“Student Work,” Ahmad Almahdi (BFA 2024)

A walkout was staged by students, faculty, and staff in the early afternoon of Thursday, Oct. 23. The sidewalk in front of the MacLean building of the School of the Art Institute (SAIC) was alight with the energy of a gathering crowd. As painted cardboard signs rose up, and stenciled canvas banners unfurled, people pressed close on the suddenly thin strip of sidewalk along heavily trafficked Michigan Avenue. From a portable microphone, a keffiyeh-clad student (who will remain unnamed to prevent retaliation from the SAIC administration) addressed the crowd. “There is no ethical education at a school funded by genocide, funded by the Crown family, General Dynamics, and the sales of 2,000 pound “bunker buster” bombs used frequently by the IOF. There is no freedom of speech, radical artistic expression, and progressive education while a Crown family member sits on our board of trustees and holds more power than any student or faculty member,” she read.

I keep returning to this idea of an ethical education, of a progressive education and the conditions of their negation outlined by the speaker. I think she was right. An institution with financial ties to people whose fortunes are built on weapons manufacturing is unethical. A school governed by such people and not by those who are actually at work in the classrooms educating and learning is not a place to expect progressive education. I am on board with the desire to organize against these conditions with the goal of changing the institution, though I have my doubts about how far that goal can actually go.  I wonder, however, if it is not possible to receive an ethical or progressive education from the institution itself, perhaps it is still possible to receive one in practice?

To my mind, an ethical education would entail interrogating the institution and would have an element of learning how to take collective action with other students. The school’s compromised conditions foreclose the possibility of an ethical education delivered through its own systems, but when the students look to themselves as avenues of an ethical education they are much more likely to find what they need. The student exhibition at SITE 280 Gallery last semester, “School as a Function of Empire: Disturb The Equilibrium,” is a case in point.

Before getting into the show, some background information; the Oct. 23rd walkout was not the first pro-Palestine protest at SAIC. Last May, during the international movement of student encampments, SAIC students occupied the gardens of the Art Institute of Chicago — a logical space for visibility and accessibility given the school’s dispersed and securitized campus, which has no prominent public gathering space. During the garden’s brief life as an encampment, the group called the People’s Art Institute renamed it Hind’s Garden after a 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed along with her family and the paramedics trying to rescue her. Only a few hours after it began, the encampment was destroyed in violent clashes with the Chicago Police Department.

In a comment for F Newsmagazine, a student participant said:  “I never thought I’d see something like that. People as young as 16 and 17, and as old as their late 60s standing in rings, with shields in their hands for Palestine. And right in front of me were over 150 fascist cops armed with batons and riot gear. I knew which side I was on.”

Witnessing solidarity and bravery such as this is a formative experience. For students at an elite art school, police brutality and the capacity of institutional powers to quickly turn against — ostensibly — their own, is an object lesson not easily learned nor quickly forgotten. Many students ended up in the hospital, and nearly 70 students were arrested. What is SAIC teaching them?

Many pieces in “School as a Function of Empire” recount the experiences of the students in these other protests against the university. In one, a silent video — likely drone footage of the May 4th activities — cuts between shots of densely packed protestors and two ominous men striking various hunter-like poses on the roof of the museum overlooking the garden. The projection is partially obstructed by an “I HEART SAIC”  hoodie that hangs with arms outstretched in a frighteningly vulnerable position, a cross between pre-embrace and sacrificial resignation. At times, the men stalking the roof disappear into the heart of the hoodie, their tiny black forms distorted through the plastic of the empty ID case in the SAIC lanyard dangling around the neck of the shirt. At other points in the video, mask-clad faces bob in the black and white patterns of the keffiyeh adorning the arms of the hoodie.

The hoodie is a symbolic object in the context of American protests. In 2013, after the racially motivated stalking and killing of high schooler Trayvon Martin, the “Million Hoodie March” brought attention to racial profiling and injustice against Black people by making use of the clothing. In the broader grammar of protests, the hoodie operates at the intersection of innocent, peaceful protester and masked, hooded rioter. Projecting footage of state surveillance onto such an object speaks the language of solidarity and interconnected struggles so well it almost feels wrong to attempt to translate it back into abstract concepts. Yet, the layers do not stop there. The hoodie — as if it needed to hold any more weight — hanging as it does, as if out to dry, is also an effective silhouette to show a “willingness to put your body on the line;” a throughline for much of the work in the show. In fact, hanging across the room, the conversation continues with “Of the ‘Outside Agitator’” which presents a pair of muddied and scuffed pants worn by a student at the protest.

“School as a Function of Empire” encountered institutional pushback. The curators, a collective called “Curators Under Censorship” were told that they were not allowed to show work by alumni, faculty or staff under the pretense of SITE being a student gallery. This came as a shock to the curators, who noted that in the history of the gallery this has never before been an issue. In emails sent to the curatorial team, administrators also forbade them from setting up a community wall, a move which resulted in a wheatpasting workshop, where participants pasted the censoring emails along the gallery wall where the community wall would have been.

“Community Wall” featured in the exhibition “School as a Function of Empire.” Photo by Ryan Fazio.

So what is an ethical education? What is a progressive education delivered by an institution in these times? I don’t know. I don’t actually think such a thing is possible from an institution that operates within today’s broader social conditions. This isn’t to say that they should be off the hook; it’s to reiterate that students who desire such a thing would do best not to look up to the institution, but to keep their gaze on each other. The truth is these institutions have nothing to say to a young crowd staring down the barrel of a genocide, and very little to teach them. The best education is one that the students make for themselves, gathering leverage and collective power, finding ways that they can use their worlds differently, and for their own purposes.

The best approximation of an ethical education students can get is in and against the institutions that only offer a model of corruption and complacency. Students looking for a progressive education would do well to continue to fight against intolerable institutional conditions with the full knowledge that a real ethical education will never come from such places, but can only arise out of the lessons learned from each other in struggle.

Exhibitions like “School as a Function of Empire” offer a form of institutional critique that helps students find each other and teach each other the hard won lessons they are learning about the school, the museum, art, and the functions of the world which seldom reward an ethical stance. As the works in the exhibition show, this reward often comes in the form of learning how unethical institutions will always push back against those who truly stand up to them. As Fred Moton and Stephano Harney advise in their book on the nature of the American university systems today, The Undercommons, “one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of — this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.”