Complaints filed by BSU about mural

At 3 p.m. Monday, over 25 students, mostly from the Black Student Union, marched from the Indiana Memorial Union to the Student Ethics and Harassment Programs building, 705 E. Seventh St. The students filed grievances with the Racial Incidents Team regarding the Thomas Hart Benton mural in Woodburn Hall Room 100 that depicts members of the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross. \nSenior Shannon Walden, political action chair woman for the BSU, said the group had been told to e-mail their complaints about the mural to the Racial Incidents Team. Walden felt e-mailing the grievances would be far too informal of a way for the group to prove its point.\n"Showing up as a group shows a more powerful dynamic," Walden said. "It shows we're serious, and stand firm behind our position."\nThe primary grievance for the group is not that the painting is exhibited, but that it is currently exhibited out of context and in an improper place.\nIU Art Museum Curator of Works on Paper and co-author of the book "Thomas Hart Benton and the Indiana Murals," Nanette Brewer said the work is out of context in the fact that the original mural has been separated and placed in three different locations on campus due to its size.\nThe two portions of the mural contained in Woodburn 100 were designed slightly different than the other panels displayed at the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress World's Fair Exposition. Because they were the final panels in the mural, they were displayed at a different angle and smaller size to fit onto the end wall, Brewer said.\n"In some ways, they were meant to be read separately (from the rest of the mural)," Brewer said. \nThis was due to the subject matter of the panels, which were meant to represent the contemporary state of Indiana life in 1933. The panel under scrutiny is known officially as Cultural Panel 10, and is meant to correlate with Industrial Panel 10, which is on the opposite wall of Woodburn 100.\nBrewer said Benton was trying to make a statement for tolerance and against bigotry in an era before the civil rights movement. Benton consciously placed a picture of a white nurse tending to a black child in the foreground and the Klan scene in the background.\n"He felt you couldn't grow in the present if you didn\'t learn from the past," Brewer said. \nFor the BSU, organizing a protest and filing grievances marked the second phase of their plan to promote dialogue on the mural. \n"So many groups are perturbed that the mural is still there after 17 years of debate," Walden said.\nThe first phase of the plan was educating people about the mural and organizing them towards a common goal of increasing dialogue about the murals on campus. \n"Because it's become an issue on campus, we feel that we've won in that aspect," said BSU President Marshawn Wolley, a junior. "We know that the University will have to do something now."\nThe next phase will be a meeting to discuss options regarding what will happen to the mural next.\nWalden said the suggestions for the mural's fate range from covering it, moving it to a museum or discontinuing the use of Woodburn 100 as a classroom and turning it into a center of diversity on campus. Also suggested was the possibility of having an African-American artist paint a mural showing a more positive side of Indiana history.\nWalden cited the University of Texas as an example, where a protest over a statue of Confederate soldiers was quelled by the erection of a statue of Martin Luther King Jr.