SBGradMag Stony Brook's Graduate Student Magazine

As the building, then dwindling, though persistent, storm of conversation, gossip, frustration, mixed with the misreported words of the recent article, "Art Exhibitions Pulled From Arts Festival; Students Call it ‘Censorship' Based on Aesthetics," in The Statesman continued to roll through personal emails, onto listservs, into conversations about the circumstances of not only morale but even a sense of viability of individuals and their scholarship on Stony Brook's beautifully landscaped but prosaically hierarchic campus, I sat with the Chair of the Art Department, Professor Anita Moskowitz, to ask basically four questions about the outcome of the art installation, "Unbound," and the separate event, "Who is Asia America."  Sponsored and co-sponsored, respectively, by the Art Department, these events featured the work of some of the University's most promising students of art. Both of which met with not only interference but imposed reconfiguration (that is to say, the removal of one installation piece and the restraint of a performance) because of liability issues presented by the President and her Office after the commencement of these events.

Since the letter that Professor Anita Moskowitz, Chair of the Art Department, wrote to President Kenny on April 28^th following the events that took place on April 16^th at "Unbound" and April 24^th at "Who is Asia America," on Friday, May 9^th, the day after the Town Hall meeting about the budget crisis, a meeting took place consisting of art faculty and administrators selected and agreed upon by both President Kenny and Professor Moskowitz, to discuss the problems with university procedures and establish a committee that grants permissions for art installations in certain sites on campus so that in the future art and artists will not be as endangered by the flaws of the system that can quickly become vicious.

"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 16^th 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.

So Castro resigned. Did not seem to resign himself to resignation, but seems be turning himself into a full time Man of Ideas. He conjures the Martían call as never before about the actions of words, words as actions.

“Deseo solo combatir como un soldado de las ideas. Seguiré escribiendo bajo el título "Reflexiones del compañero Fidel" . Será un arma más del arsenal con la cual se podrá contar. Tal vez mi voz se escuche. Seré cuidadoso.”