When I decided to write about the School of the Art Institute’s (SAIC) student show, School as a Function of Empire, shown at the school’s SITE Gallery late last year and organized by the anonymous collective Curators Under Censorship (CUC), I did so without understanding the full extent of the culture of fear and uncertainty SAIC had sown for the students, faculty, and alumni of CUC. In my conversations with CUC members, many of whom requested to be off the record, I was struck by the sheer amount of fear and exhaustion they expressed. 

While such anecdotes might not mean much to some readers, especially as I do not wish to quote those intimately involved with the show’s making out of respect for their privacy, I can state that the questions I asked of SAIC’s administration about the show were met with aggressive stonewalling. My interactions with the administration reminded me that SAIC is not a haven for artists; it’s a multi-million dollar corporate machine with corporate interests.

Why then am I writing this now, after the show’s contentious life in SITE, after the crux of the administration’s response, and long after my own interactions with SAIC representatives ended?

The artists involved in the show made a space in which they tried their damnedest to stand up for what they believed against increasingly tight institutional control. This freedom of making should not end at the university’s doors. This is especially important for SAIC, a university that as of September 4th, 2024, in their student handbook states, “Individual expression is critical to our work at SAIC. We prize academic freedom, and instructors should encourage free discussion, inquiry, and expression.” Isn’t this freedom the beating heart of art? Isn’t it this freedom that allows artists to be artists? 

I firmly believe in the importance of a record—the type of writing that solidifies, that reifies what happened, that concretizes events, and that reveals motivations. To write about School as a Function of Empire, we first need to understand the conditions that catalyzed the show’s existence.

General Dynamics (GD), the fifth largest military contractor in the world as of 2022, creates bombs like the BLU-113, BLU-109, MK- 82, and MK- 84, all of which have been used by the Israeli Air Force throughout the last decade in IAF attacks on Gaza. GD’s weapons systems, which are necessary to power the Israeli Defense Force’s combat vehicles and IAF warplanes, have also been utilized in IDF and IAF ground and air attacks on Gaza over this same time period, according to the Investigate Project of the American Friends Service Committee. 

These weapons have not only been instrumental in violently enforcing the Israeli policy and legacy of “Hafrada”, a Hebrew term which can be translated to both “separation” and “segregation”—which according to the Foreign Policy Journal “has its origins in the military regime period (48-66) when Israel imposed a formal military administration on the majority of its Arab citizenry, putting in place a repressive apparatus of ethnic and economic segregation, land appropriation, and restrictions on movement and political activity”—but have also made possible Israel’s repeated violations of international law, violations which have been classified as war crimes and crimes against humanity by The Special Procedures of the United Nations, the largest body of independent experts in the UN’s Human Rights System.

How does this connect to SAIC?

In early May of last year, a group of SAIC students helped establish a pro-Palestinian encampment, “The People’s Art Institute,” (PAI) in the Art Institute’s (AIC) North Garden, on the corner of Michigan and Monroe Ave. According to reporting by Block Club Chicago, the group “set up tents and erected signage in the garden calling for a ceasefire. . . and asked the college to divest in Israel.” The call for SAIC’s divestment was specifically spurred by the school’s longstanding ties with the Crown family, the current owners of 10% of GD. 

In 2016, the school received a $2 million endowment from the Crown family, which funds a full professorship in the Painting & Drawing Department. Steven Crown is also on the board of trustees of AIC and SAIC. The Henry Crown Gallery also sits at the top of the museum’s grand staircase. 

On May 4th, 2024, the Chicago Police Department stated to the Chicago Sun Times that on May 4th, 2024, AIC asked them to “clear the encampment that took over a garden on its grounds.” The numbers vary by news outlet, but approximately fifty to eighty arrests took place during that “clearing,” and the majority of those arrested were SAIC students. In a statement released by AIC, the museum wrote:

“Because our priority is the safety of our employees, our visitors, and our collection, protesters were offered an alternative location to continue their protest on campus that would be safer for all involved, and they did not accept that relocation offer.”

