Montrose High School Art Class Cartoons (Montrose, CO)
Artist: Students in Ann Marie Fleming's Art Class
Year: 2007
Date of Action: November 2007
Region: North America
Location: Montrose, Colorado
Subject: Political/Economic/Social Opinion, Violence, Youth
Medium: Painting
Confronting Bodies: Jill Myers
Description of Artwork: Three posters by student artists were effected. One featured the cartoon figures of Charlie Brown, Calvin and Hobbes and their speech bubbles included the words "you suck." Another featured Warner Brothers' Marvin the Martian speaking to the character Zim from Cartoon Network's series Invader Zim, who are speaking about "where babies come from." The final piece featured a cartoon of Thumper from Disney's animated film Bambi, labeled as "The American People" seeing another rabbit nailed to a fence with a sign hanging off the nail saying "G W Bush."
The Incident: The pieces were hanging up on display outside the art classroom, along with other cartoons drawn by the rest of the class, when Principal Jill Myers took the three of them down, damaging them in the process.
Results of Incident: Ms. Fleming, the art teacher, took the rest of the posters down in protest of the act of censorship. Three articles and two letters to the editor were printed in the school newspaper about the incident, and on the day the stories were released, the class hung an exhibit on censorship, which featured six posters painted black, with the words "This artwork was censored" painted in white. The images included a blurb about the artist and the artwork. Some of the pieces included Nazi, Cuban and U.N. censorship of various images, as well as the censoring of a manga, a video game, and the recent artwork of the students that was taken down. Principal Myers asked that the display be taken down, but Ms. Fleming refused.
Furthermore, administrations requested that Ms. Fleming bring a copy of her lesson plan and the research materials she used to a meeting concerning the incident, in an act of intimidation (in Ms. Fleming's 7 years working at the school, she was never asked for a lesson plan).
NCAC also wrote a letter to Montrose high school
Source:
• www.ncac.org
