Activists Want a San Francisco High School Mural Removed, Saying Its Impact Today Should Overshadow the Artist’s Intentions

One of the objectionable panels depicts a dead Native American. Dick Evans, CC BY

By Amna Khalid, Associate Professor of History, Carleton College; Jeffrey Aaron Synder, Associate Professor of Educational Studies, Carleton College. First published on The Conversation.

For nearly a century, a massive mural by painter Victor Arnautoff titled “The Life of Washington” has lined the hallways of San Francisco’s George Washington High School.

It may not be there much longer.

The mural “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, manifest destiny, white supremacy [and] oppression.” So said Washington High School’s Reflection and Action Group, an ad-hoc committee formed late last year and made up of Native Americans from the community, students, school employees, local artists and historians.

It identified two panels as especially offensive. One shows Washington pointing westward next to the body of a dead Native American. The other depicts slaves working in the fields of Mount Vernon.

Because the work “traumatizes students and community members,” the group concluded that “the impact of this mural is greater than its intent ever was.” They are campaigning for its removal.

The idea that impact matters more than intention has informed debates about everything from microaggressions to cultural appropriation.

But when it comes to art, should impact matter more than intention?

As historians committed to preserving our cultural heritage – and as citizens invested in the power of art to engage the public – we see the growing chorus of voices favoring impact over intention as a dangerous trend, one that makes art more vulnerable to rejection, censorship or even destruction.

A radical work for its time

For most members of the Washington High School’s Reflection and Action Group, the only message “The Life of Washington” sends is one of crushing, dehumanizing oppression.

What happens, though, when we examine the mural in the context of the life and times of the artist?

Painter Victor Arnautoff was born in 1896 in a small village in present-day Ukraine. He emigrated to San Francisco in 1925, where he joined a leftist art collective. During the Great Depression he was a supporter of workers’ strikes and formally joined the Communist Party in 1937. He was even hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956 for drawing a “Communist Conspiracy” cartoon that caricatured then-Vice President Nixon.

In “The Life of Washington,” Arnautoff decided to place Native Americans, African Americans and working-class revolutionaries front and center in the four largest panels, relegating Washington to the margins.

The slaves toiling in the Mount Vernon fields highlight a central paradox of America’s history: The nation was founded by men who championed liberty, freedom and equality, and yet owned slaves.

Then there’s the striking image of the fallen Native American. The mural’s detractors say that it dismisses the humanity of indigenous peoples. But why must it necessarily be read as dehumanizing to Native Americans? Could it not instead be seen as throwing into sharp relief the inhumanity of the founding fathers?

According to Arnautoff’s biographer, Robert W. Cherny, the image challenged the fallacy that “westward expansion had been into largely vacant territory waiting for white pioneers to develop its full potential.”

That the mural appears in a school is particularly important in this regard. For decades, the country’s educational institutions perpetuated national myths about American exceptionalism and American history as one long glorious march of forward progress. Up until the 1960s, the standard U.S. history curriculum ignored the country’s dark and terrifying history of racial violence, including enslavement and the slaughter of indigenous peoples. So drawing attention to the horrors inflicted on Native Americans and African Americans would have been a radical statement in 1930s America.

Many of those in favor of scrapping the murals seem to believe that merely depicting past atrocities justifies them. In fact, the Action and Reflection Group concluded that the mural contravened the San Francisco Unified School District’s commitment to “social justice.”

Quite to the contrary. In our view, the “Life of Washington” provides an invaluable opportunity for students to engage in a serious and sustained way with social justice issues. There’s a strong case to be made that Arnautoff is exposing – rather than celebrating – slavery and genocide. Moreover, those arguing for the mural’s removal are overlooking the fact that African Americans are not only portrayed as picking cotton and that Native Americans are not only depicted as victims of genocide. Rather Arnautoff is insisting that African Americans and indigeneous peoples were key historical actors in the making of the United States.

Only the latest controversy

The controversy over this mural is sadly not an isolated exception.

Over the past several years, there have been dozens of cases where plays, poems, books, prints, paintings, sculptures, installations and other creative works have been shut down, canceled, removed or otherwise censored based on snap judgments, social media swarms, ideologically motivated reasoning and obtuse interpretations of the art in question.

In all of these cases, there has been little to no regard for the aspirations, aims and ambitions of the artists themselves. Their intentions have been treated along a spectrum that runs from indifference to contempt.

To be clear, we are not saying that an artist’s intent is all that matters. How people interpret and respond to a work of art is inseparable from its raison d'etre.

