Demanding Art the Invites Us to Learn: Organizing a Petition on Facebook

Last week, I helped get a peti­tion together at school. The peti­tion is request­ing that murals that The New School Uni­ver­sity recently installed in the new Par­sons lobby be removed and that new murals be put up with the input of stu­dents. The peti­tion was drafted col­lab­o­ra­tively on Face­book. I think the devel­op­ment of the com­plaints about the murals and the peti­tion is pretty inter­est­ing. It illus­trates how orga­niz­ing can hap­pen in cyber­space, and how the cyber­spaces inter­face with face-to-face inter­ac­tions and meetings.

The new lobby at 2 W 13th street had been under con­struc­tion for well over a semes­ter. They unveiled it early in Feb­ru­ary, with much of the art­work yet to be installed. The wall space around the two ele­va­tors was white at that time. It was papered over with murals, one of a dis­traught white women get­ting out of a car, the other of pix­i­lated comic strips. Stu­dents started grum­bling imme­di­ately. The image of the dis­traught women was like a big bill­board fac­ing out onto 5th avenue. It is oppres­sive to stand under as you wait for the ele­va­tor. I avoid it, and other stu­dents, espe­cially women, have said they avoid those ele­va­tors too. The other work is just not fit to be enlarged and frag­mented the way it is other the other ele­va­tor bank. On top of all this, the print qual­ity is very poor and both instal­la­tions have started to peal already.

Two stu­dents came to the Par­sons Stu­dent Sen­ate meet­ing on Wednes­day, March 5th to com­plain. I was pretty excited to see this. Some aca­d­e­mic advis­ers had been push­ing stu­dents to orga­nize around this. I was reluc­tant to take the task on just because I was up to so many other things, and I wasn’t sure how good the response to tak­ing action would be. New School stu­dents are noto­ri­ously dif­fi­cult to orga­nize. The two stu­dents who came to the meet­ing artic­u­lated their com­plains, and I took them down in the meet­ing minutes.

MFA DT stu­dents came to the meet­ing specif­i­cally to voice con­cerns about the mural around the ele­va­tors at 2 W 13th street. Many present at the meet­ing echoed their con­cerns and expressed hear­ing con­sis­tent neg­a­tive feed­back form other stu­dents as well.

Con­cerns included
* feels like your walk­ing through a bill­board
* not rep­re­sen­ta­tive of stu­dent body
* lan­guage of retail and com­merce, not learn­ing
* pre­vi­ously wel­com­ing space now unwel­com­ing, emo­tion­ally unset­tling
* some stu­dents make a point to avoid that entrance

The next morn­ing, I was on face­book and noticed that some­one had writ­ten on a friend’s wall, say­ing they had missed her at some meet­ing. The wall post ended with a sar­cas­tic com­ment ask­ing is the “big-ass fugly girl above the ele­va­tor scare you away?” This moti­vated me to write a note about com­plaints against the mural com­ing up at the Par­sons Stu­dent Sen­ate meet­ing. What I didn’t real­ize at the time was the wall post was ref­er­enc­ing a face­book group started by one of the stu­dents who came to the sen­ate meet­ing. The title of the group was called some­thing along the lines “What’s with the big-ass fugly girl above the elevator?”

So, I start a face­book note. In the course of the con­ver­sa­tion about the note, Alex Cline sug­gested that some­one speak about the murals at the rally the fol­low­ing week. Alex was help­ing orga­nize the rally call­ing for more trans­parency at the uni­ver­sity. The rally was sched­uled for the fol­low­ing Wednes­day. I wrote back that it would be great if some­one spoke, and that we needed some sort of con­crete action to fol­low up on the speach. The most obvi­ous thing to me was a peti­tion. Sub­alekha Udayasankar, one of the stu­dents who ini­tially com­plained at the Par­sons Stu­dent Sen­ate meet­ing, vol­un­teered to speak. Now that sev­eral peo­ple were involved, I took on the task of peti­tion writing.

I wanted input on the peti­tion, but when I ask peo­ple for help, most responded that they were too busy. All us over­worked design school stu­dents… I cer­tainly didn’t feel com­fort­able writ­ing the peti­tion alone. I finally just edited the Par­sons Stu­dent Sen­ate meet­ing min­utes into a peti­tion like for­mat and posted another note on face­book ask­ing for sug­ges­tions. This was on Tues­day, March 11th, the day before the rally. Through that day and into the night, a num­ber of stu­dents, includ­ing ones who had oth­er­wise said they were too busy to work on it, offered their feed­back. To the right, you’ll see a the screen­shot of the thread. About 30 hours after I posted the ini­tial note, we had come up with peti­tion text that resulted from an open and col­lab­o­ra­tive process. I laid it out, printed up copies, and got to the rally to sup­port Sub­alekha as she spoke.

Here’s the text:

Peti­tion for the removal of the
2 W 13th street lobby murals

We the stu­dents of Par­sons and The New School at large are peti­tion­ing to remove the murals in the new lobby at 2 W 13th Street. The murals com­mu­ni­cate in the lan­guage of com­merce and brand­ing that is inap­pro­pri­ate in an aca­d­e­mic insti­tu­tion and incon­sid­er­ate of stu­dents who use the space daily. Walk­ing into the ele­va­tors feels like walk­ing through a billboard.

The mural around the east ele­va­tor bank of a soli­tary, dis­traught white woman is emo­tion­ally abra­sive and com­mu­ni­cates dis­em­pow­er­ment on a num­ber of lev­els. Stu­dents have reported con­sci­en­tiously avoid­ing those ele­va­tors as a result. The mural on the west ele­va­tor bank is offen­sively unsuc­cess­ful and embar­rass­ing to a design school of such pres­tige. We feel that nei­ther piece would likely pass any for­mal cri­tique in this school, nor are they at all appro­pri­ate for large-scale installation.

We are ask­ing The New School to address our con­cerns by remov­ing the murals. Fur­ther, we feel that these issues would have been addressed if stu­dents had been included in the selec­tion process. As these and other pro­found changes occur to the built envi­ron­ment of our edu­ca­tion, we ask for a sys­tem where there is more trans­parency and more stu­dent inclu­sion. We are some of the best and bright­est minds enter­ing the design indus­try: we want our skilled input to be included in the decision-making process of the design of our school. We want art that speaks to the sophis­ti­ca­tion and apti­tude of the stu­dent body.

We want art that invites us to learn.

The orig­i­nal face­book group against the mural was deleted because the snarky title resulted in peo­ple just ridi­cul­ing the thing rather than orga­niz­ing on how to change it. The new face­book group on the issue, called “Stu­dents against 2 W 13th lobby murals” cur­rently has 86 mem­bers. Aca­d­e­mic advis­ers and fac­ulty have told me that the activ­ity on face­book has caught the administration’s atten­tion. There hasn’t been too much activ­ity around it since the rally because of we’re on spring break. Hope­fully we can get the peti­tion mov­ing and have a good num­ber of sig­na­tures over the next few weeks. Sev­eral stu­dents have expressed ideas for alter­na­tive uses for the wall space and sys­tems of stu­dent input on the admin­is­tra­tion and cura­tion of the space. I’m look­ing for­ward to hash­ing out these ideas and get­ting some art on the walls that inspires us learn.  At least the cur­rent art has inspired us to take action.