The Art Belongs to the Artists

Deborah M. Weissman & Louis A. Pérez

“Artists are the gatekeepers of truth. We are civilization’s radical voice.”

This Article examines the rights of detainees interned at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station to claim ownership of cultural work produced during their imprisonment. Through a series of arbitrary policies, the U.S. government alternately punished detainees for creating works of art, confiscated paintings and drawings, and otherwise denied detainees’ rights to control their creative works. This Article suggests the need to understand these policies as acts akin to plunder—that is, as a practice long associated with colonialism as a means through which the artifacts of the material culture of conquered peoples were expropriated and claimed as “trophies” of conquest. It argues that the U.S. government’s deprivation of Guantánamo detainees’ art implies the intent to dehumanize and obstruct their capacity for self-reliance and agency, a practice not dissimilar to the exercise of colonial power.

This Article examines the status of Guantánamo detainees as surrogates upon whom to exact retribution for the terrorist events of September 11, 2001. The United States waged a campaign of dehumanization and brutalization against non-state actors through unlawful processes of extraordinary rendition, including the kidnaping and torture of detainees during their years of interment at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station.

Notwithstanding their circumstances, detainees created art, at times clandestinely, at other times with Department of Defense permission. Whether surreptitious or authorized artwork, the United States endeavored to deny detainees agency to claim their cultural works in order to promulgate a narrative of the artists as one-dimensional persons unworthy of basic human rights.

While acknowledging the fraught application of the rule of law and the treatment of Guantánamo detainees, this Article asserts that government efforts to obstruct detainees’ rights to their art violates a body of international and domestic laws designed to protect cultural works that speak to the human condition.