A giant statue of Edward Snowden has appeared in Union Square Park. The tribute to the NSA whistleblower is the brainchild of Jim Dessicino, a graduate student at the University of Delaware.

"When the story broke about Edward Snowden, I was thinking a lot about surveillance and monumentality and how we remember things," Dessicino told BuzzFeed News on Friday. "How public space is used and how people in history are remembered.

"And I got the idea that maybe people who are major actants upon history aren't always represented properly, and those people could be written out of history by not having something more permanent made of them."

It took Dessicino four months to complete the nine-foot tall piece of art, out of gypsum cement, steel, and foam. For the next three days, from 10 AM to 5 PM, the statue will be based in Union Square as part of the annual Art in Odd Places project.

"I was thinking a lot about who gets memorialized, who gets lionized, you know, remembered in the public eye," he said. "And there's a really democratic activity that happens in public art and public spaces where it can cause public discourse. And I saw that seemed lacking in my generation.

"And Edward Snowden does something that was beyond him, you know, it was a very public act where he sacrificed his own personal comfort and security to let us all know something. So he sacrificed himself for the greater good."

"So he's kind of dead in a way, because he can't be here, and so he becomes a subject that can be memorialized," he said.