May I Just Say There’s a Reason Dictators Always Want to Censor Artists?

I’ve been feeling overwhelmed by the insanities of the current Administration. Each day the sun rises on new slash-and-burn strategies to destroy the America we once knew. As the assaults rain down, my hope drains out. I feel like watching Love Island and sleeping as long as possible to avoid the day’s news.

Last week a story appeared first in the New York Times reporting that the gifted artist Amy Sherald, best known for her 2018 portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama, had canceled her upcoming solo exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery. Her reason? Smithsonian authorities wanted her to remove a painting of a Black transgender woman.

“I cannot in good conscience comply with a culture of censorship,” said Sherald, “especially when it targets vulnerable communities…. At a time when transgender people are being legislated against, silenced, and endangered across our nation, silence is not an option.” I couldn’t agree more. Silence is not an option. Let the art speak out.

While thinking of Sherald’s courage, I remembered the lone man standing in front of a column of Chinese tanks. June 5, 1989. Protests in Tiananmen Square had become violent. No one knows his name and no one can forget the image of him standing, alone, waiting for the tanks to arrive. A third-of-a-century later, the photographer’s art has left us with a powerful statement of courage and dissent. An unknown man taught us the power of “No” when brought to us by art.

Last week, Conan O’Brien received the 2025 Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. O’Brien’s art is spoken humor. In his acceptance speech, O’Brien lauded Twain’s hatred for bullies because he “deeply empathized with the weak.” He brought the audience to its feet when he said, “Twain was a patriot in the best sense of the word. He wrote that we ‘should support our country all of the time and our government when it deserves it.’” Precisely. Yes to our country and No to any art-censoring government.

For me, art has always been my refuge, a place to go when there is no other place to go. It quiets my restless spirit. In the molding of a sculpture or the weaving of threads, my troubled soul is freed to speak. My art is visual. Sometimes tactile. My hope is that it is always truthful.

In my recently published book, Uneasy Silence, I tell the story of being invited in 1995 to mount a one-woman exhibit in the US Senate’s Russell Rotunda. “My art was going on display between the marble statues of the Great Hall. No female artist had ever been so honored.” Three days before the exhibit opened, it was canceled. One Senator was offended by a sculpture speaking to AIDS and death. I might have saved the exhibit if I removed that one piece, but that one piece told the truth; I couldn’t do it. I remembered it all when taking in Amy Sherald’s story last week.

So what do we do? What have we learned from Amy Sherald, Conan O’Brien, the Tank Man, Mark Twain or , or my coming face-to-face with censorship? How can I be contented and grateful in my studio when every day brings a new slaughter of innocents?

One step in the right direction is to turn to the wisdom of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Tutu acknowledged that human beings are “capable of the most awful atrocities…” We may not “be able to do a great deal,” he admitted, “but start where you are and do what you can where you are. And, yes, be appalled. It would be awful if we looked on all of that horrendousness and we said, Ah, it doesn’t really matter. It’s so wonderful that we can be distressed.”

If we lose the capacity to be shocked, offended and distressed, we lose the capacity to value art or being human. The artist’s role is to remind us of what is troubling and what is beautiful in the world around us, and that in art we can be “wonderfully distressed.” Alone, we may be unable to change “that horrendousness” but in bringing the truth to life in literature or music (or any form of art) we say “No” to the pressing evil and “Yes” to all that bears witness to uncensored truth. It’s enough. Start where we are. For me, it’s a trip to my studio. Come along if you wish.