But disregarding the intentions of artists would place every significant creative work with a whiff of controversy in jeopardy because of its “problematic” or “offensive” content. In a world where intentionality and context are irrelevant, satire and irony would not only be incomprehensible but forbidden.

Artist Kara Walker’s searing paper cuts depicting the horrific violence of slavery in the United States? Nothing more than a celebration of the white domination of black bodies. The pungent, explosive litany of racial slurs in Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing”? Just a vicious rehearsal of profoundly damaging ethnic stereotypes. Keegan-Michael Key’s brilliant sketch character Luther who serves as Obama’s “anger translator”? Simply a racist caricature of the “angry black man.”

What else becomes vulnerable to censorship?

Calls to censor “offensive” art by committees, petitions or the Twitterverse are especially dangerous. For every case of “righteous” censorship that removes works of art that are allegedly racist, sexist, homophobic and so on, there will be scores more censored on the grounds that they are anti-American or offensive to Christians.

As the American Library Association reports, the most frequently challenged and banned books are those that contain “diverse content” and include characters of color or address themes of sexuality, racism, religion, disability and mental illness.

Four out of the top 11 most challenged or banned books in 2018 were objected to on the basis of their LGBT content. “Two Boys Kissing” – a 2013 novel centered around the lives of seven gay teenagers – has made the American Library Association list for several years running, even though The Guardian described it as a “complex,” “intricate” novel “so extremely powerful [it] leaves you thinking long, long after you have finished reading it.”

Thinking long and hard, alas, is in short supply for members of the “we are not interested in the artist’s intentions” when the art offends us brigade. Ripping art from its context degrades our critical faculties and imprisons us in the present. It smacks of a literal-minded authoritarianism that assumes and indeed insists that a creative work can and must only be read in one way.

When people refuse to see the contradictions, tensions and ambiguities of art, it becomes disposable. Arnautoff’s detractors bring to mind Oscar Wilde’s warning that any time a spectator of art tries to “exercise authority over it and the artist,” he “becomes the avowed enemy of Art and of himself.”

It took Arnautoff almost a year to complete the mural, painstaking labor that could be erased with a single coat of paint. Not only would this outcome whitewash history, it would also deal a severe blow to our own capacity for creativity and critical thought.

Why Age Gives West African Women More Autonomy and Power

Image via US Aid Leadership, Management & Governance Project

By Marijke Verpoorten, Associate Professor, University of Antwerp, and Sahawal Alidou, PhD candidate and teaching assistant, University of Antwerp. First published on The Conversation.

Several studies, covering about 58 countries across the world, found that as women get older they are more able to make decisions independently of men. But scholars have struggled to pin down explanations for this age dividend – why are women given more independence the older they get? We wanted to know what the reasons may be.

In a recent study, we looked at women’s autonomy across age in Nigeria, Togo, Ghana and Benin. These four West African countries are home to ethnic groups that practice “voodoo”, a religion that spread with the expansion of the Dahomey kingdom in the 17th century.

In these countries women are not equal to men. They sometimes won’t be able to make decisions about their own health – like negotiating safe sex – or on how household incomes could be used.

In our sample of 21,000 women aged 15 to 49, we found that autonomy in household decision-making increases with age. This was especially true for women who belonged to the four “voodoo-ethnicities”: Fon, Ewe, Adja and Yoruba. We also found that women had even more power if they are menopaused.

Our findings suggest that both age and magico-religious beliefs have a huge role to play in a woman’s independence. Menopaused women from “voodoo-ethnicities” are much more independent to make decisions on how they spend their own earnings, care for their own health, visit family or relatives and what major household purchases need to be made.

These insights are important for female empowerment strategies. To be effective, policies must identify potential agents of change who can, for instance, influence decisions that improve children’s schooling and nutrition or abolish female genital cutting. Despite their apparent agency, elderly women in West Africa have largely been overlooked.

West African queens of Dahomey, now Benin. These fierce fighters were also called the Dahomey Amazons. This image is likely taken 1900-1912. Photo: Francois-Edmond Fortier.

Voodoo and Menopause

So, why do women gain more independence the older they get, and especially if they are of voodoo-ethnicities and menopaused?

We analysed data on 21,000 women and their ability to make various decisions. We found that women’s autonomy was related to menstrual bleeding, particularly for voodoo-ethnicities. This was further explored in Benin, the birth place of Voodoo, where we conducted interviews with voodoo priests and menopaused women.

As one woman said:

[Women in menopause] are equipped with supernatural powers. Only she can talk to the ancestors and request their help, assistance and protection. And they respond to her worship and requests, not everyone can do that.

