"The analogy was made: ‘you wouldn't tear up someone's conference paper before they had a chance to read it.' This is our research...The bear came down."
April 16th kicked off the annual Shirley Strum Kenny Student Arts Festival here at Stony Brook University. This campus-wide event, according to the official announcement, was to "[showcase] the diversity of our students through their creative endeavors"[i] and included work by both undergraduate and graduate students.
The bear came down. The culmination of four and a half months of work, Julianne Gadoury's Polar Bears in Space[ii] was installed on April 15th in the Wang Center, located prominently above the center pool. As well as being a part of the Arts Festival, Polar Bears in Space also thematically complimented Stony Brook's Earthstock celebration that was running concurrently. The art remained installed only a short while, however, as President Kenny ordered it down when it was only partially installed, without seeing the work, or reading the Gadoury's artist's statement. Gadoury was initially told that the work had to be removed because she did not acquire the proper permits to install the piece; this is incorrect. Gadoury did, in fact, have permission and worked closely with building officials to insure that her work and the materials and methods she used to support it would not damage the structure of the center itself. The work of several other artists also had to be removed across campus, though these individuals did not have adequate authorization to install their art in the location it was shown.
So what's really the deal here? According to the press release issued by Unbound, the exhibition in which Gadoury was to present Polar Bears in Space, "officials acting at the behest of the president offered a variety of reasons for the removal of the works: It was not aesthetically pleasing, it did not reflect the image of Stony Brook University, and it was not structurally sound." Gadoury affirms: "I was told the advisors to the president didn't understand the concept behind the piece." On April 16th Gadoury dissembled her work while roughly 50 people--an assortment undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty--looked on. Only twenty minutes before the demonstration and dismantling of her piece was she contacted and told that her work could stay up until the 18th (a date quickly noted as the day before a wedding in the Wang Center), but scheduling conflicts (Gadoury, like everyone in her program, only receives 1/2 tuition waiver and teaching stipend and must also work a part-time job), as well as a rather well-grounded suspicion that the last-minute extension was granted only to diffuse her demonstration dismantling the piece, prompted Gadoury to finish taking down "Polar Bears in Space."
Julianne Gadoury received an apology after she removed Polar Bears in Space. It just wasn't for what she had expected. The necessity for Gadoury to remove her art was deemed as a "miscommunication" between Gadoury, the building officials she received her permits from, and administration; the official apology she received was for this "miscommunication"--not for having to remove her art from the Wang Center. She reflects: "I would like an apology, not for miscommunication, but because they're completely dismissing 4 1/2 moths of my work."
In speaking to Gadoury, the issues of censorship, scholarship, misunderstanding and miscommunication, and art all became interestingly interwoven--and it is in this tangle that Gadoury believes speaks to larger issues across Stony Brook. "This is our scholarship" Gadoury emphasized again and again: "the underlying issue here is an ignorance on what is valid research" in a largely scientific university. She continues: "it's hard for people not in the humanities to understand that this is our scholarship, we do the same level of work and the same level of research...[at Stony Brook] all forms of expression and research need to be validated."
What Gadoury and others involved in Unbound would like to see come of this incident, then, is an influx of letters to President Kenny speaking out against not only what Gadoury considers censorship and injustice to her work but also toward what is legitimate forms of scholarship and research. She encourages us all to write Kenny with our views on how this sort of misunderstanding negatively affects both the individuals and the collective body of scholars of Stony Brook University, a flagship of the SUNY system.[iii]
[i] http://ws.cc.stonybrook.edu/sb/artsfest/index.shtml
[ii] Please see Gadoury's artist's statement and pictures of the instillation here: http://www.primaryism.com/unbound/julianne_goudry.html
[iii] President Kenny's contact address is: The Office of the President, 310 Administration Building, Stony Brook, New York 11794-0701 Telephone: (631) 632-6265 Fax: (631) 632-6621
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