The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) has demanded that city officials explain why they ordered a private art school to remove a banner displaying an image of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
In a letter on Thursday to the Department of Buildings, NYCLU executive director Donna Lieberman expressed concern that the banner was taken down from The Cooper Union after some residents of the local Ukrainian community complained that it “seemed to promote” Stalin on the 75th anniversary of a famine he imposed.
The famine, called the Holodomor, killed millions of Ukrainians.
The banner was part of an art exhibit called Stalin by Picasso, or Portrait of Woman with Mustache. Lene Berg, the artist who created the banner, said it was intended to provoke discussion about the relationship between art and politics.
The big banner features a reproduction of a 1953 Pablo Picasso portrait of Stalin. At the time, the image was viewed as a critique of the Soviet leader.
But the Ukrainian community found it offensive, said Tamara Olexy, president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America.
“It’s like hanging a portrait of Hitler in a synagogue or in a Jewish community,” she said.
After receiving several complaints, the Department of Buildings investigated the banner’s legality and determined it violated construction and zoning regulations, the agency said on Friday.
“We determined the sign was too high, too large, lacked a permit and blocked the building’s windows,” spokeswoman Kate Lindquist wrote in an e-mail. “The department does not regulate sign content.”
But Lieberman said the NYCLU’s understanding was that the complaints were about the banner’s content, not its size.
“The question remains as to whether the building code was enforced because of objections to the content. If so, that raises questions about censorship,” Lieberman said.
In a Nov. 13 letter to buildings department community affairs director Donald Ranshte, Lieberman said the removal would raise First Amendment concerns if regulations had been selectively enforced based on complaints about its content.
Buildings officials told the school on Oct. 31 to remove the banner because it didn’t have a permit, Cooper Union spokeswoman Jolene Travis said on Friday. The school immediately took down the banner, which had been put up on Oct. 26.
Cooper Union had planned to apply for a permit to display the banner again, but not until after yesterday, when the Ukrainian community in the nearby East Village planned to hold events commemorating the famine, Travis said. But the school abandoned the effort after being told that banners can’t block windows because of fire hazards.
The controversy comes less than six months after a Roman Catholic group protested a Cooper Union art exhibition that included what the group considered vulgar depictions of religious symbols such as a crucifix and a rosary.
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