This week, censorship led to the cancellation of a touring exhibition by the non-profit art organisation Embracing Our Differences, which was set to be hosted at State College of Florida Manatee-Sarasota (SCF). The decision was made by Embracing Our Differences in response to requests by university officials to remove the words “diversity” and “inclusion” from the exhibition, along with several pieces deemed ‘offensive’ (one such piece depicted a pregnant woman asking a group of men, “Do We Not Have A Voice About Our Own Body?”). Rather than grant these requests, Embracing Our Differences decided to pull out altogether in order to remain authentic to its core values.
SCF requested these changes on the same day (31 Jan 2023) that Governor Ron DeSantis announced new legislation that restricted speech about critical race theory, and equity and inclusion efforts on university campuses. The SCF justified the censorship by explaining that the exhibition had already been the target of violent vandalism, and therefore may provoke further resentment along with carrying additional costs to ensure protection. PEN America – an organisation that advocates for freedom of expression – applauded Embracing Our Differences’ “integrity in the face of attempted censorship”. Free speech is often associated with right-wing political interests; however, this case highlights how it is, in fact, a non-partisan issue that many only come to appreciate when their own speech has been curtailed.
On an international level, art galleries have been rewriting certain narratives in response to the Russia-Ukraine war. Vartan Matiossian argues in Hyperallergic that the Met was wrong to reclassify Ivan Aivazosvky (1817-1900) as a Ukrainian artist. Aivazovsky was born in an area that was formerly part of the Crimean Khanate (1443-1783), then the Russian empire until 1917, and part of Russia until 1954. Matiossian argues that this relabelling is “terribly misguided” and part of “misplaced decolonization efforts” by the institution. At the same time, the Met renamed Russian Dancer (1899) by French impressionist, Edgar Degas, to “Dancer in Ukrainian Dress”. This follows an earlier change at the National Gallery in London, whereby Degas’ Russian Dancers (c.1899) was renamed to “Ukrainian Dancers” in Spring last year.
Public art galleries have long been part of state apparatuses to construct national identities. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas once argued that under monarchical systems of government, art was part of the “representative publicness” of the sovereign. Thus, displays of artworks, in some contexts, constituted tools to consolidate power. National museums emerged in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries as tools to selectively display the culture and consolidate the power of new nation-states. These collections were presented as evidence of shared pasts and unifying stories providing legitimacy for current political decisions and interests. This nationalist picture, when paired with Benedict Anderson’s theory of “Imagined Communities” – the idea that a nation is a socially-constructed community, imagined by those who constitute the group – can allow us to see how relabelling certain artworks can have more than just a trivial effect. In many ways, this editing of history is the explicit shaping of national identities and allegiances in real time as the geopolitical world shifts.