With a controversial art exhibit on campus set to close Friday, the backlash against it has shifted away from the photos of the nude African women it features, and is instead being directed at the Binghamton University administrators who run and finance the BU Art Museum.
Spelman College curators assembled “Engaging the Camera: African women, portraits and the photographs of Hector Acebes” to create dialogue about the representation of African women in the context of colonialism. But here at BU controversy came along with that conversation — and the exhibit has become a lightning rod for criticism against University administrators from student activists, who say their requests for inclusion in decision-making fall on deaf ears.
This came as a surprise to the Spelman curators, Drs. Isolde Brielmaier and Andrea Barnwell, who spoke at a “conversation” forum Thursday night in the Mandela Room.
“I had painted a picture of more animosity directed at the curators,” Barnwell said of her expectations for the forum. “But there was more animosity towards the administration.”
Included under activists’ crosshairs is the BU gallery’s director, Dr. Lynn Gamwell. At another forum Wednesday night, students had implored Gamwell to include one of their own representatives in the Thursday event.
They were rebuffed, and so the next day a dozen of protesters quietly hoisted signs with slogans like, “How can you silence those you serve?” They also used the forum’s question-and-answer period to voice their concern that little effort seemed to be made to get student feedback on the exhibit.
Andrew Epstein, a sophomore history major, pushed for a museum board of directors that would include students.
“You have critically minded students here who could greatly benefit from this kind of debate,” he said.
Galleries at some colleges and universities are run by more than one person, often a board of directors. At BU, though, Gamwell both directs and curates the museum.
A University spokeswoman did not know of any plans the administration had to change the way the museum is run.
Activists also asked Gamwell how much the exhibit cost BU. She declined to answer. An academic vice president for strategic and fiscal planning was out of town this week and unable to answer budgetary questions.
‘A MUCH DEEPER PROBLEM’
The controversy began when the exhibit, a collection of photos taken by Acebes on a trip through Africa during the 1940s and ’50s, opened Sept. 8. Some students, and faculty in BU’s Africana Studies department, said the photos exploited the African women it portrayed, and demanded it be shut down. (For the full story, check out www.bupipedream.com.)
Part of the problem seems to stem from the museum having not backed up the exhibition with educational components.
Barnwell, the Spelman curator, said in an interview that she was surprised that the art museum had not planned more events around the exhibit. Spelman’s museum, she said, had a 16-member board of directors that included three students. And the exhibit was accompanied by several public programs and lectures, including professors teaching classes in the museum or otherwise working the exhibit into their curricula.
“I’m always in favor of inclusion from the outset,” she said, but she added that she believed there would be other “means” here for students to learn from and react to the photographs.
But the anger seems to have migrated. One activist, Mari Morales-Williams, the African Student Organization’s educational coordinator, said Wednesday night that, although she sensed a “flaw” in the Acebes exhibit, “this campus has yet to train us how to look at an exhibit like that and assess what it’s about,” she said.
The last speaker at Wednesday’s forum, Dr. Tiffany Patterson of Hamilton College, urged students to consider the museum as “symptomatic of a much deeper problem.”
But BU Provost Mary Ann Swain seemed satisfied with what had come to pass.
“I believe what happened here tonight is exactly what needs to happen on a university campus,” she said Thursday night.