The students arrested at the PAI encampment gave a different account of the day to SAIC’s school paper, F Newsmagazine. PAI organizers stated that encampment “liaisons did not at any point reject an offer from the administration. They only requested changes to be considered.” As the day’s timeline progressed, the students arrested “reported a range of brutal treatment from CPD/SWAT: being slammed onto the ground, hit, kneeled and stepped on, dragged, aggressively grabbed, and elbowed. Many of those arrested were injured, and two arrested students needed to be taken to the ER.”

On May 5th, Elissa Tenny, president of SAIC, and Martin Berger, provost and vice president of academic affairs at SAIC, released a statement about the protests to the SAIC community, the last line of which reads:

“We will continue to allow peaceful demonstrations, but given the escalations we’ve seen in the protests over time, we wish to notify the School community that those who engage in future activities that jeopardize the safety of our community or the public, or disrupt academic operations, will be subject to disciplinary action.”

Besides the questions of what constitutes a disruption to academic operation, or how the school defines safety and for whom is safety offered, this is the landscape into which CUC was borne and a partial accounting of the factors which catalyzed and shaped School as a Function of Empire.

I say “partial” as CUC expresses in the show’s accompanying text, “as an anti-institutional outlet inside the very institution it critiques, this show has struggled with administrative suppression and censorship; you will not experience the originally proposed show within SAIC’s walls.” In viewing the show I learned exactly how the SAIC administration, through the Art School Considerations Committee (ASC), played a major role in shaping what the artists could and couldn’t say within the exhibition. Per the collective’s lawyer, Rima Kapitan:

“The Art School Considerations Committee subjected Curators Under Censorship to intimidation and censorship in an attempt to discourage and limit the exhibition, School as a Function of Empire. They did this through threats of personal legal liability, delay in approval of the exhibition, prohibition on communication with students on the SITE team, the prohibition of the participation of alumni (this decision was later retracted) and direct censorship in the form of prohibiting interactive art pieces. The School’s approach to this exhibition departed substantially from its standard approach to exhibitions, including interactive art. Notably, the School claimed to be acting to prevent harassment and discrimination but was not able to point to any specific content that was discriminatory, nor any reason to think such content would materialize.”

There is little publicly available information about the Art School Considerations Committee online or for those otherwise outside of the SAIC network. The school’s website (and student handbook) states that the group:

“…is designed to help students realize projects that may present health, safety, legal, or other challenges to the artist and/or members of the SAIC community. ASC provides an avenue for students to make and present potentially challenging work on campus and at SAIC sponsored events.”

We do not know the names of ASC members, how these members are chosen, or how the group interprets and applies the guidelines stated in the SAIC student handbook when engaging with various students and campus communities. What we do know is the result of ASC’s interactions with the collective ended, in the collective’s words, with “a prohibition on our proposed student-led community wall [as a way] to limit our capacity to share our community’s diverse voices and critiques” and a limitation on “the involvement of non-current-students [alumni] in this show.” 

Empire is no longer available to view at the SITE Gallery in the school’s 280 Building, located on South Columbus Drive. But when visiting the exhibition space several months ago, I was met with a door covered by frosted glass and signage that stated, “Not all visitors will share the curatorial collective’s perspective, and some may find the work difficult to view. The views expressed in this exhibition are solely those of the curators and participating artists.” It’s difficult to know if this is a standard text for all shows that ASC worked with and found “difficult” in some respect, or if this is a unique disclaimer. 

Upon entering the gallery, an altered version of the collective’s proposed community wall was installed upon the space’s far side. The piece, titled Community Wall, was a large wooden structure varnished with print-outs of emails between the collective and ASC. In reading the emails between the collective and various ASC representatives, viewers could learn how the two groups came in contact with one another and how their ensuing conversations unfolded over a series of months. With each confusing prohibition or aggressive stance, the exchange began to feel less like “an avenue for students to make and present potentially challenging work on campus and at SAIC sponsored events,” and more like an altercation between artists and an uncaring, if not outright disdainful bureaucracy.

