Dartmouth Removes Student Artwork From Black Family Visual Arts Center After One Week
A student-made installation at Dartmouth College has become the latest flashpoint in the university’s long-running debate over Leon Black’s name on campus. The work, Something Rotten, was removed on April 14 from the Black Family Visual Arts Center, just one week after the exhibition Storage Room opened.
Created by Dartmouth students Erik Siegel and Roan Wade, the piece consisted of 20 moldy beef sticks arranged into a smiley face. It had been installed over the center’s dedication wall, which recognizes Leon Black, Debra Black, and other members of the Black family. The BFVAC opened in 2012 after a $48 million gift from Leon Black and Debra Black, whose ties to Jeffrey Epstein have been widely documented.
Wade, who identifies as an anti-capitalist artist and activist, said the work was intended to draw attention to a “pervasive culture of sexual violence and gender-based violence at Dartmouth” that predates Black’s time at the college and continues today. Tricia Treacy, chair of Dartmouth’s studio art department, said the problem was not the work itself but its placement on the dedication wall rather than in the Nearburg Gallery, where the rest of Storage Room was on view.
The removal has intensified pressure on Dartmouth to revisit campus naming. Students and alumni have pushed to strip Black’s name from the art center, and the board of trustees is expected to take up the issue at its June meeting. Student groups, including the Student Government Association and the Student and Presidential Committee on Sexual Assault, have criticized the pace of the college’s response, arguing that a review of “naming across campus” is too slow for the scale of the controversy.
The episode underscores how contemporary art on campus can quickly become inseparable from institutional memory, donor legacy, and the politics of accountability.
