Pictures at a (Cancelled) Exhibition

In February I published an essay decrying the abrupt cancellation of a major art exhibit scheduled to open at Indiana University Bloomington’s Eskenazi Museum of Art.

The long-planned exhibit, “Centers of Energy,” represented a retrospective of the work of renowned Palestinian American artist (and IU alumna) Samia Halaby; the exhibit was to feature 60-plus years of her work, most of it striking abstract painting that explores color, shape, perspective and geometric lines.

Seven weeks before the opening, IU’s administration surreptitiously canceled the show; when confronted by angry faculty who got wind of the cancellation (no official announcement was ever made), IU’s provost insisted that the exhibit, three years in the making, posed a “security” risk to the campus. The university administration never provided any evidence of such a threat; most observers assumed that this blatant censorship was no more than a response to Halaby’s ardent advocacy on behalf of the Palestinian cause in the wake of the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas and the subsequent brutal Israeli reprisals against Gaza.

During the first week of September, I had the opportunity to see “Eye Witness,” the companion Halaby retrospective now showing at Michigan State University’s Broad Art Museum, a five-hour drive from Indiana University. After visiting that exhibit, I am infuriated with the censorship on my campus all over again.

While IU regarded “Centers of Energy” as a grave threat to campus safety, for mysterious reasons, there seemed to be no similar security concerns at MSU’s art museum. Indeed, on the day a colleague and I visited “Eye Witness” with a group of 45 IU students in tow, there was no visible museum security at all. No guards or campus security at the entrance or anywhere nearby. No metal detectors. No sign-in sheet or request for identification. Not even museum staff in the galleries themselves. The museum was filled with a diverse collection of Saturday visitors—students, families with young children, local residents of East Lansing. No one looked worried. For whatever reason, the alleged security risks discovered by IU in late 2023, necessitating the cancellation of Halaby’s exhibition on our campus, had not materialized in Michigan. When my colleague and I asked why this might be, our gracious MSU hosts seemed puzzled that this would even be an issue.

For the most part, after seeing (and enjoying) “Eye Witness,” our students expressed shock—not at any provocative or controversial aspects of Halaby’s abstract work, but by the notion that such a politically innocuous exhibit could pose any kind of a threat to campus peace. I was pleased to finally get a chance to see Halaby’s art in person, but I too remain baffled by IU’s fear of showing her work on our campus.

It is certainly true that some of the work in the MSU exhibit directly addresses the deep wound Halaby suffered from her Palestinian family’s expulsion from Jerusalem in 1948, as part of the Nakba that accompanied the creation of Israel. (It is not clear, however, that these exact works would have appeared in the IU retrospective, overseen by a different curator.) Although abstract, the titles of some of Halaby’s works reflect the experience of displacement, exile and longing that is naturally central to the Palestinian condition. A series of smaller paintings explore what Halaby calls “Occupied Jerusalem,” but she often uses the term “occupied” in its double meaning. As an artist, she remains “occupied” with her people’s desire to return to their homeland, and she captures that sensibility through abstraction. Her artistic vision is powerful and universal, touching on themes of desire for rootedness and return common to many peoples in exile.

Perhaps the only truly provocative work in the show is “I Found Myself Growing in an Old Olive Tree,” a self-portrait depicting the roots of an olive tree with these words coiled around their base in tiny handwriting: “I found myself growing inside an olive tree in Palestine. We are an ancient tree now. We lost many friends cut by Israeli butchers.” No doubt some members of the IU community—at least those who looked closely, squinted and made out these words—might have found this troubling; others, however, might have found it inspiring. Either way, it is difficult to imagine that this constituted a security threat so grave as to require the cancellation of an entire exhibit. Clearly IU’s leadership hoped that secretly shuttering “Centers of Energy” would allow them to avoid any controversy over a fraught issue. Instead, they invited that controversy.

The result is that IU missed a major opportunity to showcase this important artist’s work and to champion the university museum’s alleged commitment to “spark reflective dialogue … around artistic issues that include identity, changing cultural landscapes, and social justice,” as the museum’s now-former director, David A. Brenneman, suggests in a co-authored foreword to the exhibition catalog (which, quite astoundingly, makes no mention of the cancellation). Instead, the university has made itself notorious for its broad hostility to campus free speech and academic freedom, including a ludicrous new policy barring all “expressive activities” on campus between the hours of 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. (It’s for real; as someone who violated the policy and received an official letter of reprimand, I can testify to that.)

Indeed, the Halaby cancellation was merely a prelude to several other egregious assaults on campus free expression at IU, resulting by the end of last year in a resounding vote of no confidence in the president and the provost and a demand by a large majority of the faculty that they both step down. Instead of demonstrating to our students that a university should be a place where discussion, debate and controversy can and should flourish, IU’s leaders fumbled the chance to encourage these things, cheating students of the opportunity to learn.

MSU’s own record on this question appears imperfect, it is true. “Diasporic Collage,” an exhibit of Puerto Rican art currently on display at the Broad Museum, includes a reproduction of a 1973 photo of Arab refugees in San Juan protesting U.S. military aid to Israel. A week after my students and I visited the Halaby retrospective, the museum canceled its fall opening reception, moved the artwork in question to a less prominent position and added some signage warning visitors to “Diasporic Collage” (but not, so far, to the Halaby exhibit) that they would encounter content “that draws connections to Israeli-Palestinian conflict” by depicting “protest signs that include controversial content.” I can understand why the show’s curators are upset, but this remains mild compared to the shuttering of Halaby’s exhibit by IU. The ability of our Big Ten rival MSU to put on its own Halaby exhibit without fear only compounds my university’s shame.