Rennard Strickland received a phone call several years ago from the FBI because his friend had been retained at an airport and was deemed to be a dangerous person. After showing his friend’s work to officials, the officials admitted that they didn’t know he was an artist – they thought he was a revolutionary or a radical.

‘It’s the painters who have to be the revolutionaries and radicals,’ said Strickland, a professor at the University of Oregon. ‘Because we show people what is wrong, other people only tell them what is wrong.’

Strickland was only one of a group of artists, photographers, professors and filmographers participating in the ‘Context/Translation’ panel of Chancellor Nancy Cantor’s inauguration on Friday. The entire event, ‘Universities and Moral Responsibility: Respecting Humanity at Home and Abroad,’ was held in Goldstein Auditorium, and explored themes of social and moral responsibility.

Since their work is displayed in such a public context, many artists on the panel felt they couldn’t avoid themselves being seen as role models. Aaron Sorkin, creator of ‘The West Wing,’ cited a 1993 Nike commercial in which basketball player Charles Barkley states: ‘I am not a role model … parents should be role models,’ as an example of the fact that public figures can’t control whether or not they affect the public.

‘A person can’t decide whether or not they’re a role model, only if they’re a good role model,’ Sorkin said.

Carrie Mae Weems, a Syracuse artist, said the social responsibility of artists is much larger than any one political agenda. She said one of the most interesting things about what artists do is that their work spurs public conversation.

‘As we take the responsibility to engage, that’s what we do,’ she said. ‘The moment we decide to present our work for the public, we are engaged, we are responsible and we are social.’

Weems, who travels the country exhibiting her art, described a situation in which she was speaking in Geneseo and was approached by a young, white male who asked her why African-American artists always talk about African Americans, and didn’t understand why the black community continues to bring up topics revolving around themselves. Finding irony in the student’s question, she asked him if people usually find it odd that Anglo Americans usually talk only about the Anglo-American experience.

Silvio Torres-Saillant, director of SU Latino-Latin American Studies Program, has noticed this phenomenon, and said he encourages people to think about the notion of color. Although everyone technically has a color, when we say people of color, that phrase never includes white people, Torres said.

‘When you are the norm, the norm is always not named,’ he said. ‘It is the other that has to deal with his or her difference.’

Dorothy M. Steele, associate director of Stanford University’s Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, said art has virtually disappeared from the educational process at public schools, and that, in the eyes of students, art has become a bunch of dead white men. Steele said she assumed Weems would be quite insulted by the young man’s question, and that it’s a reflection of student’s ability to go through life and not understand the African-American experience and people’s right to express their history through art.

Weems wasn’t at all insulted, however, and thought that it was a wonderful question. She said it was an example of the kind of discussion that needs to be opened up. Students and professors alike are afraid to say what they’re really thinking and there is a missed opportunity to have a rich, full conversation about what these kinds of issues really mean.

‘In the end,’ Weems said, ‘the end the answer to the question was, ‘I’m not really talking about me, I’m talking about us.”

Published on November 7, 2004 at 12:00 pm