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University Removes Art Installation With Confederate Imagery After Students Call it Racist

University Removes Art Installation With Confederate Imagery After Students Call it Racist

“It was taken down Wednesday, about 48 hours after it opened.”

The artists thought they were going to inspire dialogue and intellectual discussion. How wrong they were.

The Roanoke Times reports:

After students call it racist, Mary Baldwin University removes Richmond artists’ Confederate-themed exhibit

Administrators at Mary Baldwin University last week removed an exhibit created by two Richmond artists after students called the installation racist because it featured images of Confederate monuments, according to a statement from the private liberal arts university in Staunton.

The exhibit, titled “Relevant/Scrap,” included images of statues from Richmond’s Monument Avenue that the artists said were intended to evoke the “complexity” of the debate over Confederate monuments. It was taken down Wednesday, about 48 hours after it opened.

In a letter to a Mary Baldwin dean, the artists, Jere Williams and Pam Sutherland, said their work had been misinterpreted, but they agreed that it should be removed from the university’s Hunt Gallery.

“We assure you that we are neither in agreement with the ideology of the Lost Cause nor racist (as many of the students called us),” the artists wrote to College of Arts and Sciences Dean Martha Walker.

“Our intention with this work is to use art making processes to create an aesthetic experience of the problematic challenge of reimagining the spaces where the monuments to the confederacy currently reside in Richmond.”

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