You Did Not Listen

In the late autumn of 2024, my wife Erin and I were invited to paint a mural in a bathroom.

The invitation came from Anne-Marie Sawkins, an independent curator working on what would become the final exhibition in the Trout Museum of Art’s old building in downtown Appleton — A Creative Place: Art from Northeastern Wisconsin 1940 to Present. The stipend was two hundred dollars. The bathroom was small. We accepted.

There was no brief beyond the room itself. We were asked to paint a bathroom; what to paint was left entirely to us. We thought about it for a long time. What a bathroom is. What you do in one. Privacy. The body. The strangeness of putting any image at all in a room that exists for moments of vulnerability. We started talking about the Panopticon — Bentham’s prison design in which surveillance is the architecture itself. We started talking about the Fourteenth Amendment, which the Court has read for half a century as the constitutional ground of bodily autonomy and, in recent years, has been reading otherwise. We talked about the things that happen in bathrooms because of what the law has done to other rooms — abortions sought in secret because shame is the cost of being seen. We talked about queer surveillance, about the bathroom as the contested architecture of who gets to be private.

We painted the walls. We painted the ceiling. Black and white, ink-style, dense. A panopticon eye anchoring the left wall. Two figures on the right covering their eyes and their ears, the gesture of the three monkeys, inverted — not see-no-evil but evil-keeps-watch. The wall label, which we wrote ourselves, called the piece The Bathroom (2025, acrylic on wallboard) and named the Fourteenth Amendment by name.

Sawkins came to see the work before the show opened. She was appalled.

She asked us to change parts of it. We said no. We offered her the right to alter the work herself, but said we would not modify it. We said she was welcome to take whatever further action she felt she needed to take.

She did. When the show opened, our piece was the only one in the exhibition to receive a content warning. The sign, posted on the bathroom door, listed the themes the museum found alarming: “abortion or miscarriage, bodily autonomy, personal choice, privacy, shame, surveillance, and censorship.” It announced an age recommendation of eighteen and up. It directed visitors who would prefer not to see the work to alternate restrooms on the second and third floors.

The warning quoted the wall label almost exactly. Our statement framed those themes as a meditation on a constitutional right. The museum’s warning framed them as a hazard. Same words, opposite registers.

A friend of mine was also asked to paint a bathroom mural for the show. He called me afterward, alarmed by what Sawkins had begun asking him to do. After our piece went up, she had started requiring the other bathroom-mural artists to submit concept sketches before painting and to sign an agreement not to post images of their work to social media until after the show closed.

His mural was a beautiful, intricate flower piece. It received no content warning. The museum has since commissioned him to paint a permanent bathroom mural in their new building.

Same brief. Same curator. Same museum. Opposite outcomes.

I tell the story not to indict him. He made a different aesthetic choice, and that is his right. I tell it to make a point about the institution. What was being selected for was visible in two outcomes side by side. The flower stayed. The Fourteenth Amendment was quarantined.

Christina Turner, the executive director of the Trout, said in private — and I think she meant it as honesty rather than defense — that she was in the middle of raising money for the new building and was afraid of what donors would think. I take her at her word. I think she was telling the truth. I think this truth is the load-bearing fact of the whole episode, and that everything else followed from it.

In June of this year, the Trout’s website made it clear what the institution had become comfortable saying out loud about itself. The Trout, together with Appleton Downtown Inc. and the venture-capital accelerator gener8tor, announced the Creative Professionals Talent Recruitment Initiative — a Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation-backed program that will spend $12,500 grants, plus relocation stipends, housing support, down-payment assistance, and subsidized studios, to recruit twenty creative professionals to Appleton over the next several years. From outside Wisconsin.

The same Christina Turner is quoted in the press release. “Investing in art and artists helps create a more vibrant community.”

I do not think this is hypocrisy in any straightforward sense. I think it is a single selection function operating in two costumes. The institution that would not stand behind a two-hundred-dollar mural it commissioned from local artists — once the work asked something difficult of its donors — is now front-of-house for a program that will spend significantly more public money to recruit replacement artists from places where the recruits do not yet have any institutional history. The selection criterion is unchanged. Once it ran as curatorial pre-clearance. Now it runs as workforce development. The question, in both costumes, is which artists the donors will fund.

What happened in our bathroom is one small local instance of a national pattern. Through 2025 and into 2026, larger institutions have been under direct political pressure to soften, modify, or cancel work that engages bodily autonomy, queer identity, or anything else the current administration has decided to make a target.

In March of 2025, the administration issued an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, directing the Vice President to oversee the removal of what the order called divisive narratives from Smithsonian exhibitions and programming. The pressure landed hardest on the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the American Art Museum. Later that spring, after the President publicly demanded her firing, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet, resigned. In January of 2025, a separate executive order on what the administration called gender ideology prompted the National Endowment for the Arts to rewrite its grant criteria, requiring applicants to certify they would not promote work that conflicted with the order. A federal court in Rhode Island blocked the certification requirement later that year, but only after a cycle of applications had already been chilled by it — the rule worked even after it was struck down.

