The Backstory of Politics at Pratt

James writes:

Today the New York Daily News features my updated report on Pratt Institute and the controversy surrounding the work of the conservative student artist Steve DeQuattro, which I first reported in this space on Monday ("Conservative Artist Boxed Out at Pratt"). Steve Kolowich at Inside Higher Ed also has an even-handed report out today on the different interpretations of the episode called "Censorship or a Mirage?," which includes the media coverage on the story since Monday.

Pratt is my father’s alma mater. I wish I could now say that Steve DeQuattro merely saw a mirage of political intolerance at the school. Unfortunately the facts of the case, as additional details have come to light, only confirm his side of the story. There has indeed been an attempt by students and faculty to keep his conservative political work outside of the group show supposedly open to all graduating seniors.

What kicked off the controversy was a letter sent by Mr. DeQuattro's student gallery-mates to his professor over his inclusion in the group show.  While the content of this letter remain sealed, some of the tenor of the student objections came through in an interview I conducted with one of Mr. DeQuattro’s objecting exhibition mates, who has asked that her name not be used in connection with this story. She reported that she and her fellow students decried Mr. DeQuattro’s craft and work ethic, not his content. When pressed, however, she elaborated on her objections in this way:

We wrote to the head of painting, his professor. We were concerned. Steven is a very political, and we’re talking about painting, and he’s talking about slavery. It offends us for someone to make us look like we are a joke and stupid, and we’re bigots.

Mara McGinnis, a spokeswoman for the institute, corroborates the political nature of the student complaint, describing the overall incident as "a procedural issue within an academic department complicated by students taking offense at the work of a fellow student." The use of the word “offensive” was also related to Mr. DeQuattro by his advisor, Dennis Masback, who initially received the letter and described its contents to him.

This letter led to the documented interdiction by Donna Moran, Pratt’s Chair of Fine Arts. On February 17, she wrote the following memo to Mr. DeQuattro removing him from the group show and instructing him either to exhibit his work alone in a non-gallery classroom space across campus or in the gallery space after the group shows had ended. While claiming that Mr. DeQuattro’s content was not a consideration in her decision, it nevertheless provided the impetus, in that her involvement came at the behest of the offended students. The introduction of the bureaucratic argument over a missing form likewise only emerged as an issue after the student objections. It should be noted that at no point did she defend Mr. DeQuattro's work, and his place in the group show. Her memo reads:

DATE: February 17, 2011

TO: Stephen DeQuattro

FROM: Donna Moran, Chair of Fine Arts

RE: Senior Exhibition

Cc: Professors Masback, Redmond and Stauber Assistant Chair, Scott Malbaurn

Dear Stephen,

It has come to my attention that there has been some dissention in regards to your senior exhibition. I have not entered into the discussion until this point because I was hoping that it would be resolved within the drawing and painting area. However, it does not seem to be resolved and I feel it is now necessary for me to step in and make what amounts to an executive decision.

For some reason, there has been discussion about the content of your work. This is not a consideration in my decision as you are free to show any work that you and your professors decide on for a quality exhibition, no matter where and when you exhibit.

The seniors who turned in their gallery request forms had worked diligently on designing their exhibitions. This is something that the department encourages and applauds. You did not even turn in your gallery request form. It is clearly stated in the request “Undergraduate Fine Arts Department: Painting & Drawing Request for Senior Exhibition Gallery” form that the deadline for this was November 6, 2010 for spring semester.

You did not turn in your form or successfully negotiate an exhibition with students who had designed their shows. Because your lack of taking responsibility in regards to a professional attitude about your senior show, I have made a decision that you can either have an exhibition in Main 500 for a week, treating that space as a gallery space or in East 240 gallery the week immediately after the last scheduled show.

This will not change your ability to graduate on time, if you successfully pass your courses this semester and have the appropriate credits to graduate.

Part of what we need to insist on for the seniors who will be going out into the art world is that they learn to be professionals and treat their responsibilities in a professional way. Please keep this in mind after you graduate if you have an opportunity to exhibit your work in a commercial gallery.

