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The University of California (UC), Berkeley has received a $2.6 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund a new initiative to confront artistic and academic censorship, the school announced on December 20.
Titled “A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times,” the multi-year interdisciplinary project will comprise anti-censorship programming at arts institutions across the country, including the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, New York Live Arts, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
UC Berkeley professor Shannon Jackson told Hyperallergic in an email that each partner institution will host events such as public workshops, courses, and online publications confronting authoritarian censorship. Jackson will helm the project alongside fellow UC Berkeley professors Judith Butler, Debarati Sanyal, and New York University professor Denise Ferreira da Silva, who is the co-director of the collaborating organization Critical Racial Anti-Colonial Study Co-Lab.
“Our hunch is that the arts are well-positioned to do this kind of imaginative work,” Jackson said.
Censorship, Jackson noted, can manifest explicitly as banning books from syllabi and terminating staff associated with certain ideas, or in more insidious ways, masquerading as calls for “neutrality.” The scholars hope to create, alternatively, an “anti-censorship network.”
“Authoritarianism has an exceedingly complex character in our current moment,” Jackson added. “Paradoxically, some forms of anti-democratic practice are now rationalized with pro-democratic language.”
The program leaders will attempt to trace the histories of free speech and censorship and to provide legal training to academics, artists, writers, and others facing censorship nationwide, Jackson said. She said she also plans to deliver a public lecture as part of the program in 2026 that will include a survey of art and current authoritarian campaigns in fields like migration and trans rights.
Arts institutions have long been embroiled in controversy regarding censorship and political expression, reaching a fever pitch over the last year. Hyperallergic has identified over a dozen artworks targeted or removed in protest from US arts institutions since October 2023 following artists’ expression of solidarity with Palestine, including Húŋkpapȟa Lakȟóta artist Danielle SeeWalker, whose Colorado residency was rescinded last May after she posted her painting of a Native woman wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh on Instagram.
Last month, East Tennessee State University began requiring visitors to sign a liability waiver to enter a politically engaged art exhibition at its museum after state Republicans demanded the show’s removal.
“There is no guaranteed political purity for the arts,” Jackson said. “We have to learn from those histories of political appropriation, too — and stay vigilant about ‘art-washing’ now.”
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