The owner of a bakery that allowed high school students to paint a giant mural of frosted treats is running afoul of a Conway, New Hampshire, city ordinance on the size of ads allowed.
Because Leavitt’s Country Bakery owner Sean Young sees the 90-square-foot depiction of a sunrise over a mountain range made of sprinkle-covered chocolate and strawberry donuts, a blueberry muffin, a cinnamon roll and other baked goods as a mural — and free speech — he sued the city, according to the lawsuit as chronicled in the Associated Press.
Apparently, the town zoning board in the city of 10,000 — bent on preserving a rural atmosphere in the town — won’t leave it alone. They decided that the patisserie painting “was not so much art as advertising, and therefore it could not remain as it is because of its size.”
;Faced with modifying or removing the mural, or possibly dealing with fines and criminal charges, Mr. Young on the grounds that he was protecting his freedom of speech. The painting could stay right where it is if it showed actual mountains, instead of baked goods that suggest mountains, or if the building wasn’t a bakery, according to the AP.
“They said it would be art somewhere else,” Young told a reporter. “It’s just not art here… The city shouldn’t have the right to police art.”
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