http://www.boston.com/…

The owners of a small South End

gallery say they had the best of intentions when they commissioned a famous

and often mischievous street artist to install a massive political mural on a construction wall lining one of the artiest strips of the South End.

The mural, 13 feet high and nearly a block long, features multiple composite portraits of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln, their faces melded together in a rainbow of colors. It is meant, the gallery said, to inspire dialogue.

That it did. The morning after artist Ron English and his band of volunteers finished the mural, “Abraham Obama,” it stirred a tempest in this insular arts community, though it had nothing to do with Lincoln, Obama or English himself.

Wha? I think both men should/would be offended by this. Obama has been affiliated with people who don’t like the whites and Lincoln wasn’t so thrilled with the blacks.