A California artist is building a 6-foot-high border wall out of cotija cheese and wants to ‘make America grate again’

GoFundMe/Alan Shaffer

A California artist is building a border wall out of expired cotija cheese to make a point about President Donald Trump’s border wall.
Cosimo Cavallaro has already raised enough money to make a six-foot-tall, 25-foot-long wall out of 200 blocks of cheese.
His GoFundMe page says he wants to extend the wall’s length to 1,000 feet if he raises enough money.
He told McClatchy that critics of his cheese wall should ask themselves why they "can see the waste in this [cheese] wall, but you can’t see the waste in a $10 billion wall?"

A California artist is building a border wall of his own, laying down brick by brick of expired cotija cheese to try and prove that President Donald Trump’s wall is a waste of the country’s resources.

Cosimo Cavallaro, a Los Angeles-based artist, has started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for the wall, which he hopes will stretch 6 feet high and up to 1,000 feet long. Each block made of spoiled milk costs $100, according to his GoFundMe page, and he’s already raised enough to fund a 25-foot-long wall out of 200 blocks.

"There’s a humor in this. The idea is: This is a wall of cheese, it’s perishable," Cavallaro told McClatchy. "People will say, ‘This is a waste.’"

He said people should take that conclusion one step further and ask themselves why they "can see the waste in this [cheese] wall, but you can’t see the waste in a $10 billion wall?"

Trump declared a national emergency in February to secure enough funds to build the wall, after Congress refused to provide him the $5.7 billion he’d demanded. A major influx of Central American migrant families in recent months has fueled Trump’s argument that the border is in a state of "crisis" that only a wall can solve.

Though Congress attempted to reverse Trump’s declaration, the House of Representatives failed on Tuesday to summon enough votes to override a presidential veto.

Cavallaro wrote on his GoFundMe page that the heated national debate over the border wall in recent months inspired him to finally put his long-planned cheese wall plan into action.

"If it takes a Cheese Wall at the border to make people look at the ‘wall’ in a different way, that’s what Cosimo will create," he wrote on the campaign page.

He’s even begun selling cheese-related merchandise through his website, www.cheesewall.com, including a hoodie with an image of a cheese grater to form the pun, "Make America Grate Again."

Cavallaro has long specialized in creating artwork out of perishable food, including cheese, ketchup, and even chocolate.

"When you cover a room in cheese, or in ketchup, or in food, you can’t rip that off anymore. That experience is so visceral and so real — it lives in your mind," Cavallaro said in a YouTube video announcing the project. "This wall is a documentation of our times. This is a moment that we’re talking about an issue, about walls. I think it’s very important that artists create something that lasts in our time to see what’s happening."

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