-19T00:14:08","slug":"painter-says-dhs-stole-his-work-for-post-about-homelands-heritage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/6745\/","title":{"rendered":"Painter Says DHS Stole His Work for Post About ‘Homeland’s Heritage’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEarlier this week, the US Department of Homeland Security posted an image <\/a>on its X account of an oil painting depicting a man and a woman in the Old West holding a baby inside a covered wagon. DHS added a caption: \u201cRemember Your Homeland\u2019s Heritage.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe work depicted was the painting New Life in A New Land, by Morgan Weistling, an American painter who primarily creates realistic paintings of American frontier life. Prior to turning to fine art in 1998, he was an illustrator for films and video games. <\/p>\n

\n\tBut DHS did not get permission to share the image, Weistling said in a new post on his website. It reads, \u201cAttention:\u00a0The recent DHS post on social media using a painting of mine that I painted a few years ago was used without my permission.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\n\tA longer, since-deleted message, initially posted to his website and his social media accounts, called the usage \u201ca violation of my copyright on the painting.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was a surprise to me and I am trying to gather how this happen and what to do next,\u201d he wrote, according to the New Republic<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile Weistling did not appear pleased by DHS\u2019s usage of his work, he does seem to have at least some political alignment with the Trump administration<\/a>. Weistling appears to have <\/a>an ongoing partnership with conservative evangelical nonprofit Focus on the Family\u2014which has been one of the longest and most aggressive opponents of abortion access and LGBTQIA+ rights\u2014to sell prints of his paintings through Focus\u2019s online store. <\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the prints on offer is a reproduction of the painting posted by DHS. There it is titled A Prayer for a New Life, with the text noting that it \u201ccelebrates the value of life despite the many hazards a young family would have faced on their journey through the pioneer west.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tJust two weeks earlier, DHS posted a different image of a painting, which similarly showed an idyllic view of American life, this one from a different period. That was a work by Thomas Kinkade, Morning Pledge, which shows a mid-century suburban neighborhood<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier this week, the US Department of Homeland Security posted an image on its X account of an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6746,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75,7456],"class_list":["post-6745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-trump-administration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}