The removal of a controversial artwork in the exhibition “Storage Room,” which was curated by art students Erik Siegel and Angeles Juarez-Ruiz, is causing quite the stir beyond the walls of Dartmouth College’s Black Family Visual Arts Center (BFVAC). The art center opened on Dartmouth’s campus in 2012, thanks to a $48 million gift from billionaire financier and art collector—and 1973 Dartmouth alum—Leon Black and his wife Debra, whose friendship and business dealings with Jeffrey Epstein are well documented.
Black stepped down as the board chair of the Museum of Modern Art in 2021, after three years in the role. He has remained on the museum’s board, however, and as recently as in March of this year, former MoMA director Glenn Lowery referred to Black as a “solid trustee.”
The artwork in question, titled Something Rotten and attributed to Siegel and fellow art student Roan Wade, is made up of 20 moldy beef sticks arranged into a smiley face formation over the art center’s dedication wall, which acknowledges Leon and Debra Black and four other Black family members, two of whom (Benjamin and Alexander) also graduated from Dartmouth, in 2006 and 2011, respectively.
Something Rotten was removed on April 14, one week after the show opened, according to The Dartmouth. The artwork’s wall label includes the phrase “Ah man, the guy loved jerky. You didn’t know?” A search of the Epstein Files reveals over 300 references to “jerky.” The Dartmouth quotes an email from Epstein with the subject line “Leon Black’s office address,” sent on Nov. 16, 2012 (two months after the BFVAC opened): “Jojo is here and will walk the jerky over to Jeffrey. . . Please you just go on your own to Leon’s office. Melanie is Leon’s assistant. I will alert Melanie you are coming to see Jeffrey. Reply back please! :)”
Roan Wade, one of the two artists responsible for the installation, identifies as an anti-capitalist artist and activist on their website. They told The Dartmouth that Something Rotten is meant to call attention to a “pervasive culture of sexual violence and gender-based violence at Dartmouth that has existed long before Leon Black was a student here and long after.”
Tricia Treacy, chair of Dartmouth’s studio art department, said that the problem was the location of the piece on the BFVAC’s dedication wall rather than in the center’s Nearburg Gallery, where the other artworks in “Storage Room” were on view. It is, however, hard to image the piece having the same impact on a blank gallery wall. The Dartmouth was unable to confirm if a photograph of the work in situ is in fact now on view in the Nearburg Gallery.
The artwork is part of an ongoing effort—by both current students and alumni organizations—to remove Black’s name from the art center, an idea the college’s board of trustees says it will begin to address at its next meeting in June, according to the Valley News.
Many groups, however, feel that merely committing to study “naming across campus” is too slow and tepid a response. “Regardless of whether Epstein held an official title, files confirm that within his capacity as director and personal consultant to Black, Epstein advised and planned Black’s donations to Dartmouth,” said the college’s Student Government Association and the Student and Presidential Committee on Sexual Assault. “Those donations are a financial scar on this institution.”
