THE ARTS PAPER – ARTICLES

Howard el-Yasin’s art weaves the structure of the world

Hank Hoffman

Howard el-Yasin. Photo by Harold Shapiro.

One of artist Howard el-Yasin’s earliest memories is of making a footstool for his father. El-Yasin recalls it being “more of an object than a footstool – I found scraps of wood and nailed them together.”

But that simple and devotional act of creation bears a strong resemblance to his present process.

“I use found materials when it seems appropriate,” el-Yasin says. “I also love the simplicity, beauty, and crudeness of such raw materials.

“I grew up around old furniture. I was always mesmerized by what people did in the past,” el-Yasin says. “I think it’s important for everyone to reference the past in relationship to the present. Then it’s possible to develop a sense of the future.

“All my work involves constructing,” el-Yasin says.

The process includes choosing materials, figuring out how to combine those materials, and contemplating what a work will say or reference. If there is an overarching theme it is interconnectedness – the present to the past and future, people to one another other and the planet.

El-Yasin minored in visual arts in college but wasn’t happy with the type of painting and drawing he was being taught. He now steers away from “anything representational,” a preference he attributes in part to his Islamic background. He is deeply influenced by African art – particularly quilts and textiles – as well as the work of Minimalists such as Sol LeWitt.

“For me, art is everything or everything can be art,” el-Yasin tells me. “Art can evolve out of the most unseemly materials.

“I’m not trying to replicate something I see. I’m creating something from my imagination,” says el-Yasin. “For me, art-making is about working through the process of engaging myself with materials. I don’t necessarily have an image in mind.”

Among the range of materials el-Yasin has employed are twigs and branches, plastic grocery store bags, human hair, and tea-stained paper. He is fascinated by organic materials and by manufactured objects that evoke the past. Plastic bins in his studio overflow with twigs collected on walks in the woods, old picture frames, part of a rusted muffler, the trunk of a tree. Long scraps of tea-stained paper lie in a pile on a table against the wall. On average, el-Yasin says, it takes about four to six weeks to stain a whole sheet. They are mottled with myriad shades of brown and have different textures. They look like worn, dirty old leather.

Tea-stained paper was el-Yasin’s material of choice for his work in the recent Orchard Street Shul Cultural Heritage Artists Project exhibition at the John Slade Ely House Center for Contemporary Art. The Orchard Street Shul, which still stands, was the synagogue at the heart of New Haven’s Orthodox Jewish community, a community scattered by redevelopment and an exodus to the suburbs. El-Yasin and artist Meg Bloom collaborated on an installation for the exhibition. Umbilicaria Walls, Bloom’s hanging strips of burn-scarred, wax-infused fabric, referenced both the deterioration of the physical structure of the old synagogue and men’s privileged access to the Torah and the wearing of the tallit. El-Yasin’s Numbered Pews was made of woven grids of numbered strips of tea-stained paper.

“I interviewed people to get their perspective of what, culturally, it was like to grow up in that environment. One of the things I was trying to get at was the role of women in an Orthodox space and the degree to which they were silenced,” says el-Yasin.

Male congregants purchased seats in the pews on the floor; women were segregated in the balcony in numbered seats corresponding to those of their husbands. Numbered Pews evoked that seating arrangement, as well as dark, aged wood, a nod to the people and the building that symbolized a community and its faith.

One of el-Yasin’s ongoing projects involves collecting human hair. El-Yasin has already used some hair for a sculptural piece about lynchings and for a mixed-media work, Hair Weaving, in which hair was interwoven with tea-stained paper. Hair, el-Yasin explains, “references our multiplicity as human beings.” Through DNA, it is an identifier of the unique individual. Hair texture is also a strong cultural signifier. Hair Weaving contains hair from several different ethnic groups; in essence, el-Yasin is “binding our multiplicity together.”

“It’s what my work is about. It’s all weaving, pulling things together that appear to be different,” says el-Yasin. The Orchard Street Shul project, says el-Yasin, is “just one example of opportunities to see how we’re all connected, an opportunity to look at the world in a different context.”

Formally, el-Yasin finds a grid structure, as in Numbered Pews, to be the perfect vehicle for his metaphor.

