Law School That Covered Slavery Murals Didn’t Violate Artist’s Rights, Court Rules

For the past two years, administrators at Vermont Law and Graduate School have been locked in a legal battle with the artist who painted a set of murals for the school in the 1990s. Painted on the interior walls of one building, the two murals depict the brutality of slavery, including a slave market.

The administrators moved to conceal the murals, which some students believed depicted Black people in racist ways. But the artist, a white man named Sam Kerson, sued to block the school from hiding his work, saying the concealment violated federal law.

Under the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, artists have certain “moral rights” to their work, which include the right to prevent art from being destroyed, modified or distorted without their consent. Kerson’s lawyers had argued that the school’s installation of acoustic panels was equivalent to modifying, and even destroying, the 24-foot-long murals.

A federal appeals court rejected Kerson’s argument last week, ruling that “ensconcing a work of art behind a barrier neither modifies nor destroys the work.”

“Modification, as conventionally understood, does not include concealing a work of art behind a solid barrier, assuming the work remains intact while hidden from view,” a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said in its decision, which affirmed a district court ruling.