In times of crisis, free speech feels all the more essential. Amid Operation Metro Surge, and following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, several incidents in the Twin Cities art world have brought free speech into focus, opening up a debate over what qualifies as censorship and what qualifies as curation.

When snow sculptures are disqualified from competitions for alleged political speech, is that censorship? What about when the organizers alter or remove the sculptures? When a theater company cancels a planned production because the plot too closely mirrors traumatic current events, is that censorship, or simply care?

Recent events test what we actually mean when we use those words.

On January 25, a sculpture entered into the Minnesota State Snow Sculpting Competition at the St. Paul Winter Carnival, inscribed with “ICE OUT MN,” was defaced and disqualified. 

On January 26, at the World Snow Sculpting Championship in Stillwater, a sculpture entitled “Call to Arms” – a 10-foot orb of extended arms with words like “resist” and “peace” in sign language – was also removed. 

Robin Anthony-Evanson, president of Stillwater’s chamber of commerce, cited the event’s rules as the reason for removal. In a statement, she said the team didn’t abide by its initial design and didn’t follow the rule banning the use of sculptures “to make political statements.”

Dusty Thune, the team captain behind “Call to Arms,” disputes that. The sculpture, he said, “is more of a humanitarian call or crisis, rather than a political one, because we are under siege with armed government in our cities.”

Related: ICE unrest alters Twin Cities artists, but hardly deters them

Artist Heather Friedli, who was at the winter carnival when the “ICE OUT MN” piece was rendered unviewable, calls what happened censorship. “In the rules, there isn’t anything that states that artworks will be destroyed or defaced if they break the rules,” she said. “We feel that it purposely silences the voices of those artists, especially during this time when our community is really hurting.”

After the actions taken against the sculptures, Thune started a GoFundMe to create a permanent version of his team’s memorial. He also worked with Friedli on a new, temporary snow sculpture erected on private property near Minneapolis’ Lake of the Isles.

Along with a team of artists, they partnered with Heid E. Erdrich, the former poet laureate of Minneapolis and current Camille J. Gage Artist Fellow, to create the piece.

The two-part sculpture re-imagines elements of the two disqualified pieces. It explicitly shares an “ICE OUT” message while also listing the names of individuals who have died in ICE detention or at the hands of federal law enforcement. 

“As a poet and as an artist, it’s tender to me,” Erdrich said. “[Renee Good] is not the first poet who has been harmed by law enforcement. But to me, it just struck a chord that this is somebody who’s never going to be able to come to their voice the way they would have in our community.”

Did the snow sculpture competition officials engage in censorship when they removed the works rather than simply disqualifying them? The artists say they did and many in the local art community agree. But not every decision to pull a piece of art functions the same way.

Take Minneapolis’ Theatre in the Round. Recently, playwright Lauren Gunderson’s name appeared in the Epstein files, causing at least one regional theater to cancel her work from their season. However, Theatre in the Round’s decision to cancel Gunderson’s play “anthropology” pre-dated that revelation. Their decision was not about a playwright’s reputation, but about a plot involving abduction that reverberated too closely with the traumatizing presence of ICE in the Twin Cities.

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In the case of the snow sculpture competitions, many believe the organizers engaged in censorship by silencing artists to avoid political friction. But at Theatre in the Round, the decision seems more about curation – stepping back from a planned show not to silence it, but to avoid inflicting further pain on a community in crisis.

Director Sophie Peyton asked herself a question: Why tell this story now? She wondered if the play could cause harm both to the artists working on it as well as the audiences, she said. So in mid-January, she approached the theater’s board of directors. “It was a really emotional conversation,” said board member Jennie Ward. “It was a really honest conversation about who the theater wants to be in the community, and what kind of space they want to hold.”

Ultimately, the board came to a consensus. “It really felt like the way to serve our community right now is to offer a different kind of story,” Ward said. 

Larisa Netterlund, Theatre in the Round’s executive director, maintains that the cancellation was an act of curation for the moment. “History is moving too fast right now to keep up,” she said.

In place of “anthropology,” Peyton will direct “Conscience,” by Joe DiPietro, about a McCarthy-era senator, Margaret Chase Smith, standing up to government overreach.

For Peyton, the distinction between the suppression of a voice and the protection of a community is rooted in how we handle harm. “Some of the things that have been missed in these big moments of cancel culture is the complexity of what it means to actually repair relationships,” she said. 

She suggests that the First Amendment carries a weight that institutions often ignore. “I feel like we should all be able to say whatever we want, whenever we want, vocally and artistically,” she said. “I also think that, depending on where you are in the power hierarchy of dominant culture, there’s a different responsibility that you need to think about when you’re speaking publicly.”

The theater’s choice suggests that freedom of speech comes with the responsibility not only to honor the artists’ intent, but also to ask what the community desires, and to think clearly about its needs.

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