“The world really is a grid. All these different ideas and forces and peoples, but it all fits together. All these degrees of connection and association and disassociation,” el-Yasin says. “Everything is connected to something and that something is connected to something else.”

Even apparent randomness can have an underlying structure. El-Yasin shows me one of his “string drawings.” Black strings protrude from the front of the paper as seemingly random lines. But when the paper is turned around, I see that a grid actually organizes the placement of the strings.

El-Yasin has also projected the grid format into three dimensions, sometimes in a circular pattern (which itself has symbolic resonance). The sculpture Verboten, a work shown at City Gallery in 2007, hangs from the ceiling of his studio. It is bordered by a wire frame and consists of cross-hatched layers of branches bound to the outer wire by twine. It is a fetish, after a fashion. Sharpened tips of branches point outward. Nails are driven through some of the twigs at the top and bottom, echoing their use in African Nkisi art. The nails, el-Yasin told me in 2007, “guard against evil spirits.” Branches alternate between those that are sanded white and others that are tan and shiny from shellac.

“I had the materials, I had the scraps, but I wasn’t sure what to do until I realized I wanted it to be a circular piece,” says el-Yasin.

“What I’m attempting to approach is essence, a sort of nakedness,” he explains.

He tears the bark off twigs “because what I’m trying to get at is beneath the surface. So even with pieces where they are built up in layers, I’m still stripping away part of it to suggest there’s always something beneath the surface.

“It’s about layers of information,” says el-Yasin. “I don’t like to make art where I spell it out. I like to leave room for the viewer to contemplate.”



‘Through Nick’s Eyes’

David A. Brensilver

	A watercolor painted in Istanbul. Courtesy of Sara Ohly.

For 40 years, Nicholas Ohly documented his experiences, however ordinary or extraordinary, in pocket-size notebooks. He made notes to himself, drew scenes and landscapes, and pasted small pieces of paper on which he’d drawn or made notes onto the pages of the notebooks.

On the top half of one notebook page, for example, Ohly drew the view from his seat in Dr. Anton Philipszaal, The Hague, from which, as he noted in cursive below his illustration, he watched and listened to the Residentie Orkest (Resident Orchestra, also known as The Hague Philharmonic Orchestra) perform Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, Suites 1 & 2. He also made note of the hall’s “excellent sound.” On the bottom half of the same notebook page, Ohly drew three windmills along a road in Leidschendam, the Netherlands. Each scene is dated, as is the handmade spine he crafted for each notebook so it could be organized among the others. Some 80 of these notebooks exist, dating back to 1966.

Ohly, who died in 2007 at age 68, is the subject of an exhibition the Arts Council will present this month. An architect by vocation, Ohly spent his life capturing that which piqued his interest through photography, watercolors, ink-pencil and charcoal drawings, and, of course, the notebooks he was rarely without. A collection of these different media will be on display in the Sumner McKnight Crosby Jr. Gallery from March 29 through May 21.

Patrick Cardon, who met Ohly in 1971 on an excavation in Greece, once asked him about the detailed documentation evidenced in the notebooks.

“What is all this for?” Cardon said he asked Ohly, who, he said, responded, “Just keeping a record to go back to.”

In 1968, Ohly and his wife, Sara, came to New Haven, where for 40 years he worked as an architect with Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates on projects that included the Central Park Zoo and Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Sara talked recently about her late husband’s interest in visual art, which began with his mother taking him to galleries and museums when he was growing up in Washington, D.C. By his teens, Sara said, Ohly was carving wood, and, as a student at Williams College, created sculpture and Calder-inspired mobiles in a barn on family property in Vermont. He returned to the barn for a six-month period during graduate school to continue working on his sculpture.

“I think he felt a little torn about whether to be an architect or a sculptor,” Sara said.

While he was studying architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, Ohly spent portions of three summers on an archeological dig in Greece, from which he and Sam Peterson, who was studying art history at New York University, traveled to “remote parts of Syria, Jordan, and Iran, going through Turkey,” Sara said. Ohly, of course, traveled with a camera.

In 1971, as an art-history student at New York University, Cardon and his wife, Carol, worked on an excavation in Greece, to which Ohly had returned with Sara three years after they married. On days off, the couples would hike.

