Here’s how UK could end the mural debate, stop a costly lawsuit and improve higher education
In this hellscape of 2020, things no longer converge so much as collide in a violent explosion. Just one example is the University of Kentucky, dealing with COVID-19 and managing to bigfoot itself into a raging national debate over racism and censorship with a 1930s mural that most people are sick of talking about but has culminated with a lawsuit from its most celebrated living graduate, Wendell Berry, that was splashed across the pages of the New York Times. (This is all happening just a few weeks before UK unleashes 30,000 undergraduates on Lexington’s rising COVID-19 rates, so in my head the whole scene off South Lime is starting to look like a Hieronymous Bosch painting.)
It’s also like a comedy of well-meaning errors. The fresco has become a plaster strip-tease artist with the number of times it’s been covered, uncovered, then covered again. President Eli Capilouto took the advice of a committee of faculty when he commissioned prize-winning artist Karyn Olivier to contextualize the fresco with work of her own. Not all students were satisfied, though, so then shortly after George Floyd’s death, Capilouto just up and announced that he would get rid of the mural altogether. This frankly kneejerk reaction was made without a word to Olivier, who got rightly angry that her work would now be invalidated. Berry, whose wife Tanya is a relation of mural artist Ann Rice O’Hanlon, decided to sue to stop the destruction of a fresco that’s painted into the wall and would therefore be very difficult to move.
Then last week, a group of Black faculty and students released a letter to Capilouto telling him that despite his heartfelt gestures on the mural and on yet another task force on improving UK for Black students, he’s managed to ignore their work, their advice and their resources, which now include the as-yet unfunded and multidisciplinary Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies. The Institute will house the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative, a project that will explore the histories and legacies of slavery on campus and in our community.
Got all that? But there’s a way to bring all these threads together. Take the money that would be used to move or destroy the fresco and use it fund the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies and the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative. Then house those programs at Memorial Hall, now closed to regular classes, complete with O’Hanlon’s mural, Olivier’s project and new programming devoted to race and reconciliation.
This merely reworks an idea that UK faculty and staff already had. Several task forces ago, a committee with UK Art Museum Director Stuart Horodner and faculty suggested that Memorial Hall be turned into a truly commemorative space dedicated to UK’s problematic issues with race. The committee continued to discuss a reimagination of the building, until Capilouto’s surprise announcement.
As Horodner said last September, Memorial Hall could be a perfect space for a mix of academic and artistic programming for students, such as lectures, film screenings, performances, panel discussions and concerts. “Imagine a talk about WPA era murals in America one month, a symposium on Toni Morrison another, and so on,” he said. “The possibilities are endless.”
They are. Unlike the straight propaganda of Confederate statues, O’Hanlon’s mural can be endlessly analyzed and debated, separate and in concert with Olivier’s piece. But students should also have the choice to avoid it if they choose. One of the many ironies of a university choosing to remove and probably destroy this piece of art, while nullifying Olivier’s, is that as part of his plan for racial justice, Capilouto implemented a new program to add diverse public art around campus.
UK history professor Anastasia Curwood served on the committee to re-imagine Memorial Hall and is one of the authors of the letter to Capilouto about racial progress, as well as an editorial. She likes the idea of putting the new Commonwealth Institute there.
“It would show a real investment from the central administration and it would create an autonomous space for Black studies,” she said.
As for the mural, she agrees with Berry that O’Hanlon showed a certain subversiveness to put Black people in the front and center of the mural as a clear depiction of who built this society.
“We want the full history of black history in this state to be represented and that mural is a piece of it,” Curwood said. “At this point, we don’t want to erase the conversations that we’ve already had on campus, and that Karyn Olivier began with her art work. One is incomplete without the other.”
University officials said they are open to more dialogue. “The university is creating a process — which hundreds of community members have volunteered to join — to have just these kinds of challenging conversations around these kinds of creative ideas,” said spokesman Jay Blanton.”
Dialogue and process, though, have tanked many an idea before. The UK Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies at Memorial Hall could end a costly lawsuit, take Black studies out of the shadows and put it squarely in the center of campus, and erase accusations of censorship at an institution of higher learning. I understand Capilouto’s desire to act swiftly and dramatically in the face of a new and energized Black Lives Matter movement. This idea is less dramatic and would cost more than simply destroying a piece of art, but it could have a much more momentous effect in moving UK forward.
This story was originally published July 27, 2020 at 11:47 AM.
