Her teacher said artists could no longer paint something that would shock and offend the public. Jody Folkedahl said they could. She was right.

Her nude study — painted from a photo in the pornographic Cheri Magazine — was removed from the Stevenson Union Gallery at Southern Oregon University after a three-day run.

The reason? It wasn’t the full-frontal depiction of female genitalia, said gallery adviser Karen Finnegan, but rather the title — "Bustamante," after Folkedahl’s art professor, Cody Bustamante — and the words painted on the canvas: "… and she was thinking about her painting professor…"

The 21-year-old Folkedahl, an art senior at SOU and native of Roseburg, said she did the work not to shock, but to "say something" and generate discussion about social values.

Finnegan said she would have stood by the artist’s right to freedom of expression as superior to the artist’s responsibility to propriety and taste, except for one thing — the artist "pointedly singling out" her professor in the title.

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"If not for the name, and the fact he’s the only male art professor, I would have said ‘This is outrageous, but I’m not going to take it down,’ " noted Finnegan.

Folkedahl acknowledged the piece strongly hints at the taboo of faculty-student intimacy, though she stressed its intent is purely as a work of conceptual art. She said the desired result is not so much the art itself but the awareness and dialogue it provokes.

The painting went up in the highly public Stevenson Union on a Saturday in mid-May and was removed the following Tuesday. In its place, Folkedahl hung a pure black canvas titled, "Self Censor."

Student gallery manager Marco Rosichelli said he would have left the painting up. His comment was featured in a Page One story in The Siskiyou, the campus newspaper, which carried a tasteful photo of the painting.

When she hung the painting, Folkedahl was well aware she was drop-kicking a beehive and that it was unlikely the painting would be on display very long in a gallery frequented by the public, including children, benefactors of the university and people who didn’t come there for art.

"It came out of a conversation with my art professor, in which he said it would be difficult if not impossible these days to create any art that would shock or offend people," said Folkedahl.

"That triggered a reaction in me and I decided to see if I could prove him wrong," she added. "I definitely proved you can still be shocking. It got people thinking, which is a lot of what I wanted to do."

On the day the painting was removed, Folkedahl was applauded upon walking into class – and a vigorous discussion of shock and censorship followed.

"The removal was appropriate because of the context of the very public gallery and the various sensibilities of people who work there," said Bustamante.

Art for the exhibit was selected by students, he added. The situation would have been very different if Folkedahl’s canvas had been selected by gallery staff and presented at a venue dedicated solely to art.

Bustamante said because shock value had been "so ratcheted up in the art world in the last half century," it would be hard to make art that shocked.

"(Folkedahl) wanted to make art that addresses social issues and she hasn’t exactly found her artistic voice," said Bustamante. "It was a painting done in a classroom situation made by a student still learning, but we did have a long discussion in class."

Students reacting to the painting and its removal, he said, were "keenly aware of their rights (about not being censored) and I tried to balance that with how artists have responsibilities and don’t have a license to do anything they want."

Fellow art student Daniel VanWeerd said it was Folkedahl’s title that bred controversy. "If she’d called it ‘Painting No. 4’ nothing would have happened," he said.

Another art student, Charles Adams, said, "It was a publicity stunt and hurtful to a professor. She was looking for it to be removed, so mission accomplished."

If the image seems borderline pornographic, it’s not a coincidence. Folkedahl, who accepted the label of "pornographic" for her painting, is working her way through college with help from her part-time job at the Adult Shop in Medford. That’s where she found Cheri Magazine and the image she used in her art project.

Strongly influenced by performance art and conceptual art, Folkedahl said, "I’m far more interested in people’s reactions than in the actual painting. I was trying to make a piece that’s more about the environment it created."

But is the painting so offensive as to justify its removal? "I personally don’t find it offensive," said Folkedahl, "but I can see how people would have a problem with it, because it deals with taboo subjects, like how it’s attached to a professor in a sexual way. But people have been doing far more explicit, shocking and offensive work than this for 30 years."

Folkedahl acknowledges the painting is not a nude, in the sense of the statue of David, which celebrates the beauty of the human body, but rather is nakedness, which "exposes" in order to say something, she said.

"There’s a huge difference between making art that is shocking and wants to say something, change perspective and promote social change – and art that just wants to shock. I don’t make art just to shock."

John Darling is a free-lance writer living in Ashland. E-mail him at jdarling@jeffnet.org.