When it comes to equality in sports, Alexis Ohanian never misses the mark. The tech mogul owns a women’s soccer team, funds all-female track events with jaw-dropping prizes, and stands tall for women’s sports like few others. But fighting for equality is one thing, standing guard for family is another. And recently, when Serena Williams proudly displayed a meaningful cotton art piece in her Florida home before NYC hotel comments sparked fan outrage, Alexis was there, fierce and unflinching. His love roars louder than the storm, proving that when it comes to Serena, he defends with fire.
Tennis icon Serena Williams once again found herself at the center of an emotional cultural conversation. During a recent trip to New York City, the 23-time Grand Slam champion shared IG stories capturing cotton plant decorations in the hallway of her Manhattan hotel. She was in the city for Kim Kardashian’s NikeSKIMS launch event, but her focus shifted when she saw the cotton as decoration. Filming the arrangement, she asked her followers, “How do we feel about cotton as decoration?” and followed with, “Personally, for me, it doesn’t feel great.” Her words carried weight, striking a nerve across social media.
Williams didn’t just observe the cotton; she engaged with it, plucking a ball from its branch and remarking that “it feels like nail polish remover cotton.” Her discomfort was clear, and it spoke volumes. To her, this was not just interior design but a painful reminder of a brutal past. Cotton, for many African Americans, is tied to centuries of slavery, forced labor, and generational trauma. For Serena, seeing it stripped of meaning and displayed as mere decoration felt unsettling and even offensive.
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When media outlet Page Six picked up the story, they added fuel to the fire by referencing the cotton artwork in Williams’ Miami home. That mention didn’t sit well with her husband, Alexis Ohanian, the outspoken Reddit co-founder and vocal supporter of women’s rights. Ohanian swiftly took to social media, resharing the story and calling out the coverage. He wrote, “Folks entitled to have their opinions, but to use owning Radcliffe Bailey’s Monument for a Promise as some kind of a ‘gotchya’ is so breathtakingly stupid—there is some very obvious symbolism of the cotton in the artwork.”
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Ohanian’s fiery defense wasn’t just about an artwork; it was about protecting Serena’s voice and the deeper meaning behind her feelings. He reminded critics that context matters, and that Bailey’s work was never meant as décor but as a historical reflection. His post made waves, drawing attention to the difference between art that challenges and decorations that sanitize history.
Radcliffe Bailey, the artist behind “Monument for a Promise,” was celebrated for weaving African American history into his work. The piece in question features a concrete donkey carrying a trunk of cotton on its back, symbolizing the weight of slavery’s past. Bailey’s art forces viewers to confront painful truths rather than ignore them.
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The cotton in Bailey’s work is not there to look pretty. It is there to sting, to remind, to demand remembrance of the enslaved lives that picked it under oppression. Williams and Ohanian made it clear that while art can speak truth to power, casual use of cotton as decoration risks erasing that truth entirely.
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