UR creates new art placement policy after sudden removal of student-made awareness posters

The University of Richmond is crafting a new student art policy following the removal of public awareness posters created as part of a visual and media arts practice course in early October. 

The course, Print in Public Spaces, included a project tasking the students to create “social message posters” that “used the immediacy of power and poster to spread a message,” Professor of Art Tanja Softić said. 

The students in the class were required to get permission from university facilities and the people in charge of the buildings they wanted to paste the posters on. Figuring they had all their bases covered, the class started putting their temporary work up around campus on Oct. 5. The posters were supposed to remain up for about a month, since they were plastered using water-soluble paste and would fade after a rainstorm. 

All of the posters were suddenly removed on the morning of Oct. 9–the same day as the Lora Robins Court gas leak. Softić and her students were baffled.

“We have this emergency, and somebody is going around removing student artwork,” Softić said. “It doesn’t strike me as a priority.”

As Softić tried to track down what exactly had gone wrong, she was pointed to a “strange and cumbersome” 2011 art policy that even people in the Department of Art weren’t aware of, she said. 

“I am personally wondering if there was a complaint about the posters, and that’s why the school reacted so quickly,” Softić said. “I’ve had posters up on campus before, and I’ve never heard of this policy.” 

Now, UR is crafting a whole new policy on the placement of student art to be finalized in early 2025, according to Sunni Brown, UR’s director of media and public relations. 

“We believe that everyone was operating in good faith, and that this was a misunderstanding about the policy and the approval process,” Brown wrote in an email to The Collegian. “The posters were removed because no one in the chain of the existing policy approved the art installation”

The new policy will funnel the art approval processes through the Office of the Provost, according to Brown. 

“We deeply value the many ways students may wish to express themselves, including through public art, and the primary goal of this policy is to protect student art installations,” Provost Joan Saab wrote in a statement shared with The Collegian. 

Students in the class, however, aren’t convinced. Most of their posters had been up for a few days before being removed–except for one student’s work concerning the Israel-Hamas War.

“I thought it was interesting that my poster was okay to be up, but another one of my classmates’ was taken down in 24 hours,” Ally, a student in the course, said. “Her poster was about genocide and only had two statistics on there.” 

Ally’s posters were put up at the Boatwright Memorial Library and remained up for a few days, she said. Her work consisted of three posters meant to remind students about the importance of relaxing once in a while, she said. 

“To me, it was frustrating. I had even seen someone post [my poster] on their Instagram story,” Ally said. “That was cool for me to see the public perceiving it.” 

The class has no plans to put the posters up around campus again, Ally said. Instead, the Art and Art History Department will be displaying them in a stairwell in Keller Hall and plan to celebrate the project at a reception on Dec. 5. 

“It was very disheartening, just to see that the school isn’t okay with art, and the censorship,” Ally said. 

Contact executive editor Caitlin McCormack at caitlin.mccormack@richmond.edu.