If you would like to meet with me about this please email me for an appointment time. My email is XXXXX@pratt.edu

Sincerely,

Donna Moran,
Chair of Fine Arts

As this letter makes clear, Pratt did indeed attempt to remove Mr. DeQuattro from the group show. Pratt may argue that they never prevented Mr. DeQuattro from showing his work on campus, but Professor Moran did try to keep his art from standard public view in an unprecedented way. Pratt has since attempted to spin Moran’s intent to sideline Mr. DeQuattro from the group show as merely an offer of “alternative space.” Upon receiving the official letter, however, Mr. DeQuattro says he was not interested in what he preceived to be a forced marginalization. He considered exhibiting in the gallery space, in the group show, to be not only a requirement but a right for graduating seniors at Pratt, regardless of whether other students took offense to the work. He wrote back to Professor Moran by email:

On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 1:07 PM, Steve DeQuattro

Dear Ms. Moran,

I am just receiving your e-mail for the first time, I apologize for not being more on top of the pratt e-mail system. Let us get something straight, I did indeed fill out the form in request of a gallery, in fact Dennis gave us these gallery request forms last semester in class where I filled it out and returned it to him same day, during class time. The issue seems to be not that I did not fill out a form, but rather that because I needed to be registered for 19 credits this semester, which is over the credit limit, it was quite late before I was actually registered for all of my classes. Dennis informed me that because of this, I was moved from my original date, to a later one. This was not an issue for me, as I was never informed of the original date, so to me it seemed that there was no change.

It has now come to my attention that the only thing getting in the way of my show going on successfully is the intolerance of Pratt students. There has been an effort to segregate me and my work from the rest of the community, putting me in a class room that is not, nor has ever been a gallery, and certainly does not occur as one of the places one would visit on a typical monday of gallery openings. I believe this effort to be reminiscent of the claims of Southern Democrat governors in regards to the public school systems, in which students were put in "separate but equal" schools. as we all know, it became obvious that separate could never be equal, and thus the separation at hand was indeed discriminatory.

The assumption was made that the promise of a show of my own would be appealing to me, but it is not, I do not want special treatment, I want to be treated as everyone else, I have been at this school for five years, taken classes under two majors, and I simply ask for the equality of opportunity this wonderful country of ours grants all of its citizens, regardless of ethnicity, religion, or political ideology. Therefore, it must be obvious as to why your offer of moving me to a week after the last show is scheduled is one I cannot accept. I can do the math, this would place my show after the school year is over; a clear attempt to silence my work by minimalizing the audience.

If the prejudice of these students is such that they cannot bear to show their work next to someone who is affiliated with the political party that freed the slaves, gave women the right to vote, and pushed for the civil rights act to be passed, then they are the one's who should give up their show date and location. They should be the ones showing after school ends, they should be the ones put in the dungeon on the 5th floor.

This controversy highlights the success of my artwork, I came to believe that those who claim to be 'tolerant," and "liberal" are the least tolerant amongst us, and are not liberal in any sense of the word, and here is this intolerance on display for all to see. any effort to silence, what probably is, the only display of a conservative/libertarian political philosophy in years if not the entire history of Pratt institute, is no different in my mind that the crimes the democrats committed again blacks under the Jim crow laws. Separate can never be equal, the idea is in opposition to our founding document: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, amongst them Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." and yet, this entire effort is trampling on my right to pursue happiness, the very fact that I am the one who's date and location is in jeopardy illustrates the absurdity of the whole situation, again, it is the prejudice and intolerance of those I'm scheduled to show with that has made this an issue, not my complaints (I have none, and would be happy to show beside them); thus, give them the option of showing on the 5th floor, and give them the option of showing after school ends, I will not willingly forfeit my rights to cater to bigotry.

Thank you,
-Stephen DeQuattro

In her email reply, which I excerpt, Professor Moran responded:

You are not the decision maker here... You will not be showing with that group. Where and when are our decisions not yours.

Following this exchange, a closed meeting was called to address Mr. DeQuattro’s ouster from the group show. Pratt now says that through this meeting, which took place a week before my press coverage, the school resolved Mr. DeQuattro’s complaints and restored him to the group show.

