"I knew something was wrong and I couldn't fix it," Courtney said, describing her helplessness at learning school officials were meeting without her. She had been given a new title: "pornographer." The principal confiscated Courtney's workbook, required by the school project, and delivered it to the Sex Crimes Unit of the Colorado Springs Police Department. Was it smut? Was it dangerous for featuring an under-age model, even if the artist was also under-age? Courtney today suspects it might have been the aggressively puritanical mores of the city, identified as the Evangelical Capital of the country by the national media.
When the police sagely returned the workbook after finding no illicit activity, the principal failed to apologize to Courtney and left her with the dilemma of having to complete her paintings, and the Arts Project, within a few days. Thanks to her perseverance and belief in the value of her work, Courtney finished, graduating and achieving a "6" out of a possible "7" grade from the independent judge, although she was not permitted to experience the validation of peer critique, as could other students. "I wasn't even allowed to bring friends into the classroom to show my paintings to them."
“The teachers should have been role models for exploring the difference between art that exploits and art that explores,” says this 19-year old student, working today on a degree in Chemical and Biological Engineering at CU in Boulder, Colorado. “I think they were more worried about keeping their jobs.”
Since Courtney’s stand for art, Palmer High School has established a written code for art acceptability. “Under their guidelines,” says Courtney, “Michelangelo wouldn’t be allowed to have a sketch of ‘David’ in his workbook.”
Pornography, in Courtney's mind, has a particular, discernible intent. Why were her female figures threatening to some? Not because they objectify women (see any Victoria Secret commercial), but because they do the opposite: reveal women who are real, raw, not surgically enhanced, with honesty, without shame and with emotion and openness. "It's such a fucked up message," said Courtney, "to call that pornography"— which caused her to speculate that it must reveal the projections of the critics' own lurid thoughts.
Nadine Gordimer wrote, "Censorship is a brand on the imagination that affects individuals who have suffered it forever." Courtney solemnly contemplates those words. How did censorship of her enthusiastic, idealist work at such a tender age affect her? "I definitely feel it hasn't limited what I want to do. If anything, it's a challenge that's kicked me in the butt. I know more than ever who I am, but I also am more aware of how much I am an outsider in a culture that's dominated by the fear of expression."
Postscript: After the Palmer High School debacle, Courtney held a one-woman show at Smokebrush Gallery in Colorado Springs, “Banned Art,” attracting 200 supporters and raising money for the Colorado Springs Conservatory, an arts and music school for youth. She has since shown her art in five other shows, including one sponsored by Planned Parenthood in Texas.