A Yale University art student who has claimed that she videotaped her own self-induced abortions will not be allowed to display an art project about the abortions unless she acknowledges that the project is “fiction,” university administrators announced today.
The project, by Aliza Shvarts, a senior art major at Yale, started an uproar on the campus and in the blogosphere, and a debate over whether her project should be protected by artistic freedom. It is supposed to go on display tomorrow in Yale’s Holcombe T. Green Jr. Hall. Ms. Shvarts has created confusion and angered Yale officials by telling Yale’s student newspaper that the abortions really happened, but then acknowledging to administrators that the project was merely “performance art.”
Ms. Shvarts has told the Yale Daily News, in interviews and in an