In its own report, Inside Higher Ed wrote:

Moran says the Pratt Institute expects that DeQuattro will show his cereal box, and several accompanying pieces, during the last week of April. Masback, DeQuattro's professor, wrote yesterday in an e-mail to Moran (which she forwarded to Inside Higher Ed) that DeQuattro had been "notified verbally and by email" that he is to show his work with the other students, and "said he was fine with that."

Mr. DeQuattro confirms he would have been “fine with that,” if indeed he had been restored to the group show (and not merely relegated to exhibiting “during the last week of April” in an “alternative space.”) An email from another one of his classmates following that meeting indicates that his offended gallery mates still believed DeQuattro would be forced to exhibit his work on his own outside of the group show. In addition, Mr. DeQuattro was still declining this offer. Excerpt below:

--------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Kyle XXXX

Stephen

Sorry it took me a while to contact you,

I offered to design, print, finance and disperse a poster which would contain You, Laura, Rin and my name if you agreed to show in Room 500 main building. You refused.

Yesterday, Ms. McGinnis suggested to me that Pratt is now working to restore DeQuattro to the original group show: “The students have since been advised to seek mediation through Pratt's Office of Student Affairs in order to design a four-person show.” If true, I applaud the school in these efforts, and hope Mr. DeQuattro is allowed to exhibit his work in the group show--without the additional harassment of “missing forms,” or the double-speak of “alternative spaces.” And let's also hope that next time it doesn’t come to this.

Conservative Student Boxed out at Pratt

James writes:

You don’t have to be an art critic to see something tasteless going on at Pratt Institute. Since 1887, this venerable New York institution has been dedicated to educating “artists and creative professionals to be responsible contributors to society.” Yet teachers and administrators at Pratt have been nothing but irresponsible in their recent dealings with a fifth-year drawing student named Steve DeQuattro.

Mr. DeQuattro is a political artist. He uses his background in graphic design to illustrate the dominant political culture of his world. At Pratt, this means creating work that addresses, as he wrote to me, the “growing bureaucracy, higher tuition, new buildings for administration, new offices, and departments, and left-wing bias, all at the expense of the students.”

As part of his recent work, Mr. DeQuattro has designed a cereal-box-like sculpture that he calls, ironically, “Sustainable Liberalism in a Box” (the graphics are pictured above). He has developed a piece that takes the ubiquitous Apple iPod ad campaign to address abortion. He has designed a sobering five-foot-wide mural that tracks the Democratic Party’s record on race, from Jefferson’s slave-holding days up through the racially charged speeches of Senator Robert Byrd and Vice President Joe Biden.

As a senior in the school, Mr. DeQuattro has been working on this art in preparation for a group show for Pratt’s graduating students, which is scheduled to open on April 23. While his faculty advisor has been supporting him, his peers have not. Mr. DeQuattro says they recently wrote a letter to his professors, calling his work “offensive” and complaining about exhibiting alongside him. Last week, the chair of the fine arts department stepped in to prevent Mr. DeQuattro’s participation alongside the other students in the group show--an unprecedented move in the history of the department, says Mr. DeQuattro, despite the fact that none of his work is pornographic, libelous, or in violation of the laws of free speech. Mr. DeQuattro's advisor did not return a request for comment.

For the administrators and students at Pratt, the problem isn’t political art itself, says Mr. DeQuattro, but the nature of his politics, which are conservative. He says his school takes a liberal position on politicized discourse, just as long as that discourse does not deviate from a left-wing position. Pratt’s opposition to Mr. DeQuattro’s art only underscores the importance of his work. Mr. DeQuattro is asking for outside help in convincing the institution to support his exhibition.

Mr. DeQuattro's case illustrates the art world's double standard towards political art. From Jean-Louis David’s Death of Marat to the works of George Grosz to Picasso’s Guernica, political commentary has had a place in the history of art. Artistic expression can help us understand politics in ways that other forms of commentary cannot.