Other collectively created work, like the Community Object Shelf and the large-scale collage titled Disclose, Divest, function in a manner similar to the Community Wall: they are reminders that the show cannot be separated from the conditions that precipitated its creation. The original Object Shelf, proposed to be a place where visitors could contribute to the show without administrative oversight, was also denied inclusion in the show by ASC. The installation included in the show contained a note to “please not leave any items here.”

The artists’ work engaged with the show’s central tenet: a collective reckoning with the ongoing genocide in Palestine in relation to their own position(s) within AIC and SAIC. Such reckoning can be seen in the large-scale collectively created collage that documents student activism on behalf of Palestinian liberation and SAIC divestment since October 7th, 2023. Images of these students fill the entirety of another gallery wall, a poignant reminder that though the gallery may be quiet, people made this show possible.

A particularly poignant piece in the show was, Dreaming in Letters. The premise of Letters is an exchange of letter writing between the creator and three other people whose families have been impacted by partition, displacement, and occupation throughout the Middle East and South Asia. These letters, however, are never sent to their intended recipient, they exist only as found echoes and memories—one is written on a lampshade, another on fabric, another still on rapidly fading parchment. Some of the letters are not meant to be accessible to viewers, the text may be obscured or illegible, as they are accounts of pasts, presents, and futures that cannot and do not exist because of the world we live in. 

There’s an exacting pathos to the piece as it mirrors what was occurring (and continues to occur) in the world during the time of the show. Letters gives name and solidity to the millions of faces many of us in the West only see on the news. The people, the memories, the ghosts that circle the letters are your friends, your parents, your grandparents. This fragility, our shared fragility, lies at the show’s beating, bloody, heart.

It’s here then we have to ask, how can we understand the web that Empire was created within? How can we understand SAIC’s response to the collective’s activism, to GD’s role in school and the world stage? We cannot separate the show from these conditions, so to really understand Empire, we then need to understand something of what was happening in the world at the time of the exhibition. 

Last year for the London Review of Books, human rights lawyer Selma Dabbagh wrote how women and children were disproportionately impacted by Israel’s attacks on Gaza, whether by sexual violence or as a civilian casualty. As of May of last year, UN experts estimated that almost 15,000 children and 10,000 women had been killed in Gaza, out of a total death toll of 34,488. At the same time over 17,000 Palestinian children were estimated to be orphaned.

In a recent report for Al Jazeera, Ruwaida Amer writes that the conditions of the displacement camps many Gazan people now live in foster more violence. Families continue to be torn apart by stress and trauma. Violence begets violence. There is something especially heinous about visiting such cruelties upon children as it is a way to symbolically snuff out a tiny future, one, by one, by one. 

How does facing these horrors aid our understanding? How do we reckon with the reverberations that echo outward from a show that continues to impact the lives of its artists?

I don’t know how to hold these questions, what to do with them, or how, really, to talk about them. Perhaps then, that is why the most meaningful moment in the show for me was the following lines in the exhibition text:

“This show and its curators do not aim to glorify the role of students in the movement for Palestine’s liberation; nor do we aim to argue that the exhibition, or the activism it portrays, enact any significant or efficacious form of justice.”

When we make art or write, we often feel alone and relatively powerless. We too often never have the chance to “enact any significant or efficacious form of justice.” Yet, perhaps by talking, writing, and making, loudly and insistently, like the members of Curators Under Censorship, we can approach something that feels like power or, at least as a start, community.

Editor’s Note: The artists involved in this show have chosen not to be named in this piece. Though the artists are concerned about retaliation, they did express their wish for the piece to be published.

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