Brooklyn Library Under Fire for Truncating Exhibit—Is it Censorship?
-- Library Journal, 3/1/2007
The National Coalition Against Censorship, an alliance that includes, among some 50 organizational members, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Library Association (ALA), and People for the American Way, has criticized the Brooklyn Public Library for censoring an exhibition of art related to a highly controversial local development known as Atlantic Yards. In response, the library acknowledged error in not renaming the exhibit, but staunchly resisted the censorship accusation.
The exhibit, "Footprints: Portrait of a Brooklyn Neighborhood", had earlier been mounted at a local gallery, showing people and landscapes, both literal and figurative, in the path of the 22-acre development, which would include a new basketball arena and 16 towers close to both a transit hub and low-rise neighborhoods. The library exhibition added some pieces and subtracted others, some for logistical reasons but also, the library's Jay Kaplan said, because they "were not so much artistic or documentary in nature as they were political." In a New York Times article, he called a rejected portrait of Daniel Goldstein (above, credit: Sarah Sagarin), spokesman for a community group fighting the development and a plaintiff in an eminent domain suit against the project, "hagiographic." Goldstein's group, Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, in turn charged the library with seeking not to offend Atlantic Yards developer Bruce Ratner, who the library has identified as a possible donor for its long-stalled Visual and Performing Arts Library.
NCAC noted that the library could disclaim responsibility for political opinions expressed in exhibitions and also to seek to include a wider, rather than a smaller, range of opinion—as recommended in the ALA's Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights applied to exhibitions. "We doubt the library would reject a book because it laid out an argument on a matter of social importance no matter how one sided the argument was. Why reject an artwork?" NCAC asked.
Kaplan, the library's director of programs and exhibitions, responded that BPL's exhibition criteria, which predate this show by several years, "stipulate that exhibitions in Central Library's Grand Lobby should either document Brooklyn or pertain to books." He said that the library "curated an exhibition documenting the neighborhood in the path of the Atlantic Yards project," and should have provided a separate title. He stressed that "BPL does not itself take sides or express its own preferences" through its materials, exhibition, and programming. He argued that NCAC's analogy "is specious. Our Central Library houses thousands of books, but it can only house one exhibition in its Grand Lobby at a time." Meanwhile, Freddy's Bar and Backroom, a much-lauded bar and gallery in the path of the project, has mounted an exhibition of the rejected work.