Yet the relationship of artist to audience often tells us much about the validity of political work. Art that preaches to a wholly agreeing public is little more than propaganda. Most self-described political art today falls short in this regard and is of limited value outside of its political utility, because it almost exclusively presents left-wing arguments to a left-wing public. Rather than standing apart from their audience, works like Shepard Fairey’s promotional designs for candidate Obama to Richard Serra’s visual denunciations of Abu Ghraib pander to existing assumptions and reaffirm the politics of their surroundings.

Audience resistance and censorship, by contrast, can sometimes illustrate the value of an artist’s political message. Such work may encourage the audience, however resistant, to see its politics in a new way. Sometimes this censorship is largely self-constructed, as in the case of David Wojnarowicz's “Fire in My Belly,” where a bad internal decision at the Smithsonian to remove the work from display was taken up by protesters as an opportunity to advance a political and monetary agenda. In that example, the work went from excluded to another form of propaganda, quickly landing in the permanent collection at MOMA. Other times the censorship is more serious, as now in China, where the state crackdown on Ai Weiwei speaks to the continued validity of his artistic project.

By these definitions, Mr. DeQuattro has the makings of a political artist, because as a conservative artist he currently stands outside of the politics of his own time and place. Regardless, student work deserves an especially generous standard for display. Mr. DeQuattro’s art should be supported by the same institution that invited him to hone his craft over the past five years. He should be afforded the same rights given to his classmates and allowed to exhibit in the group show. The fact that his politics are not shared by his peers does not render his art as irrelevant or “offensive.” Instead, it is a reason his political art is valid and deserves to be shown.

Beatnite: Bushwick

James writes:

You don't need a passport to cross the border into the vital arts scene of Bushwick, Brooklyn, but it can help to have a guide. That's why Jason Andrew, the co-owner of Storefront Gallery and the director of the Bushwick nonprofit Norte Maar, organizes Bushwick Beatnite. For these semi-annual events, usually on Fridays, Bushwick's galleries stay open late. Jason and his co-sponsor, Hyperallergic.com, issue maps listing all the venues. The gallery crawl then concludes at a bar starting around 10. In this case, the Cedar Tavern of Bushwick is a place called Bodega.

Here's what the scene looked like at Friday's event. Katarina Hybenova of Bushwick Daily has more. Most of these shows just opened, so there's still time to see the art over the next few weeks. 

Beatnite poster by the singular Bushwick assemblage artist Andrew Hurst

Jason Andrew (driving, in trucker's hat) took the VIPs around by minivan. In the flashbulb, Hrag Vartanian and Veken Gueyikian of Hyperallergic.com  Not pictured, Jason's dog Fern, sitting on my lap. 

Some of the work on view at Fortress to Solitude, the gallery run by Guillermo Creus, who seeks out an eclectic range of artists. The center two pieces are by Jenna Bauer.  

Paul D'Agostino of Centotto talks with Jason Andrew. Dove-tailed sculptures and rope made of styrofoam and acrylic by artist Zane Wilson.

Artist Ashley Zelinskie is the co-founder of the ambitious new Bushwick collective Curbs and Stoops, an "art accessibility think-tank." On the wall is a painting by Angel Otero, whose inaugural New York show is now on view at Lehmann Maupin. I write about a studio visit with Otero in my next column for The New Criterion, out March 1.

Gwen Skaggs of Sugar shows paint skins by the artist Erika Keck.

Much of the party centered around Norte Maar, Jason Andrew's home gallery. Here Austin Thomas has curated a group show in the living room. Austin's t-shirt references her newest venture, Hippie Potluck, a regular symposium of artists and writers hosted at the offices of Hyperallergic.   

Not pictured, but also on my rounds, was Meg Hitchcock's obsessive text work of Biblical proportions at Famous Accountants (check out this James Kalm Report for more), the closing party for Mary Judge at Storefront, and the gallery Laundromat in its new location across from Norte Maar. 

My thanks to Jason, and all of the participating artists and gallery owners, for keeping the lights on and allowing us to see a creative neighborhood in its prime.  

UPDATE: Hrag Vartanian has published a "personal beatnite in photos" at hyperallergic.com. Caught on film is the author (left) on assignment with Paul D'Agostino (right) and Fern Dog (center), the unofficial mascot of Beatnite. 

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