“The camera was always out … Nick would catch the beauty in whatever was going on,” Patrick said – “and the motion,” Sara added.

Two decades later, Ohly took a year off to live in the Netherlands, where, as a Ph.D. candidate in Yale University’s Department of Anthropology, Sara did field work for her dissertation on Turkish labor migration in the Netherlands. Once they arrived, Sara said her husband “painted every day,” visited galleries, and kept detailed journals about his days and artistic struggles.

“Spirit of place was really important to him,” Cardon said, “and in his art it comes through.”

And yet, Ohly didn’t discuss his artwork.

Chris Pullman, who, along with his wife, Esther, met the Ohlys decades ago, said, “I don’t ever remember him talking about this stuff.”

Ohly did analyze the art he made. On the back of almost every painting, he made, in Cardon’s words, “notes to self.”

“I have to think that over 40 years he was making all these incremental observations about his ability to image,” Cardon said.

Sara said that during the last year of her husband’s life she asked him, “Who do you imagine reading these?”

“He just shrugged,” she said, adding that she imagined he made the notes for “himself.”

Reading through Ohly’s notebooks, Cardon was reminded of the “intensity of the appreciation of whatever he was getting into,” and said the notebooks themselves are “a reminder of the sensation he experienced at the time.”

Pullman described Ohly as “somebody who was always on … his radar was on.”

And he chronicled all that appeared on his radar.

Pullman said the exhibition, Through Nick’s Eyes, represents the “tip of the iceberg,” of Ohly’s avocational yield, and pointed out that “he didn’t think of these as exhibit material.”

“At best,” Pullman said, “it’s a peek into this side of his nonprofessional life … life as an observer over 40 years.”



‘Supporting the vision’
Musical collective helps local songwriter’s music find audiences beyond New Haven

David A. Brensilver

Call of the Wolf Peach cover art. Painting by Todd (T.S.) Rogers.

If you watch This American Life, Showtime’s adaptation of the syndicated Chicago Public Radio program, you’ve probably heard original music from Pale White Moon, a group of musicians enlisted by New Haven resident Doug Slawin to bring an album called Call of the Wolf Peach to fruition.

The music on the CD represents what was to become the second recording from Slawin’s erstwhile band, The Secret Ink, whose lineup featured Richard D’Albis (drums), Netta Hadari (violin), Jennifer Morgan (bass, vocals), Slawin (guitar, vocals), and Linnea Weiss (cello). The idea behind the group’s instrumentation, Slawin said, was to have string players as part of the band, not just musicians who’d show up and read charts. He also had an interest in connecting people to these instruments.

Following the group’s eponymous first album, Slawin began recording a follow-up. Morgan, though, had relocated to Texas where she’s an assistant professor of molecular cell and developmental biology in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.

As a result of Slawin not wanting to be the group’s primary vocalist – “I don’t like being the center of attention,” he said – the music he was writing became more instrumental in nature, with vocals being part of the mix, but not the focal point. And no one involved, he said, felt comfortable replacing Morgan.

Slawin did want to finish the record he’d been working on, particularly the songs he felt strongly about, not all of which made it onto Call of the Wolf Peach.

What had been a band turned into a studio project, something Slawin said allowed him to “express some of the music I was writing.” He started bringing people into the project depending on what a particular song called for, a process that became “exciting,” as he felt he could draw on the talent of New Haven’s musical community. And he didn’t have to look far to find collaborators.

“Everyone was kind of in plain sight,” he said.

Slawin wrote “Frost Flowers” with Pierre Bourgeois (Gabriel Cruz), whom he’s known for years and whose band, Pale Horse Company, Slawin has done some engineering for. One night, after the two talked about Hank Williams’ “Beyond the Sunset,” Slawin said it became clear that Cruz should write the lyrics to “Frost Flowers.”

When he needed a double-bass player, Slawin called on his neighbor, Ben Wolfe.

And while Call of the Wolf Peach took shape as a studio project for which he, as songwriter, called on other musicians to collaborate, much of the work has its roots in Slawin’s artistic relationship with Weiss.

