In Their Own Words: Christa Noel Robbins
Christa Noel Robbins teaches art history at the University of Virginia. On February 26, 2024, she wrote an email, which was forwarded to The Jefferson Council, explaining her reasons for canceling class. The art historian said she was motivated by solidarity with the "Yes on Divest Walkout." The walkout organizers endorse a student referendum demanding that managers of the University of Virginia $14 billion endowment purge its holdings of corporations benefiting from business with the "apartheid" regime of Israel.
Dear Class,
I'm writing to let you know that I am canceling class today in solidarity with the "Yes on Divest Walkout" that the UVA Apartheid Divest coalition organized. I realize this issue is polarizing right now, so I want to take a moment to let you know why I made this choice. As we've discussed in class, cultural heritage and community integrity has everything to do with place. You just finished watching Ai Weiwei's Human Flow, where you saw that Gaza (a strip of land around 25 miles long and no more than 7.5 miles wide at its widest point, that once held over 2 million people) has been under a blockade since 2007. You heard Hagai El-Ad, an Israeli LGBT and human rights activist, describe Gaza as a "Third World country on the way to collapse" and you saw a group of young students describing Gaza as a prison and expressing their regret that they cannot travel the world because they cannot freely move in and out of Gaza.
My decision to cancel class comes from my own sympathies with the people of Palestine and out of a desire to see them live freely. I realize you have your own views and I want to assure you that I have no expectation that your views align with mine and that I welcome discussion about these issues. If you would like to know more about the divestment campaign, there will be students discussing it on the steps of the Rotunda today at 2pm. I look forward [to] seeing you on Wednesday where we will discuss Ai Weiwei's film about refugees and Decolonizing Architecture/Art Residency (please read the two short articles I posted before classes). We will also discuss the final on Wednesday.
See you soon and be well.
Christa
Here is how Robbins describes her scholarly interests on her art-department home page:
As an art historian, I’m interested in the many ways that works of art can bring us into close contact with history. I mean this quite literally. As objects that come to us from the past, works of art offer us a unique opportunity to have a material and even sensual encounter with history. In my own research, my observations of the material details of art bring me closer to the concerns, questions, and values that were being worked through in a particular historical moment. I have spent a great deal of time, for example, looking closely at abstract paintings from the 1950s and 1960s in order to get a better sense of how artists participated in debates over the value of creativity and individuality in a historical moment where the very notion of identity was in question.
That description provides no tell-tale signs of intersectional-oppression paradigm so prevalent at UVA, but Robbins has been inclined at times to interpret art through the prism of feminism and white male privilege. In the clip below, these topics arise in questions she presented to artist Neal Rock in a 2021 UVA Department of Art video.
I was thinking about some feminist work and in particular Hannah Wilke. ... Hannah Wilke's starification, for those of you who don't know it, in '75 she did a performance where she asked viewers to come into a gallery and chew bubble gum, and she would form them into these very purposefully vaginal little sculptures and then she stuck them all over her body, and eventually it turned [into] this editorial photo piece. ...
I also maybe just wanted a little provocatively have you respond a little bit to the kind of privilege that comes from being a white man who can dissociate his body from his sculptures in a way that a lot of artists can't....
In our "In Their Own Words" series, The Jefferson Council refrains from making editorial observations about the subjects' scholarly interests, preferring to let them speak for themselves. However, given Robbins' action in canceling class, some questions do occur to us:
Last year the Ryan administration issued a directive to faculty members forbidding them from canceling classes to allow students to attend the Students for Justice in Palestine rallies. Is that policy still in force?
If so, have any violators of the policies been disciplined or even reprimanded?
How does a class in art history justify showing "Human Flow," a 2017 film about the global refugee crisis with a heavy emphasis on the Israel-Gaza conflict?
Will the recently appointed religious diversity task force ask whether such one-sided political advocacy contributes to a hostile environment for Jewish students at UVA?
