A New York City sculptor has expressed frustration after spending $100,000 building a lifesize statue of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk only to find that nobody wants it.

Kirk, 31, who co-founded the grassroots organization Turning Point USA, was shot dead on the campus of Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025 while hosting an open air political debate with students.

Suspect Tyler Robinson, 23, was subsequently arrested and charged with Kirk’s murder but has so far not entered a plea.

Speaking to The Guardian, artist Sergio Furnari explained that he had spent his own money on crafting the figure of a seated Kirk brandishing a microphone out of steel and resin but had as yet had no luck selling it.

He also revealed that he had recently broken his foot by tripping over a roll of tape in his studio, leading him to ask: “Is it cursed? Maybe. I don’t know.”

Furnari, born in Italy, said he did not create the statue because he agreed with Kirk politically and disagreed with him on “certain issues.”

“I wasn’t a fan of Charlie,” he said. “Like one thing that I couldn’t stand about him while he was alive [was] when he was talking about Palestine. ‘Oh no, Palestine doesn’t exist.’ I thought: ‘Well, this guy must be out of his mind.’”

Instead, he told the newspaper he had designed it to “glorify and to exercise the First Amendment, this freedom of speech,” as well as to express support for his widow Erika Kirk, to “glorify democracy” and to “commemorate a person.”

“Why am I making the statue?” Furnari said. “The same reason why Michelangelo did the Pieta, or Michelangelo did the David, or Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa. Why? Just to commemorate a moment, you know, a person.”

An online fundraiser the artist set up to recover his material costs had only raked in $8,225 as of Tuesday morning.

“I was thinking that it was going to resonate with the world, with whoever, but man, people are strange out there,” Furnari said.

“Meaning like, nobody is really coming up with support, especially financial support. So far I’ve spent all my money on this.

“Things financially are a total, absolute nightmare. It’s like wow. People are cheap, man. You know, people talk, talk – I know lots of people out there, and everybody’s so cheap.

“You know, like, it’s disgusting how cheap they are.”

He added that, if there are still no takers, he intends to display his monument in Times Square on September 10, the one-year anniversary of Kirk’s death, and to invite Mayor Zohran Mamdani to its unveiling.

In another interview with Newsmax, Furnari told anchor Greg Kelly that he was not usually an avid consumer of news but that he had been moved by the killing last year, likening it to the assassinations of such monumental 20th century figures as John F Kennedy, Robert F Kennedy, Dr Martin Luther King Jr and John Lennon.

He also said he felt Erika Kirk had been cruelly treated by the media and spoke of his ambition to remake the Kirk statue out of stainless steel, although, he admitted, the likely $250,000 cost was currently prohibitive.