In the interviews we gathered that voodoo adherents worship collective deities (related to the sea, the earth, or thunder) and family deities: ancestors that turn into spirits after death.

The interactions with the family deities are led by a menopaused woman, referred to as the “Tassinon”. Only she can transmit the family members’ prayers and requests to the ancestors and consult the oracle to see if the spirits have accepted the offering and sacrifices.

These alleged powers, in their turn, increase the bargaining power of elderly women in their communities and households.

In situations where the supernatural power of menopaused women has faded, the cultural norm derived from it – increased awe for elderly women – persists.

Our analysis shows that the “Tassinon effect” is sizeable. We created an autonomy index – which looked at a combination of different situations where decisions had to be made and who made them – to measure this and found that it increased their ability to make decisions by about 10%.

As one woman said:

My opinion matters now in all important decisions or issues in the family and in my community. It was not the case before my designation as tassinon. I could not even attend or talk in certain audiences.

Our research provides support for the argument put forward in the African feminist literature, that seniority trumps gender in an African context.

Nigerian women callling for gender equality on International Women’s Day 2017.

It also adds to the evidence that voodoo continues to play a role in West-Africa. Adherence to voodoo has been proven to affect the governance of natural resources. For instance fishermen who adhere to voodoo are more likely to respect rules related to prohibited fishing gear. It also affects the uptake of preventive health care; for instance because mothers who adhere to voodoo will rely on traditional healers, they may not immunise their children. Now we know that voodoo also affects the level of independence women have in some communities.

The Way Ahead

A better understanding of cultural attitudes towards elderly African women will become more important for policymakers in the future. As fertility declines and life expectancy increases, elderly women will increase in numbers, both in absolute and relative terms. They could play an important role as agents of change in supporting both child care and female empowerment projects.

For instance in Benin the respect for elderly women is already relied upon in interventions targeting children’s health and nutrition, and in the abolishment of female genital cutting. This could be reinforced and extended to other sectors and to other countries.

Heji Shin's Kanye West's Kunsthalle Zurich Gallery Show: "I Knew People Would Hate This Exhibition"

Artist Heji Shin is no stranger to controversy, writes Tom Waite for Dazed.

“I knew people would hate this exhibition,” the artist says.

Shin is currently showing some of her newest works at the Kunsthalle Zurich gallery, with an exhibition featuring nine larger-than-life injet portraits of Kanye West. The two separate prints are pasted together and printed directly onto the gallery’s walls.

Why do people hate the exhibition, according to Shin? “This desire to have art to meet their moral and political standards has always existed. Today, more than ever, art is considered as the ultimate validation.”

The artist’s Kanye portraits express a rebellion to political correctness sweeping the art world.

After meeting Kanye in Chicago, she joined him in rural Uganda, with a generally detached attitude about the rapper’s comments about slavery, his idolizing of Donald Trump or his often incoherent tweets. The actual images were shot in 10 minutes in LA.

Shin’s disinterest in Kanye’s political attitudes changed quickly when I saw people getting really mad. I was interested in how the media portrayed him all of the sudden, “when he expressed his opinion.”

“Is that art?” one commenter on the Kunsthalle Zurich Instagram writes, while another exclaims: “We love it! Kanye is bigger than God!!!”

A scholarly tweet: “His work may be far beyond the scope of my art history and theory training I received while in school. As far as I can tell the purpose of this work is to simply elicit the feelings of contempt for every party involved in this work.” is followed by “Fuck this garbage.”

Kanye made Shin her own MAGA-inspired New York Yankees cap with ‘make New York gay again’ on the brim. Even that act crazed the digital culture and they attacked her. artNet writes: She says the hat is about making a stand against politically correct culture. “My work wouldn’t be possible if I restricted myself in these terms,” she says. “I don’t even understand how somebody can possibly think this is about gay rights. What has Trump got to do with gay rights?” (Hmmm . . . actually Trump has quite a lot to do with gay rights, and his vice president has even more to do with it!”

“He-Ji Shin raises the question of portraiture today, and therefore addresses the difficult business of intimacy and exposure as they are undergoing a radical reevaluation in the context of social media,” says the institution’s director and curator, Daniel Baumann.  artNet sums up the point of the Kanye West images this way:

Shin and West seem to be a good match, both willing to stir the pot and and unafraid to annoy their audiences. It all begs the question: is the art world as tolerant of taboo as it imagines itself to be?

German-Korean photographer Heji Shins solo exhibition runs through February 2, 2019.