Last November, the country music performer Ryan Edward Upchurch uploaded an Instagram video of himself shooting several rounds of bullets from an assault rifle into Jacob Aaron LeVeille’s paintings before tagging one of the canvases with an insult directed toward the artist. The self-described “hick-hop” rapper then auctioned off the damaged artworks over social media.
A lawsuit filed by the artist with Florida federal court on Monday alleges that Upchurch violated the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA) when he “intentionally mutilated” the two paintings (one depicting the musician and another representing Johnny Cash) and “defamed” LeVeille by posting the video for the Redneck Nation country rapper’s 1.4 million Instagram followers — more than 155,000 of which have viewed the video since it was posted on November 9, 2018.