LEWISTON — The three art directors for Bates, Bowdoin and Colby colleges Monday released a joint statement criticizing Gov. Paul LePage’s decision to remove a controversial mural from the Labor Department building in Augusta last month.

They said the removal raises issues of censorship, historical revisionism and artists’ rights, and they took the administration to task for offering one anonymous letter as justification for the removal.

“Marshalling, as evidence of the mural’s ostensible offense, one anonymous letter equating the Maine labor mural with North Korean propaganda demonstrates a disregard for consensus, due process and transparency,” said  the release, signed by Bates’ Dan Mills, Bowdoin’s Kevin Salatino and Colby’s Sharon Corwin.

The mural, 11 panels commissioned by the state in 2007 and painted by Maine artist Judy Taylor, covered the walls of a small waiting room in the Labor Department building until March 26. LePage ordered the mural taken down, citing what he felt was the mural’s anti-business feel. The private owner of the building has said the panels were safely stored in one of the building’s rooms until a permanent home can be found. 

The complete text of the release follows:

“The recent removal of the Maine Labor Mural Cycle documenting key labor events in the history of our state … raises issues of critical importance to those of us who believe in the importance of public art. Among these issues are censorship, historical revisionism, and artists’ rights.

“We deplore censorship in any form, but we particularly deplore the censoring of art. Those who may claim that the Maine Labor Mural Cycle is merely being transferred to another, more appropriate, locale, and neither destroyed nor censored, miss the point. Destruction takes many forms, vilification (even by innuendo) being one of them. … Moving the work from the site for which it was made to a site for which it was not made is simply destruction by another name, its “dislocation” intended to strip it of its force, immediacy, and relevance.

“The situation has been exacerbated by the clandestine nature of the mural’s transference to an originally undisclosed, and still uncertain, location. Removed without, to our knowledge, the supervision of either a trained art handler or a museum registrar (or, for that matter, the artist herself), we neither know nor are able to assess its current condition.

“The desire to silence the provocations of art by those who find those provocations offensive has a long and dispiriting history.

“The Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Colby College Museum of Art, and Bates College Museum of Art, dedicated as we are to the preservation and interpretation of the past through its cultural artifacts, to the often discomfiting dialogue between the past and the present, and to art’s immutable power, are heartened by the passionate response by Maine’s lively and committed arts community to the mural cycle’s removal. We unreservedly add our voices to theirs.”

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