http://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/upimage/VF_I18G_017.pdf

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Part of White Only' Signs in Art Project at SUNY Buffalo Draw Concern, September 19, 2015

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The New York

Times

http://nyti.ms/1 Lp51o8

N.Y. / REGION

'White Only' Signs in Art Project at SUNY
Buffalo Draw Concern
By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS

SEPT. 19, 2015

A graduate student at the State University of New York at Buffalo hung "black
only" and "white only" signs around campus this week as part of an art project,
which she said was intended to provoke a searing conversation.
And indeed it did. The signs shocked students and jolted the university at
a time when discussions about race and race relations have been prominent in
the news.
The student, Ashley Powell, who is enrolled in the university's Art
Department, began posting the signs, made of cardboard and paper, shortly
before noon on Wednesday, she said, hanging 17 of them in several buildings
on campus, next to elevators, water fountains, benches and bathrooms.
Within about an hour, university police began receiving phone calls from
alarmed students, according to a student newspaper, The Spectrum. Some
students called the signs traumatic and said they made them feel unsafe.

■ 6(31) God

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@JVMES_BVTTLE

This was posted on a public bathroom at UB. Not
only is this a hate crime, but it is also an act of
terrorism.
2:03 PM - 16 Sep 2015
785

509

At a meeting of the Black Student Union on Wednesday night where
students talked about the signs, Ms. Powell, who is black, announced that she

was responsible for them. She described her project, called "Our Compliance,"
as an effort "to expose white privilege."
"Our society still actively maintains racist structures that benefit one
group of people, and oppress another," Ms. Powell said in a statement. "Forty
to fifty years ago, these structures were visibly apparent and physically
graspable through the existence of signs that looked exactly like the signs I put
up. Today these signs may no longer exist, but the system that they once
reinforced still does."
Her statement continued: "I apologize for the extreme trauma, fear and
actual hurt and pain these signs brought about. I apologize if you were hurt,
but I do not apologize for what I did."
Ms. Powell, a 25-year-old from Chicago, is in her second year of a two-year
art program at the university. As part of a class called "Installation: Urban
Space," students were asked to create an installation near the campus arts
center about time.
For people who are not white, Ms. Powell said in an interview, time has, in
m:any ways, stood still.
Since the deaths of Eric Garner on Staten Island and Michael Brown in
Ferguson, Mo., both unarmed black men who died at the hands of police,
"black lives matter" has become a rallying cry, and issues of race, especially in
policing, have commanded significant attention.
On Friday, John DellaContrada, a spokesman for the university, released a
statement in response to Ms. Powell's project.
"On a daily basis our faculty and students explore sensitive and difficult
topics in an environment that values freedom of expression, and this week's
student art project is generating considerable dialogue," Mr. DellaContrada
said. "The university is encouraging our community to discuss how we

negotiate the boundaries of academic freedom in a safe and inclusive
environment."

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