“Beefsteak,” Weiss’ composition for cello and loop pedal, is one that, while not on Call of the Wolf Peach, has appeared on This American Life, as have her “Heirlooms” and “The Wolf Peach,” both of which are on the record.

“Linnea is an amazing talent,” Slawin said, and very modest, referring to the work she’s done with such groups as Mates of State, which served as the “house band” for a 2007 touring production of This American Life.

Weiss also had a lot to do with the album being called Call of the Wolf Peach.

Beefsteak and heirloom being types of tomatoes as well as song titles – “Heirlooms” also has a classical feel thus giving the title double meaning – Slawin did some research and came across folklore that told of witches planting the fruit to summon werewolves. Believed poisonous, tomatoes were given the name lycopersicum, which translates to “wolf peach.” Slawin liked the darkness of the imagery and, when it came time to design a CD jacket, related the wolf-peach legend to New Haven-based artist Todd (T.S.) Rogers.

Rogers listened to the album, and, he said, “truly loved what (Slawin) had done.” And he was “enamored” with the folklore Slawin had related.

“That sold me,” Rogers said, “it roped me in.”

Slawin, Rogers said, drew a rough picture of the album art he envisioned.

“As soft-spoken as he is,” Rogers said, “he’s very firm and knows what he wants.”

Growing up, Rogers “got hung up” on the artwork that graced Iron Maiden’s album covers – specifically the band’s mascot, the living and ever-transforming skeleton “Eddie,” who was conceived by British artist Derek Riggs. In high school and college, Rogers learned about the “masters,” and that the distinction didn’t include “the guy who did the Iron Maiden covers.” Whereas normally his work has a comic-book influence and utilizes “dark, thicker outlines,” Rogers wanted to do “something more organic, painterly” for Slawin’s album.

As it turned out, Slawin said, Call of the Wolf Peach is “a lot about New Haven … appreciating and treasuring New Haven.” “Stars Hollow Days,” for example, is about being caught between New York and Boston, and “The Seven Year Cicadas” features the sounds of local crickets in New Haven parks.

Call of the Wolf Peach was mixed and mastered (and in part recorded) by Nick Lloyd at Firehouse 12. Lloyd not only contributed from behind the mixing console, he played piano, Wurlitzer electric piano, and Hammond organ on the album.

Lloyd, Slawin said, is another one of New Haven’s “super-modestly talented people.”

Lloyd, who recorded The Secret Ink album, talked about that project and Pale White Moon, saying the former was “more rock-oriented” than the music on Call of the Wolf Peach and that The Secret Ink “really was a band.” Slawin returned to Firehouse 12 with some music that predated the first record and some that was written during and after that, with an eye on fleshing out the ideas he felt were strongest. By the time they started mixing Call of the Wolf Peach, Lloyd said, Slawin had a very clear idea of how he wanted the record to work.

“(Slawin) has a very wide breadth of music that he’s interested in,” Lloyd said, a “lot of different influences in what he’s up to,” and that he doesn’t worry about it fitting into a certain genre.

“I feel like Doug is a huge asset to the music scene” in New Haven, Lloyd said. “He’s a really interesting guy who is a student of all these different types of music.”

Lloyd agreed that the music on Call of the Wolf Peach was informed by New Haven “in a really deep way.”

Lloyd also said he was struck by Slawin’s interest in exploring all possible outlets for his music.

Talking about the connection Slawin made with This American Life, Lloyd said, “He’s figured out how to get his music out to the world in a much broader way.”

Slawin said that he and Weiss, while recording, would often talk about This American Life more than they’d discuss the music they were working on. At some point, he called This American Life Producer and Series Music Supervisor Jane Feltes to introduce himself and sent her some songs. This American Life licensed 10 songs, most but not all of which are on Call of the Wolf Peach.

“That actually allowed us financially to finish the record,” Slawin said. “We were just really flattered to be part of something that we really admire and enjoy.”

The connection to This American Life led to music from Call of the Wolf Peach being used in a documentary film, LaPorte, Indiana, which was directed by Joe Beshenkovsky, who worked as an editor on This American Life.

Even with momentum behind him, Slawin is looking ahead to another project. Although Weiss has plans to move to Spain, Slawin said he’s been talking with her and D’Albis “about continuing to do recording together over the Internet,” and is thinking about a project that would involve a “large, post-rock ensemble.”

