Censorship blows
May 4th, 2008 by Nicole
“Polar Bears in Space” by Julianne Gadoury
“Polar Bears in Space, uses the metaphor of the polar bear to talk about the larger issues behind global warming. We often fail to fully understand and gain knowledge about and push to the back of our minds many issues that affect us socially and on the global level.”
Julianne Gadoury’s Artist’s Statement
A few weeks back one of my friends who graduated with me from the Marist Art program wrote a disturbing email blast about how her work at SUNY Stony Brook was being censored by the administration. Julianne Gadoury is studying for her MFA and had created a series of works using the polar bear as a metaphor for global warming. One part of her installation was a wire sculpture that was to be suspended above the pool in Charles B. Wang Center on campus. After receiving the go-ahead from building supervisors and maintenance staff everything was looking good. On the opening day of UNBOUND, the President Shirley Strum Kenny ordered the sculpture to be removed citing that it didn’t fit her aesthetic view of the building and therefore censored the artwork.
I think it’s a slap in the face to the educational art community and sets a horrible standard for future artists. College can be a breeding ground for intellectual ideas and expression via alternative mediums and it shouldn’t be a place where you have to seek approval on your aesthetic choices. On the flip side, I think it’s great that this controversy has brought Julianne’s work into focus that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. Her idea of making the polar bear transparent through the use of wires symbolized our ease in which we see through our global responsibilities. Likewise, the censorship of this piece says even more about how we don’t want to acknowledge our oversights, especially when they don’t fit in with our current view of the world.
For more information on this issue and to see more photos of the installation and the rest of Julianne’s work, see the following resources:
- Julianne Gadoury’s Polar Bears in Space - artist statement and photos of installation
- Stony Brook University Censors Students During Shirley Strum Kenny’s Arts Festival - NewsLI.com (April 20, 2008)
- My letter to President of SUNY Stony Brook, re: art removed - Jaleen Grove, Ph.D 1, Art History and Criticism
