On February 8 we published an alert that a Lawrence, KS “artist,” Amber Hansen, was planning a chicken slaughter “art”
exhibit sponsored by the University of Kansas's Spencer Museum of Art:
Protest Chicken Slaughter “Art” Project in Lawrence, Kansas.
http://www.upc-online.org/entertainment/120208chicken_slaughter_art.html
Comments and letters posted to the Spencer Museum Facebook page and The Kansas City Star
(http://www.kansascity.com/2012/02/17/3436536/art-project-destined-to-end-in.html)
overwhelmingly oppose the “Story of Chickens: A Revolution.” Check out those Comments!
Quick background: Five chickens are scheduled to be wheeled around town in a fancy coop starting March 30. On April 21, the coop is scheduled
to close and the birds are to be slaughtered in a communal bloodfest celebrating “respect for animals” at the Lawrence Percolator, a nonprofit project space of the Lawrence Corporation for the Advancement of Visual Arts. (Note: Restaurant
715, originally set to prepare the dead chickens for the meal, has canceled out. Yay!)
What Should I Do?
Please urge The Percolator to cancel its agreement to provide space for the chickens to be slaughtered at its location. Urge The
Percolator to withdraw its support from and involvement with this project. The only reason The Percolator, Spencer Museum, Rockets Grants,
Amber Hansen and their allies can get away with calling this fascist project “art” is because society abuses farmed animals with
impunity and vested interests can exploit the total helplessness of chickens especially and clothe their cruelty in cheap rhetoric about
“humane” farming, “free expression,” and fostering “public dialogue.” Tell The Percolator to WAKE UP AND
SMELL THE COFFEE. Sticking knives in animals’ throats is Not art. And it certainly is not
“revolutionary.”
Contact:
Lawrence Percolator
Attn: Eric Farnsworth
Email: lawrencepercolator@gmail.com
Website: www.lcava.org
Post a Comment at: The Story of Chickens
Also Contact:
Dr. Saralyn Reece Hardy, Director of the Spencer Museum of Art and an original Advisory Committee Member of The Percolator. Email: SRH@KU.EDU. Copy all correspondences to:
spencerart@ku.edu.
From UPC’s letter to Dr. Hardy earlier this week:
Dear Dr. Hardy:
Opponents of the Spencer Museum’s chicken butchery project have sought to address this matter in a respectful, articulate way, while
maintaining the urgency and gravity of the situation. We have hoped to stimulate your conscience and your compassion as well as your devotion
to art as opposed to “art” and cheap, cruel spectacle.
We still hope and expect that you will choose to do the right thing, and cancel the project. At the same time, please bear in mind that our
eloquent, impassioned, and reasoned arguments, versus the lame justifications of the Spencer Museum, will be permanently posted on the Internet
on behalf of compassion and justice for animals in the arts.
If you go through with this non-artistic, morally bankrupt public spectacle of traveling chicken coops and killing of innocent birds as an
“artistic” statement, the Spencer Museum will not only be crafting its own identity but you are setting a precedent for other
institutions to act with similar impunity. Is this the kind of a world you celebrate in your capacity as director of the Spencer Museum?
Is this a legacy that you want?
It’s pathetic that, in addition to all of the obvious sources of animal cruelty, we must devote our time to an institution such as yours.
But since this is how it is, we will persist because we care about animals and mercy and justice as well as about art.
Karen Davis, PhD, President of United Poultry Concerns
For our three previous alerts about this snuff “art” exhibit,
see Latest Alerts at
www.upc-online.org/alerts/.