“For me,” Slawin said, “it’s just (about) what’s going to continue to hold my interest.”

D’Albis who played drums for The Secret Ink and on Call of the Wolf Peach, said he and the other musicians who contributed to the more recent project were “supporting the vision” Slawin had for the album.

“Doug is ringleader of the collective,” D’Albis said.

Slawin talked about Pale White Moon and the Call of the Wolf Peach album, and about his music being licensed by This American Life and used in a documentary film.

“The kind of music that we do, and the way the music industry is right now, we’re not going to have a big FM radio hit,” he said.

It’s nice, he said, that “the songs are getting heard,” and that people outside New Haven are hearing the work of local musicians.

“I think for a lot of people in music right now … everybody’s trying to find an answer. … There is no one answer. There’s a thousand answers,” he said.

Call of the Wolf Peach: the details
Track listing:
1. Heirlooms (Weiss)
2. Rabbits Run (Slawin/Fay)
3. Stars Hollow Days (Slawin)
4. The Seven Year Cicadas (Slawin)
5. The Search for Helium Three (Slawin)
6. Sir Basil Humphrey’s House on the Hill (Slawin)
7. The Wolf Peach (Weiss)
8. Frost Flowers (Slawin/Cruz)
9. Stars Hollow Days (chamber group) (Slawin)

Musicians:
Linnea Weiss, cello
Ilona Virostek, vocals
Doug Slawin, guitars, organ
Netta Hadari, violin
Ellen Higham, viola
Nick Lloyd, piano, Wurlitzer electric piano, Hammond organ
Scott Amore, organ
Richard D’Albis, drums
Ben Wolfe, upright bass
Keith Yarbrough, tuba
William Bartlett, clarinet

The “Rabbit Run” players:
Lauren Fay, vocals
Doug Slawin, guitar
Carrie DeRegis, guitar
Andrew Spurrier, bass, guitar
Craig Woleader, drums

For more information about Pale White Moon and the Call of the Wolf Peach album, visit myspace.com/palewhitemoon.

Space: definition, movement, and creativity

OluShola A. Cole

Space, the emotional and physical environments in which creative expression is born, shared, discussed, and debated.

A few weeks ago, a musician came to see me about a concept he has for an incredible multimedia installation that would showcase musical icons through a mix of art and technology. It became obvious to me that, despite the man’s idea, and his contagious enthusiasm for it, defining a space where it could take root, flourish, and engage a community would be a challenge.

As an individual artist, and as the Arts Council’s coordinator of community programs, I’m constantly expressing myself and doing what I can to extend these “spaces” into communities where they haven’t been cultivated. Nothing excites me more at the end of the day (when I’m not rehearsing, creating, or performing) than moving from one space – my emotional space – to another.

I’ve been energized by Neighborhood Central Management Team meetings, which have allowed me to meet neighborhood leaders and find artists for neighborhood events.

The Dwight neighborhood found a special place in my heart when Florita Gillespie and Curlena McDonald invited me to speak at an NCMT meeting so that I could introduce myself as the Arts Council’s link to the community. Watching them bring a neighborhood together by organizing a fall arts festival was truly inspiring. I’ve also admired the organizational fervor of Grand Avenue Village Association Director Gabriella Campos in Fair Haven. Quite simply, I couldn’t have asked for a more well-timed crash course in identifying community space, and soon I was finding artists, poets, and musicians for GAVA’s historic lantern cemetery tour on Halloween.

I’ve also discovered different creative “spaces” since I began working at the Arts Council in September. I joined the New Haven Chorale and have performed with such groups as PlayMakers Theatre and New Haven Theater Company. Soon, I’ll be able to add Long Wharf Theatre to that list. With some organizations, I’ve had to adjust to imbalances of race, class, and socioeconomics, whereas the diverse makeup different neighborhoods offer makes them feel anything but exclusive. But exposure to new surroundings and experiences has allowed me to challenge myself and has broadened my comfort zone, which is important to me personally and critical to my role at the Arts Council.

