PANEL: Art, Censorship and Academic Freedom 
February 21, 2026, 12-2pm

Panelists: AMBOS (Tanya Aguiñiga), Astri Swendsrud, Elana Mann, moderated by Amy Lyford

This panel will consider recent instances of censorship and the limiting of academic freedom experienced by three Los Angeles-based artists at local universities. The panelists will discuss their individual experiences, including public censorship of artworks, suppression of research topics and tenure denial, and attacks by online influencers. These incidents will be discussed within the larger context of assaults on art and culture taking place nationally. This discussion is presented in conjunction with the exhibition DEFENDING ETHICAL INTEGRITY: the new Degenerate Art.

Panelist Bios:

AMBOS: Art Made Between Opposite Sides is a femme-led binational artist collaborative that works along the U.S./Mexico border to build migrant support systems through craft, care, and mutual aid to advance pro-migrant narratives in the U.S. and Mexico. Founded in 2016 by the artist Tanya Aguiñiga as a way to make visible issues that affect the transnational population in Tijuana, the project has grown organically in scale and scope in reaction to a changing border landscape. AMBOS Projects reside in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago. Current and past collaborators include Karla Aguiñiga, Tanya Aguiñiga, Jackie Amézquita, Cecilia Brawley, Gina Clyne, Cog•nate Collective, Natalie Godinez, Diana Ryoo, and Juan Villavicencio, among other artists in both the United States and Mexico.

Astri Swendsrud is a Los Angeles-based artist whose multi-disciplinary practice investigates the ways in which humans form meaning, posing questions regarding belief, interpretation, and the instinct to seek and place significance in patterns. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows nationally, including at JOAN, The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Visitor Welcome Center, Richard Telles Fine Art, TSALA, Irenic Projects, General Projects and the Vincent Price Museum. Additionally, Swendsrud is part of the collaborative project Semi-Tropic Spiritualists, and their book The Semi-Tropic Spiritualist’s Guidebook was published by Insert Press in 2018. She was also co-founder and co-director of Elephant, an artist-run space in Los Angeles from 2010-2023. She received her MFA from CalArts in 2008.

Elana Mann is an artist and activist who explores the power of the collective voice, the embodiment of language, freedom of speech and disability. Mann is Hard of Hearing and for over twenty years she has researched the act of listening through sculpture, sound, works on paper, and public performances. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at the Museum of Art and History (Lancaster, CA), 18th Street Art Center (Santa Monica, CA), Lawndale Art Center (Houston, TX), Artpace (San Antonio, TX). Mann has received numerous awards, including an Artist-In-Residence at Artpace San Antonio, the Jenni Crain Foundation award, the Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Award, the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art La Jolla, the University of Chicago, the Getty Research Institute and Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, among others.

Amy Lyford is Arthur G. Coons Professor in the History of Ideas at Occidental College, where she teaches modern and contemporary art history. Her research and writing center on 20th-Century artistic practices in the US and Europe, with a special interest in the politics of art, issues of race, gender and sexuality. She is also a scholar of interwar European and US artists and collectives working against fascism in the 1930s and 1940s.  Her books include Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France (Univ of California Press, 2007), Isamu Noguchi’s Modernism: Negotiating Race, Labor and National Identity, 1930-1950 (Univ of California Press, 2013), and Exquisite Dreams: The Art and Life of Dorothea Tanning (Reaktion Books, 2023). She is working on a new book about the Paris-based surrealist photographer Dora Maar (under contract with Reaktion Books).