Artwork in Capitol spawns partisan dispute

WASHINGTON — A racially divisive fight over a student painting hanging in a dismal hallway of a House office building is not the weirdest thing that has happened in the new Congress. But that is only because it is Congress.

The kerfuffle began a few weeks ago, when lawmakers came to realize that a painting that had been hanging in the Cannon House Office Building since June with hundreds of other pieces of student art depicted a confrontation between police officers, some rendered as pigs, and citizens in downtown St. Louis.

Republicans have taken the painting off the wall four times and trotted it back to the office of Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-Mo., only to have it rehung by Clay and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

The piece is a finalist in the Congressional Art Competition, in which high school students compete to have their artwork hung for a year in the tunnel connecting the office building to the Capitol.

The acrylic painting by David Pulphus, a senior at Cardinal Ritter College Prep High School in St. Louis, appears to depict the stormy events following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by the police in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014. Some of the officers in the piece seem to be wild boars.

On Wednesday, Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Wash., a former sheriff, wrote a letter to the Architect of the Capitol, the office in charge of the art program, requesting a review of the piece, called “Untitled .1.” The artwork, he wrote, violated rules prohibiting works with “subjects of contemporary political controversy or a sensationalistic or gruesome nature.”

A spokeswoman for the Architect of the Capitol did not return emails and calls.