Scenes from NSCAD student weekend on organizing and art

The student union of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, or SUNSCAD, had planned two days of teach-ins, art-making and discussions focused on student organizing for their art-college peers—to be hosted at their Granville Street Campus last weekend. Their booking to use NSCAD space Nov 2-3 was initially approved. Then, their university president refused the request.

NSCAD president Peggy Shannon wrote “I am denying the request to hold this event at NSCAD, and it must be moved off of our campuses. I do this also to ensure the safety and security of all our students, which this event does not support.”

Shannon wrote that “the room booking was initially approved in error” since it lacked “details about the specific itinerary and invited participants from outside NSCAD’s community.” She wrote this after seeing an Instagram post of the weekend’s programming, its association with the Students for the Liberation of Palestine-Kjipuktuk and the name Al Zeitoun.

The SLPK is the coalition of students from five Halifax universities—including NSCAD—who held a 78-day encampment, named Al Zeitoun University, on Dalhousie campus to pressure their university administrators to disclose and divest financial ties with Israel’s occupation of Palestine and war in Gaza. NSCAD has not acknowledged its students involvement in the encampment that was shut down by police officers and security guards on July 29.

SUNSCAD president Owen Skeen replied to Shannon’s email that “the students of NSCAD have the right to use NSCAD campuses for educational purposes,” and said “I cannot ignore the obvious racism and islamophobia in your statement that by silencing Palestinian NSCAD students, and deplatforming Arab students and professors, you are ‘ensure(ing) the safety and security of all our students, which this event does not support.’”

He wrote that “speaking about Palestine on our campuses does not necessitate any safety or security threat to students. We are all here to keep students safe.”

The administration then told Skeen that the event could potentially still happen—though not as scheduled. Instead, it would have to be insured, have added security, be shortened to one day instead of two and require a list of participants “should any issues come up.”

The administration wrote “the approval was given in error, as the understanding was that all the information had been shared. Once it was found that we had not received the full program, the approval was withdrawn.”

The full program, as listed on Instagram Oct 26, was what caused the reversal.

The program listed 11 different educational sessions hosted by SUNSCAD “along with the [SLPK]” and invited “all NSCAD students to come out.” Sessions included: art building; linocut t-shirt printing and Palestinian cross-stitching led by NSCAD student Nour Beydoun.

It listed three sessions led by professors from other Halifax universities: one on student organizing in Kjipuktuk by Mount Saint Vincent University professor, El Jones; one teach-in on the suppression of free speech on Palestine by Saint Mary’s University professor emeritus and Independent Jewish Voices member, Larry Haiven, and one teach-in on decolonization in Palestine and Canada with Dalhousie University professor Ajay Parasram.

It listed four sessions led by the SLPK—which NSCAD students are part of—including a discussion on organizing in Kjipuktuk and a workshop on the roles within the student movement.

Based on this schedule, the administration told Skeen that the weekend “was not marketed as a SUNSCAD event but rather hosted by Al Zeitoun University with co-sponsors” and, thus, should be considered “a public event, an external event…covered by the External Space Policy.” However, this policy applies to events where the majority of participants are non-NSCAD students.

The administration cited the Canadian Society for Education Through Art Conference that happened in July at NSCAD’s Port Campus as an example of an external event, or the category of event that this SUNSCAD weekend—it was said—should fall under. The CSAE is a national membership-based organization of art educators and students and is separate from NSCAD. Its four-day conference in July was not created for-and-by NSCAD students, but was open to CSAE members, students, retirees, teachers on call and all Nova Scotians. Registration fees ranged from $150 to $350. NSCAD was one of 10 sponsors of the conference. Not the same as the student’s weekend.

Skeen told The Coast that SUNSCAD executive members met with members of the administration on Thursday Oct 31 to discuss whether their original booking could be restored.

He says the administration wanted SUNSCAD to agree to their terms to change the weekend’s schedule. The union refused. Instead, students held the weekend outside in the brisk November air.

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SUNSCAD had blankets, hot drinks and hand warmers to give to roughly 50 people—the majority of whom were NSCAD students—who came to sit, learn and discuss in chairs on the cobblestone street outside of NSCAD’s campus on Granville Street.

A NSCAD student and SUNSCAD staff member named Ziggy told The Coast, “if [the administration] thought that cancelling our booking would make the event not happen, they were totally wrong—and I don’t know why they would think that. Precedent has shown we’re willing to sit in the cold if it means we get the learning that they’re not giving us.”

Ziggy said that the administration’s response to the event shows the school is scared of its students, “first and foremost—they’re scared of students using the space to do learning that is about what is actually happening. They’re scared that students are organizing.”

Ziggy said it also made him reflect on “the hypocrisy of NSCAD as an institution that claims to want to decolonize itself, but as soon as we talk about occupation and the genocide of an indigenous population, they clam up. They get defensive.

“This is supposedly a liberal institution but they’re scared of students actually wanting to make change—and I think that tells you all you need to know about where NSCAD is at.”

Last Saturday Nov 2 at 9am, Al Zeitoun weekend began. It lasted until early evening Sunday.

