“We all want to talk about this.” A Study of Freedom of Artistic Expression in Academic Art Museums and Galleries In my course on African American art, for example, we look at silhouettes depicting vile acts in the context of slavery by Kara Walker, Confederate flags re-worked by Sonya Clark, self-portraits of the African American artist Nona Faustine Simmons standing nude on an auction block on Wall Street, and Michael Ray Charles’s painted appropriations of racist caricatures. My students disagree every semester on whether these images help or harm – but the point is that we are having the conversation because we can look at the work. Faculty and museum professionals are more likely to understand the pedagogical value of these intense conversations than others with less expertise who may be involved in decisions regarding what art may be exhibited on campus.
5.2 When the exhibition decisions made by museum professionals are overridden by administrators and others, then it’s almost definitely censorship. The delicate distinction between curating and censoring is not a new problem. Instead, this dynamic has a long history in the United States, particularly as our legal and cultural expectations of freedom of expression set expectations and assumptions which are difficult if not impossible to meet. Freedom of artistic expression often raises the potential for conflict with other important goals, such as maintaining campus, public, political, and philanthropic support for higher education institutions, and fostering an atmosphere of genuine welcome and inclusion for diverse audiences. Instead of ‘naming’ censorship acts and ‘shaming’ academic institutions and their community members, this study purposely focuses instead on understanding the structures and processes through which curatorial decisions are made. As we have seen in previous Takeaway sections, trained museum staff understand the important role art can play in fostering dialogue, and they also have the expertise to physically situate and textually and /or in other ways present and interpret art to enhance its pedagogical value. Although self-censorship is clearly a concern, the topmost worry we should have about censorship regard those moments when individuals in administrative or external roles take over decision-making functions that should properly rest with museum professionals. To interrogate the question of power in decision-making, both interview subjects and survey respondents were asked a series of questions about normal processes, and how those changed when art exhibited on campus might be controversial.
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2021-2022 Fellows Research
