Daily Newsletter

The War Against Imagination

The SAIC cracks down on a professor’s thought experiment and the Obama Presidential Center embodies a nostalgic idea of public life.

Hyperallergic

June 12, 2026 — 4 min read

An art therapy professor asked her students to imagine a therapeutic treatment plan for a queer Arab woman who feared retaliation under the Trump administration for supporting pro-Palestine protests. For that, the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (SAIC), one of the foremost art schools in the country, placed her on leave. It’s a prime example of the rot authoritarianism introduces into democratic society — something we have to “fight at every turn,” Editor-at-Large Hrag Vartanian writes in an opinion piece today.

Mere minutes away from the SAIC, the Obama Presidential Center, opening to the public on Juneteenth, feels like a dispatch from an alternate timeline — a vision of public life built around pluralism, civic responsibility, hope, Lori Waxman writes today. If only that world extended beyond its granite walls.

—Lisa Yin Zhang, associate editor

They Want to Control Our Imagination

When oppression works its way into society, it does so by limiting our imagination first, stopping us from finding our way out of the tyranny of control by forcing us to curb what is possible, what we may need and not yet know.

The recent story coming out of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) that Savneet Talwar, the director of its graduate art therapy program, was placed on leave after she asked students to “create a mock therapeutic treatment plan for a queer Arab woman who sympathized with pro-Palestinian protests and feared retaliation under the Trump administration” is a prime example of this decay that authoritarianism can insert into a democratic society, one that we have to fight at every turn. | Hrag Vartanian

Tough Stuff: Women in The American Glass Studio

Highlighting works from the 1960s through today, this survey at the Corning Museum of Glass celebrates the legacies of women artists who helped shape the Studio Glass Movement in the US.

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Queer Elders Series

Sarah Schulman’s Four Decades of Lesbian Fiction

“Nothing stops me except the publishing industry,” quipped the novelist and AIDS historian, who cut her teeth as an East Village journalist writing for queer and feminist papers. | Lakshmi Rivera Amin

A self-portrait by the painter Clarence Heyward on display at the Houston Museum of African American Culture was intentionally defaced last month by visitors, the Texas institution said this week.
Along the Charleston waterfront, the International African American Museum has furloughed all its staff — including leadership — due to challenging financial conditions.