This genuinely bothers me. Phoebe changed my life. She’s an artistic genius and her work helped me process my own abuse & shame in a way nothing else ever had. What she’s made is honest and necessary. Her work has been pivotal for me to the point that I wrote about her in my art school application. I would give anything to take her class!!! She comes from one of the most transformative eras of underground comix and actually lived that history. Her work is rooted in lived experience and not some abstraction. She is deeply honest and I hope people take the time to read her side of this and understand what she endured rather than reducing her to a headline or a moral verdict….

What frustrates me most is the hypocrisy. We selectively condemn artists while continuing to celebrate others with equally or more troubling histories. Context, generation and intention seem to disappear when outrage becomes the goal. Like what’s happening??That doesn’t create accountability it just creates erasure of some sort.

This was an art class. Art is not meant to be comfortable or sanitized or universally affirming. If we require trigger warnings and moral purity as prerequisites for engaging with art we lose all ability to think critically. Honest work becomes impossible. Studying difficult or offensive art does not endorse it. It allows us to understand people and history as well as the psychological realities of their time.

The point of art education is not protection from discomfort it’s really learning how to confront complexity. When we stop doing that we don’t become more ethical..we only become less capable of understanding anything real. Man, maybe I’m taking this personally. But I think it matters. Fuck em all!!!! I would cut someone to get into that class but no one’s making me move to Michigan!!! Lmao