In leaked transcripts of meetings held by leaders of the University of North Texas art school, Dean Karen Hutzel wouldn’t tell faculty or staff who ordered an exhibit closed and removed from a campus gallery. She described the decision as an “institutional directive” in a meeting with faculty, and told college staffers that she was expecting “a media storm.”
Administrators might survive public excoriation, she said. Elected representatives, however, can more readily slash programs, impugn professors and hold state funding over college executives’ heads.
Hutzel discussed administrators’ widespread fears over funding loss, and how those concerns are compounded by leadership purges at the University of Texas and Texas A&M University after ideological clashes with Texas Republicans, who have spent the last two legislative sessions fighting what they say is leftist bias and indoctrination in public education.
Texas public universities have seen curriculums forcibly overhauled by lawmakers, and entire programs have been eliminated because they don’t align with the conservative values of Republican lawmakers in the state house or in Washington.
The UNT College of Visual Arts and Design has been in headlines across the country since it shuttered an exhibit last week by globally known street artist Victor Quiñonez, known broadly by the graffiti tag he developed in east Dallas, Marka27.
The graduate of Dallas’ renowned Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts had an exhibit, “Ni de Aquí Ni de Allá,” open Feb. 3 in the CVAD Gallery. The exhibit explores Quiñonez’s identity as a bicultural and bilingual American. Born in Juarez, Mexico, Quiñonez grew up in east Dallas.
His exhibit, whose title translates to “neither from here, nor from there” included work from his “ICE Scream” series. The work uses a popular Mexican treat, the paleta, to honor his heritage while it considers incarceration and deportation.
He crafted huge, melting paletas out of resin that encase handcuffs and guns. There are official-looking seals that read: U.S. Department of Stolen Land Security, and the phrase U.S. Inhumane and Cruelty Enforcement. Smaller resin paletas encase scenes of Mexican-American life and immigrants, and the words “U.S. Inhumane and Cruelty Enforcement” on the popsicle sticks.
Faculty, students and alumni quickly denounced the removal as censorship, and especially bristled that a Hispanic-serving institution silenced a Mexican-American artist. CVAD students staged a sit-in at the Board of Regents meeting Thursday and warned the regents that the censorship of Quiñonez’s show would hurt confidence in CVAD programming and hurt recruitment.
The Denton Record-Chronicle obtained transcripts of Hutzel’s Feb. 10 meeting with staff at CVAD, and from a Feb. 11 meeting with faculty. The newspaper confirmed with several CVAD faculty members, independently, that CVAD had virtual meetings on Feb. 10 and 11.
In Hutzel’s meeting with faculty, she requested the recording be turned off, and a staff member confirmed that the recording had stopped. In the transcripts, only Dean Hutzel was named. Names mentioned by faculty, department leaders, Hutzel and staff were redacted in the transcripts obtained by the Record-Chronicle.
Hutzel’s message to faculty and staff was both mysterious and clear: The directive didn’t come from CVAD leadership; she couldn’t confirm whether a visitor or viewer lodged any formal complaint about the show, or if any university official saw the exhibit when it opened; and it was Quiñonez’s ICE-related art that led to the exhibit’s removal.
She cautioned faculty and staff from making any public statements and to be careful when talking to students, lest they be recorded and have their remarks posted online. Hutzel said she expected the university’s brand strategy and communications team to issue an approved statement that faculty and staff could use, but that she didn’t plan to respond to media inquiries.
As of Friday morning, it doesn’t appear that the statement has been released, and university officials have only publicly confirmed that the exhibit was closed, a loan agreement with Boston University was terminated, and that the art would be returned.
And perhaps the most ominous warning? Art faculty shouldn’t expect the university’s legal counsel to protect them if they become a target of political ire.
“So, would UNT legal not represent faculty who were basically, like, they have freedom of speech under the Constitution,” a CVAD department official asked. “Would [that] guarantee legal represent a faculty member ... ?”
“They never would have, they never would have,” Hutzel said. “No, it would never have been the case. ... I don’t believe the university is going to deploy their legal counsel to protect an individual faculty member. I don’t think we’ve seen that elsewhere, either. Again, I mean, I’m just being honest. It’s not an absolute answer, but that’s how I understand it. And I just want to be honest in what I understand.”
Hutzel told faculty that university policies “are violated constantly” in the current environment, and that professors and staff shouldn’t rely on policies to be set in stone.
