BALTIMORE, MD (WBFF) — A performance artist from Baltimore was charged with indecent exposure, assault and resisting arrest Saturday after posing nude atop a pedestal in the city’s Little Italy neighborhood.
F. Hambleton Sonnenfeld, a 31-year-old known as “Ham,” was pulled off the marble post early on Independence Day by officers in a cherry picker. It was the latest oddity at the former site of Baltimore’s Christopher Columbus statue, a Reagan-era monument toppled exactly six years earlier and resurrected at the White House in March.
In an interview Monday with The Baltimore Sun, Ham said that with the holiday, he saw an opportunity to honor Italian culture in a setting where its symbols have been controversial, while also examining “what freedom is now.”
The way the performance ended — with Ham restrained on the ground, naked and surrounded by a group of police officers — was “the perfect representation of how complex this concept really is,” he said.
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