Burned/Banned/Censored

by Eva R. Cohen

20"x15"x3" • colored pencil, ink, marker $$400

My piece deals explicitly with books that have been burned, banned, and censored in the US. It is designed as a triptych, mimicking the standard Medieval altarpiece form, and each panel contains central characters from a book that has been prominently burned, banned, or censored in this country. The left panel, entitled "Burned," illustrates Harry Potter, the eponymous central character from the Harry Potter books; these children's novels--decried as satanic by many fundamentalist Christians--have been publicly burned at dozens of churches around the US in the past 10 years. The central panel, "Banned," illustrates both Celie--the narrator of The Color Purple--and two chin-strap penguins--the heroes of the recently-published children's book And Tango Makes Three. Both of these texts have been banned by school districts around the country for, among other reasons, their depictions of 'homosexual activity'/gay relationships. The right-hand panel, entitled "Censored," depicts Guy Montag, the "fireman"/book-burner who is the central character in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451; while this is a book which perhaps more than any other warns against the dangers of censorship, it was ironically censored by publishers--who printed an expurgated version for classroom use--until the 1980s. Burning, banning, and censoring books, in my mind, makes their heroes/central characters almost candidates for modern martyrdom. While in the United States we no longer have legal right to burn dissidents at stake or crucify the people who don't agree with us, people seek to express their opposition to an ideological position by venting their rage at the texts written by those they conceive as their ideological opponents. We do not burn J.K. Rowling, but we quite literally burn Harry Potter. Through depicting the central characters from frequently-challenged books in the manner of medieval icons, highlighting their connections to the stories and experiences of early Christian martyrs, I seek to both underscore historical parallels and move the viewer to reflect more deeply on these characters. It is, after all, their stories that we ultimately deny in burning, banning, and censoring works of fiction.