What happens at the federal level travels. Regional museums whose budgets depend on donors who watch federal cues, or on state funding from legislatures that mirror those cues, begin quietly modifying programming. Shows are pulled before they are announced. Exhibitions go up with new content warnings. Curators are told what their donors will and will not tolerate. Most of this is never reported. The work that does not get made because someone said we shouldn’t right now leaves no trace.

Institutions invite contemporary work to signal contemporary credentials. They panic when contemporary work arrives. They quarantine the work through content warnings and spatial workarounds — the language of hazard rather than exhibition. They impose retroactive process controls on the rest of the cohort. They quietly de-platform the non-compliant artists in future opportunities, and they reward compliance with permanent installations.

The trigger warning on our bathroom door is one small piece of evidence that should be part of the public record of what this period looks like from inside a regional museum. Most artists who experience this are experiencing it in private. Most of the conversations look like the one Erin and I had with Sawkins in the bathroom — short, polite, decisive, off the record.

The art critic Dave Hickey spent decades arguing that the institutional art world had drifted into a self-licensing priesthood — a system in which the value of work was determined less by what it did in the world than by which credentials had blessed it. I am not a Hickey absolutist. His romance with the market was its own kind of selective vision. But the diagnosis was sharp, and I find myself returning to it.

The institution that demands obedience from its artists has revealed its theory of art. It thinks artists are vendors of decor. It is mistaken. Art that has any stakes at all will sometimes ask something of the institution that hosts it. An institution that can only host work that asks nothing is in a position, if it cares to look, to admit what it has become.

Erin and I are not pretty-picture artists. I say this with respect for our friends and colleagues whose work is. I say it as a statement of stance. We are willing to make work that has an argument inside it, including arguments that make donors restless. This is what we are for. It is not a marketing position; it is the whole of the practice.

It is also worth saying clearly: I understand every situation needs curation. We curate our own venue’s window. Not every piece belongs in every room. The argument here is not against curation. It is against the specific move that Sawkins made, which was not curation. She invited the work, accepted the work, and only after the work was painted on her walls did she try to edit its themes because she was newly afraid of what its themes would cost the museum with its donors. That is something else. That has a different name.

This past weekend, Erin and I drove to the Wisconsin Visual Arts Achievement Awards ceremony — a biennial recognition co-presented by the Museum of Wisconsin Art, Wisconsin Visual Artists, and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. Erin received an award for her teaching — she is a high school art teacher in Kewaunee County, and the recognition came through that side of her practice. The three institutions together constitute a separate, statewide recognition surface, operating on different selection criteria from the Trout’s and answerable to different stakeholders.

Anne-Marie Sawkins was also there. She had received an award for A Creative Place — the exhibit that included our bathroom mural.

She approached Erin to chat. Erin said: Don’t you remember me? You wanted to censor our art.

Sawkins said: You did not listen.

I have been turning this sentence over for two days now. Listen — the verb assumes Sawkins had been speaking something worth hearing, something we failed to absorb. As if her objections to the abortion imagery, the surveillance imagery, the queer themes were curatorial wisdom we should have integrated. They were not curatorial wisdom. They were donor-fear, articulated late, after the work was already painted on her walls. We did not fail to listen. We heard her and declined.

But the verb is revealing in a way told would not have been. Sawkins does not believe she censored anything. She believes she offered guidance that should have been received. This, I think, is the chilling effect’s deepest cover. It does not announce itself as censorship to the people doing it. It presents itself, in the donor-captured institution, as professional judgment — the curator’s expertise, the institution’s interests, the wisdom that artists who hope to be invited back should be heeding.

The cascade that followed — the quarantine of the work, the gag clauses for the other artists, the doors that have since closed to us at the Trout — was not retaliation, in Sawkins’s frame. It was the consequence of artists who refused to be guided.

I will not pretend I do not find this clarifying. I do.

Erin added a line to her acceptance speech about discussing artificial intelligence and censorship with her students. She wrote it for Sawkins. I doubt Sawkins recognized it. The line is now in the public record of what Erin’s teaching practice is for.

I want to say one more thing, because I think it is the useful thing.

The Trout could withhold a $200 commission. It could brand the work as a content hazard with a sign on the door. But it could not withhold the coalition that grants the Wisconsin Visual Arts Achievement Awards — the Museum of Wisconsin Art, Wisconsin Visual Artists, and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. Recognition flowed around the Trout, not through it.

This is the answer to the chilling effect at the working-artist level. Not to plead for re-admission to the institution that turned away. To build out enough adjacent institutional surface that no single donor-captured node can withhold your standing.

For artists working in regions like ours — regions where the local arts ecosystem is thin enough that a single museum can function as the validator — this is not personal advice. It is the structural response.

The press release will continue. The recruitment program will recruit. The new building will open, and someone else’s mural will hang in its gift shop. We will keep working. The exhibit has closed; the institution is moving. What happens to the bathroom walls is up to them. What gets remembered about what was painted on them is up to us.

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Don Krumpos · Algoma, Wisconsin · June 2026