Obama Center, Nayland Blake, Danielle Mckinney
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.
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
“Nothing stops me except the publishing industry,” quipped the novelist and AIDS historian, who cut her teeth as an East Village journalist writing for queer and feminist papers. | Lakshmi Rivera Amin
The New York-based painter and filmmaker speaks to Hyperallergic about finding the essence of things. | Valentina Di Liscia
“You have to be a person who champions other work,” they told Hyperallergic, “so that you build the context within which your work can be legible.” | Lisa Yin Zhang
A joint biography of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, a catalog on Martin Wong’s Chinatowns, Catherine Opie’s portraiture, queer nightlife through the ages, and more.
At her longtime studio in Tribeca, the Palestinian-American painter discussed her experimentation with color and how she “accidentally stepped into abstraction.” | Jennifer Samet
The author and memoirist spoke to Hyperallergic about curating the work of Cuban painter Rocío García, whose characters linger in the space where power and pleasure meet. | Lakshmi Rivera Amin
The new campus is an expression of the former US president’s civic ideals, and a reminder of how distant they now seem. | Lori Waxman
Each figure in her paintings luxuriates in the dreaminess of space belonging to her and her alone. | Channelle Chevelle Russell
He emphasizes the temporality of looking, as well as underscores that one’s experience of time is subjective. | John Yau
In Rome, an exhibition explores Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s relationship to his most powerful patron, Pope Urban VIII. | Anthony Majanlahti
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