“I was really pleased with the number of people who came out, even in the cold,” said Ziggy. “The talks were phenomenal and the atmosphere in general was really positive. Overall, it was a great success.”

Skeen told The Coast that there were added security guards at NSCAD’s front doors on both Saturday and Sunday, and that, until Sunday afternoon, the doors from Granville Street into NSCAD’s campus weren’t unlocked by student key cards as they normally would have been. He also said that faculty, staff and alumni of NSCAD have sent messages of support for the union’s event and disappointment in the administration’s response to it.

Jones—associate professor at MSVU journalist, author, researcher poet, activist and prison abolitionist—led an outdoor teach-in on Saturday entitled “Student Organizing in Kjipuktuk.”

“I taught at NSCAD and, ironically, what I taught at NSCAD was the history of social movements and art,” said Jones. She said the material she was teaching then and the workshop she taught Saturday were “essentially the exact same material about how art and student movements relate,” which now is considered “too threatening to be inside the building, so we have to sit out here in blankets to talk.”

El Jones leading a teach-in on student organizing at SUNSCAD’s Al Zeitoun Weekend on Saturday Nov 2 outside NSCAD’s Granville Street Campus. Credit: Clem Oliver

In her teach-in, Jones discussed: the history of NSCAD as an institution with foundations in Victorian-era, transnational colonialism; early student protests at the university in the ‘60s over the exclusion of women artists and students from a NSCAD-hosted international art conference; and the ensuing identity-switch in the late ‘60s to NSCAD becoming an internationally-recognized school of conceptual art thinking under then-president Gary Neill Kennedy.

“The irony of your [administration] at this point suggesting that a teach-in is dangerous for NSCAD is really ironic when you look at how NSCAD is forming itself [in Kennedy’s era] as an internationally meaningful art college,” said Jones. “NSCAD is now going to be this political art college where art has relevancy and meaning, and they’re bringing in political conceptual artists who are doing political work—and this is how NSCAD is founded. In 2024, we can think about what that means for an art college with a board [of directors] that is now scared of teaching and learning.”

In connection with the school’s refusal to allow the weekend to happen on campus, Jones talked about the resignation of prominent art historian, educator and author Charmaine Nelson from NSCAD in early 2022.

Nelson had been recruited by then-president Aoife Mac Namara to found and direct the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery at NSCAD.

She left soon after joining the school, citing of a lack of support from the institution discrimination at work and the school blocking access to her own grant funding to hire student research assistants. Mac Namara was mysteriously removed shortly after Nelson came to NSCAD in 2020, which Nelson spoke out against at the time, as did others in the NSCAD community. NSCAD’s current president, Shannon, joined the school in December 2021, shortly before Nelson left.

Referring to Shannon’s email to Skeen refusing SUNSCAD’s booking, Jones pointed out in her teach-in, as SUNSCAD had, “the underlying racism and Islamophobia that comes with deeming certain types of information and teaching and learning as threatening to the institution and without even articulating what it is that you think would be threatening.”

The weekend wrapped with an art-making session led by NSCAD student Nour Beydoun on Sunday afternoon. Beydoun, who is Lebanese-Palestinian, led about 20 participants in a Tatreez, or Palestinian cross-stitching, workshop. This was one of the scheduled events that the administration refused to allow on NSCAD campus.

“Sometimes people need to change the way they’re learning,” Beydoun told The Coast. “Art is another way of learning. It was really nice to end [the weekend] with that and to make sure to celebrate Palestinian art and tradition.”

Tatreez, Beydoun said, is cross-stitching with Palestinian motifs and has been practiced for thousands of years. “It’s a deeply cultural art form that Palestinians have used in all of Palestine, and all of the motifs come from different areas. They replicate agriculture, so there’s motifs that are stars but also trees, plants, flowers and birds.”

Beydoun started practicing Tatreez a few months ago. Her sister learned how to do it at pro-Palestinian events over the past year and taught Beydoun, who then taught students on Sunday.

“It really is a communal art form because, for thousands of years in Palestine, [Tatreez] would be something that women do with each other, friends and family in the community, and they would stitch it on to thobes—which are Palestinian dresses—and they would be worn for traditional events such as weddings. It’s a way to bring people together, and I think we really emulated that during this last Sunday.”

As to whether she was disappointed in her school’s response to the weekend, Beydoun said “I think it’s only right to say yes—of course. They didn’t allow an event that was very safe, and was all about spreading knowledge. My workshop was just us playing with thread and fabric.”

Beydoun said she was upset on Friday “and a little bit on Saturday because we were stuck in the cold, but when Sunday came, I was feeling really enthusiastic and optimistic, because the community really came through.” On Sunday, too, the side doors to the Granville Mall were unlocked by student key cards, so people could sit indoors and stitch warmly.

Beydoun said one thing she realized that weekend was that “all of these people who are participating are also super-interested in learning and supporting the cause.

“It can sometimes feel hopeless when people in positions of power don’t support it and try to cancel these events, but then the turnout always makes you feel a lot more hopeful.”

The Coast reached out to NSCAD for comment on the weekend being held outdoors and on students’ disappointment in Shannon’s email, but as of publication time has not heard back.