As I’ve moved through new “spaces,” I’ve discovered the newly developed Hill Museum Corporation, an old brewery in the Hill neighborhood that was once an abandoned eyesore but slowly has been beautifully renovated by Krikko Obot (yes, the large pencil drawing artist – check Union Station!) and his assistant, Amin. This area is being revitalized thanks to Krikko’s efforts to provide artistic experiences to kids in the neighborhood. The space is breathtaking. It’s simple and efficient and has the potential to transform the neighborhood.

I’ve also discovered the historic New Haven People’s Center on Howe Street, a house on the Underground Railroad that later became a gathering place for immigrants in the Elm City. The information I’ve found there has been informative and very community oriented. I always feel very welcome when I step through the doors.

Defining “community” requires assessment, even discovery. Still, just a handful of months into my new job, I continue to define and move through “spaces” and see how they can be put to good, positive use. And each day I meet new people and find something new to explore.

The Bregamos Community Theater rehearsal space, which was converted by the organization’s founder, Rafael Ramos, hosts an eclectic array of ensembles, dance troupes, and theater groups. I’m constantly intrigued by the groups that have found this space in Erector Square (the entrance is on Blatchley Avenue). I’ve rehearsed in this space with the New Haven Theater Company. Spending time there let me see just how many diverse and talented groups it draws. I discovered a bachata band called Los Chavos De Fuego and a salsa band called Agua Pa Chocolate, both of which use the space. The newly formed Hillhouse Opera Company also rehearses there, as does Collective Consciousness Theatre. In October, the space was the site for Ras Mo Moses’ production of Testify! Real Stories, Real People, a multimedia production that explored violence during Domestic Violence Awareness Month. A simple assessment of the groups that practice and rehearse in the workshop shows that community space can be accessible and cost-effective, and that it can foster and cultivate participation in the arts.

Another discovery I’ve made is Church Street South Apartments, a privately owned low-income housing complex in town. Bregamos Community Theater is in the process of collecting stories and conducting interviews for a production that will be staged at Church Street South to draw attention to an area that has, for the most part, been ignored. Here, I see a community working to create a necessary dialogue.

I’ve also engaged with organizations that focus on social awareness and action such as Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services and Collective Consciousness Theatre, and I’ve spent time with local playwrights, availing myself as a cultural liaison as they’ve collected stories about the immigrant experience in New Haven for a presentation on the campus of Yale University on World Refugee Day.

I am literally moving into a space defined by creative activity and commitment to community. To step into shoes once filled by Jose Monteiro and Aleta Staton, and into a role that calls on the influence and legacies of Bitsie Clark and the late Zannette Lewis, is to step into a learning process that helps me frame my goals creatively, honestly, and objectively.

In order for the arts to thrive in our communities, we need to constantly be identifying, evaluating, cultivating, and even creating new “spaces.” All around town, I see performance spaces, gathering spaces, peaceful spaces, empty spaces, rehearsal spaces, safe spaces, and creative spaces. Here, I see a chance for communities to work together creatively to enjoy and thrive on artistic, cultural, social, and accessible expression.

OluShola A. Cole is the Arts Council’s coordinator of community programs.



The First Amendment and the arts community

Lucile Bruce

It’s fair to say the writers of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights didn’t have artists – or arts organizations – in mind when they drafted the First Amendment. But no single sentence will ever be more important, more relevant, or more foundational to any arts community in the United States – including Greater New Haven’s.

The First Amendment, ratified in 1791, protects the free expression of artists everywhere, assuring that they can’t be fined or imprisoned for the content of their work. It also protects arts organizations: the government can’t stop museums, orchestras, theaters, or festivals from presenting works of art it may find threatening. These freedoms don’t exist everywhere in the world, and I’m proud we have them here.

But let’s not get over-confident. Today, as government attempts to silence speech have become increasingly rare, we see instead cultural, social, and economic factors at work inhibiting free expression.

In case you think these situations are exceptional, the truth is that challenges happen frequently, in communities of all political stripes. Most of the time, they don’t involve the government at all. The majority of challenges to free speech involve people like you and me who have the power to make decisions about what we see and don’t see, read and don’t read, hear and don’t hear.