“For UNT, the stakes are high in that, if you’re paying attention to the news, you may have seen what’s happened at, for instance, Texas A&M, and UT in Austin, and the leadership shifts that have happened there,” she said. “And the new presidential leaders that have come into those institutions, and the programs that are now coming out of them are being canceled by those institutions. ... UNT is very vulnerable to a similar situation.”
Hutzel said she has empathy for UNT leaders and seeks to balance that with advocacy for CVAD.
“My ultimate goal is to minimize harm here and to protect CVAD so that we can continue to teach and mentor and create art,” she told faculty. “Even now, when it feels like the conditions are getting more and more constrained. But our ability to preserve our ability to educate students is, for me, not meaning that we’re retreating from our values, but that we’re thinking longer term and how we sustain ourselves.”
The faculty meeting also revealed deep and persistent fears over having students record professors and teaching fellows, and then post recordings online to damage or end their careers. Those fears aren’t unfounded. A Texas A&M professor was fired last September after a student recorded a class discussion about gender identity in children’s literature.
“So, for instance, if you are teaching screen printing, and because the college originally kind of suggested instructors can talk about students about censorship, like, within their classes and have these powerful small group conversations, but if a student records a faculty member discussing or critiquing censorship in a class that does not specifically relate to that, that is another point of vulnerability,” a department chair said, according to the transcript. “And I just wanted to point that out. ... I’m worried about all of us. I’m worried about you. I’m worried about our students, and that’s just something to keep in mind as we have these conversations that like, just remember, you know, you can be recorded, and I hate to spread paranoia, but that is just something that we need to be aware of.”
Hutzel spoke positively about Quiñonez’s art with staff members who hadn’t seen the show before it was closed.
“It was a beautiful exhibit,” Hutzel said. “It represented the artist’s experiences as a Mexican American in this country.”
Hutzel explained that the college made an agreement with Boston University to host the exhibit “at least a year ago,” which is also around the time Texas lawmakers who represent Denton County said they received a high number of complaints about an exhibit at the UNT Union Art Gallery by two Muslim female students. All four representatives demanded that the university close the exhibit because it was antisemitic. The exhibit closed on its scheduled date.
CVAD doesn’t operate or manage the student union gallery.
Hutzel herself didn’t appear to object to the exhibit. She told staff members that Quiñonez’s political pieces were the reason the gallery windows were covered with paper and the art removed.
“... Some of the pieces included what’s deemed as anti-ICE messaging,” she said. “And so ... that topic itself has entered a different space, and so it was that aspect of it that the university leadership became very concerned about ... the political and public response [and] scrutiny across the spectrum.”
One CVAD staff member asked what will happen when students plan to include political expression in solo or group shows.
“Another good question, and it’s one that I’ll be navigating as well [in] some meetings this week,” she said. “I, too, am questioning and concerned with what work we show and if there is a change to that.”
Faculty suggested renting spaces off campus, or partnering with spaces in the community that might host exhibits off campus for Master of Fine Arts candidates. The larger concern was that censorship could eventually reach students.
“If they’re censoring work at a professional level in our home gallery, then faculty and students are going to be next,” a faculty member said. “I don’t want to be alarmist, but I also think it is a lot, you know what I mean? And they’re paying tuition to come here to make work with us, and make the work that they want to make. So, I feel like it’s kind of my responsibility to be honest with them as much as I can. You know what I mean? That’s just my perspective.”
Faculty pressed college leadership on how the closure would affect students who make and show art on campus, asking, “Is it on us to talk to our adjuncts and [teaching fellows]?”
“I don’t know what to tell them,” a department chair said. “And I don’t know what you should tell them. I don’t think anyone has any answers. Like ... maybe if they have questions and come to you, I don’t know that I would recommend setting a meeting to talk about this because, honestly, I don’t know what should be said.”
Others said the removal of the Quiñonez exhibit could hurt recruitment of graduate students, who shoulder instruction for many CVAD programs. And removing the work of a professional artist could hurt faculty recruitment. Hutzel mentioned communicating with a student from California who enrolled in CVAD because she was impressed by faculty art.
“There are going to be hits and implications,” Hutzel said. “And yet, you all are still highly respected as artists in your own right. And that recruits students. It’s because of you all individually. And what you’re doing is what grad students come here for. But it’s going to impact us for a little bit.”
LUCINDA BREEDING-GONZALES can be reached at 940-566-6877 and cbreeding@dentonrc.com.
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