Weekly Newsletter
The “Obamalith” is unveiled while the School of the Art Institute of Chicago wages war against its students’ imagination.
In the award for the most literal interpretation of authoritarian thought control this week, the winner is the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
The institution placed Savneet Talwar, the director of its graduate art therapy program, on leave for asking students to create a mock therapeutic treatment plan for a queer Arab woman who sympathized with pro-Palestinian protests and feared retaliation under the Trump administration.
Provost Martin Berger found this exercise in empathy unacceptable, enacting his own retaliation against the professor. Ironically, Berger is a scholar who has authored several publications on the civil rights movement.
This incident, as Editor-at-Large Hrag Vartanian writes, is “a prime example of this decay that authoritarianism can insert into a democratic society, one that we have to fight at every turn.” The stakes are clear: students have already been arrested for protesting and writing articles, and now an institution is targeting their very imagination.
Please read Hrag’s opinion piece and enjoy the other stories featured below. Have a great weekend.
—Hakim Bishara, editor-in-chief
They Want to Control Our Imagination
When oppression works its way into society, it does so by limiting our imagination first, stopping us from finding our way out of the tyranny of control by forcing us to curb what is possible, what we may need and not yet know.
The recent story coming out of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) that Savneet Talwar, the director of its graduate art therapy program, was placed on leave after she asked students to “create a mock therapeutic treatment plan for a queer Arab woman who sympathized with pro-Palestinian protests and feared retaliation under the Trump administration” is a prime example of this decay that authoritarianism can insert into a democratic society, one that we have to fight at every turn. | Hrag Vartanian
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News
- The School of the Art Institute of Chicago has placed the director of its graduate art therapy program, Savneet Talwar, on leave after she assigned students a case study analyzing a hypothetical client who was “deeply affected by the violence against Palestinian civilians.”
- David Hockney, long regarded as one of Britain’s greatest contemporary painters, has died at his home in London at age 88.
- Italian labor unions, cultural workers’ associations, and grassroots collectives have joined the call for a national strike across the country’s arts and culture sector on Friday, June 12 to demand better working conditions and show solidarity with Palestine.
- The New School in Manhattan has laid off 19 full-time faculty and 68 staff members as it confronts a cumulative $160 million structural budget deficit attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic and declining student enrollment.
- Phoenix Art Museum will soon showcase 100 works by Native American artists tracing creative resilience over the course of a century following its largest-ever gift of Native American art.
- Renderings of the winning Penn Station redesign prominently feature Trump’s name, raising questions and concerns.
- The prediction market platform Kalshi has ventured into the rarefied space where fine art and big money meet, launching a section dedicated to art markets.
- A self-portrait by the painter Clarence Heyward on display at the Houston Museum of African American Culture was intentionally defaced last month by visitors, the Texas institution said this week.
- The New Museum will hold the largest-ever survey exhibition of works by filmmaker and multimedia artist Arthur Jafa this September, titled I Am Tony in honor of the late jazz drummer Tony Williams.
- A child punctured a René Magritte painting at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem using a pinecone from its garden.
Pride Month
Interviews
Beer With a Painter: Samia Halaby
At her longtime studio in Tribeca, the Palestinian-American painter discussed her experimentation with color and how she “accidentally stepped into abstraction.” | Jennifer Samet
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From Our Critics
Features
My Queasy, Forest-Scented Stroll Through LA’s New AI Art Museum
I stepped onto the escalator and descended into a cavernous mirrored space, as dazzling light projections covering the walls, floor, and ceiling morphed into hard-edged cyber-graphics, then branching mycological networks, then color-saturated flowers and trees. A thunderous soundtrack swelled from ambient minimalism to cinematic triumph, peppered with bird chirps and the howls of monkeys. The scent of a damp forest floor wafted through the air, dispersed by a device I wore around my neck. The walls seemed to shift around me, and my heart began racing.
It was exhilarating. It was mesmerizing. I felt like I was going to be sick. | Matt Stromberg
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- Required Reading: Jean Shin’s memorial to the trees of Greenwood Cemetery, the 250th anniversary nobody wants, Pride bar-hopping, and more.
- A View From the Easel: This week, Stacy Bogdonoff follows artists’ exhibitions around New York City and yearns for more s p a c e.
- Art Movements: Dr. Steven Nelson named Director of Sam Gilliam Fondation, Aperture HQ’s fall opening date, and, uh, the New Museum partners with Penske Media?
- In Memoriam: This week, we honor Valentine Willie, champion of Southeast Asian art, Marjane Satrapi, the giant behind “Persepolis,” John Claridge, a photographer dedicated to London’s East End, and others.
- Opportunities: Residencies, fellowships, grants, and open calls from the VH Award, Bennett Prize, and more in our June list of opportunities for artists, writers, and art workers.