Since I moved to New Haven 10 years ago, I’ve heard about four publicly reported incidents – right here in our region – that raised important First Amendment questions. Last summer’s decision by Yale University Press not to reprint in a scholarly book Kurt Westergaard’s cartoons and other images of the Prophet Muhammad made international news. Around the same time, a group of citizens in Cheshire mounted an emotional challenge to the public library’s purchase of In the Middle of the Night: The Shocking True Story of a Family Killed in Cold Blood, a book about a local crime committed in 2007.

Last fall, San Francisco-based artist Richard Kamler accused a local curatorial committee of censorship when his art installation, which wove together cut paper strips of the Torah and Koran, was pulled from the Orchard Street Shul Cultural Heritage Artists Project exhibition. And some members of the community objected strenuously to the presentation of the play Alive From Palestine: Stories Under Occupation at the 2002 International Festival of Arts & Ideas.

Of course, as First Amendment expert and Yale Law School Dean Robert Post pointed out to me, for communities not to offend one another is a good thing. At the same time, he said, artists can play a role in moving communities through – and beyond – entrenched positions they may hold. That too, is a good thing, and one of the highest functions of art.

Now, I’m not advocating some bizarre new aesthetic for New Haven, one that champions violence, sexual perversion, and the defamation of other people’s gods. Moreover, I feel protective of children and youth; I confess that sometimes I change words – and occasionally plot points – as I read children’s books aloud to my own kids, whereupon my husband calls my bluff and I start feeling like Tipper Gore.

Make no mistake about it, First Amendment issues are tough. They push our buttons. And often, the stakes could not be higher.

In recent years, fear of violence has been cited as a legitimate reason to suppress free expression. Yale University Press decided not to reprint Westergaard’s cartoons because it was afraid of a violent response from Muslim extremists.

Imagine, for a moment, that these cartoons, along with other images, had been reprinted in the name of free speech, and that the Yale University Press office on Temple Street in downtown New Haven had been bombed and civilians killed. (Westergaard was physically attacked in January; he survived.) Would we feel that Yale University Press’ decision to publish the cartoons had been the right decision? How far are we willing to go to protect freedom of speech, which, when balanced with human life, may seem like an abstraction?

And yet, here’s what the College Art Association said in its far-reaching statement, released in December 2009, about Yale University Press’ controversial decision:

“Words and images exist in complex socio-political contexts. Suppressing controversial expression cannot erase the underlying social tensions that create the conditions for violence to begin with, but it does create a climate that chills and eventually corrupts the fundamental values of liberal democracy.”

As artists, writers, and journalists know, free expression is a practice, an attitude, a way of life, a discipline. It’s not something to be misused, abused, or feared. It draws us into a lifelong conversation about speech: when to use it, how to use it, and how to protect it for everyone.

With that in mind, I asked representatives of several major arts organizations – the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven Symphony Orchestra, Fairfield University’s Quick Center for the Arts, Shubert Theater, Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts, Yale University Art Gallery, Yale Center for British Art, and Yale Repertory Theatre – if they have written guidelines in place for dealing with First Amendment issues, should anyone ever challenge the presentation of a particular work of art at their institutions. None do.

In its Guidelines for State Art Agencies, Museums, University Galleries and Performance Spaces, the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) “encourages arts institutions to develop written selection policies that will guide them in showing or sponsoring art that may spark controversy in a particular community. These policies should contain procedures for responding to challenges initiated by the board, administrators, organizations and individuals in the community.”

An arts organization’s professional standards, says Post, are key to navigating these questions. His belief is reflected in the NCAC’s list of possible criteria for making curatorial decisions – things like:
• imaginative quality/originality/complexity/unity of idea …
• professional background of the artist
• social relevance
• diversity of viewpoints represented
• insight into social conditions/depth of analysis

So, art lovers, ask people at your favorite arts organizations about their selection criteria for exhibiting and presenting works of art. Find out how they make choices and what principles guide their decision-making process. Ask them to articulate their First Amendment values. Are they, unwittingly, engaging in self-censorship out of fear of offending someone? Are they educating their donors about the importance of free expression? And ask the artists you meet if they’ve ever been silenced, or have silenced themselves. These conversations will make our arts community stronger.

And most of all – never, ever take the First Amendment for granted.

This is the opinion of Lucile Bruce.

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