Telling the Truth: Inside the Controversial Poster Project

“I think we can expect that people will be pretty upset tomorrow,” Phoebe Collins ’22 announced to the eight Smith students packed into her postage stamp-sized dorm. I felt the excitement in the room bouncing off the walls—a kind of childlike giddiness that can only come from doing something that you know will earn you a scolding. The eight of us had come together at the behest of Collins, who had confided in all of us a secret that she had been keeping for two years: that she was the mind behind the infamous poster scandal of 2019 and that she was going to do it again. 

In case you weren’t on campus when the original iteration of this project was executed, I’ll fill you in: over the course of two weeks in Dec. 2019, around 600 anonymous posters went up in 20 locations on Smith’s campus, featuring 82-point, Futura Bold type with phrases like, “What Haven’t You Noticed? How Would You Know?” and, “Look Behind You—See What You Have Passed.” The posters garnered attention; there was a time when you couldn’t walk into a room without hearing someone talking about them. Conversation about the posters was not relegated to the places in which they were hung. Smithies far and wide took to their sticker-covered Macbook Pros, expressing on the Confessional and Smith-affiliated Facebook groups their strong opinions on the project. Some applauded Collins for creating something that was able to monopolize campus-wide conversations, while others criticized her for raising anxiety levels around campus and implored her to stop the project in its tracks. 

On the third day of “Sincerely, Anyone” posters went up with a date, time and location: “Thursday, Seelye Lawn, 7:00 p.m.” As Collins predicted, students gathered there with no idea what was to come. “People said that nothing happened that night, but over 100 people stood in the cold together just because of the place and time I suggested,” she said about what she has termed the “non-event.” (The name is a nod to the Happenings, performance art events that were popularized in the 1950s by Allan Kaprow).

Since then, half of Smith’s student body has graduated and been replaced by students who were busy fretting about early decision application dates while “Sincerely, Anyone,” the original iteration of the project, was underway. The institutional memory of the college has been utterly destroyed by COVID and by the lack of continuity of a student body. Collins decided that this turnover was the theme that she was going to explore with her second set of questions: “How would you explain it to someone who wasn’t there?” “How would they know you were telling the truth?” “How would you know you were telling the truth?”

“Telling the Truth” is one of three projects that the Kahn Institute is supporting in hopes of cultivating a dialogue about democracy, both on and off campus. When asked how Collins’s work relates to the Year on Democracies, Alexandra Keller, Kahn Institute Director and Professor of Film and Media Studies put it simply, borrowing a phrase from recent campus speaker Masha Gessen: “If you don’t have public conversation, you don’t have democracy.” She continued, “We do not problematize our public sphere on a daily basis. We do not often think about the contours of public discourse and public space in these ways.” Here, she alluded both to the questions that passersby are forced to consider upon encountering one of Collins’ signs and to the fierce debate around them. 

The 2022 round of the project engendered an almost-comparable amount of conversation among the Smith community. Confined to the Confessional rather than being posted on Facebook, anonymous commenters asked the same question time and time again: “How is this a work of art?” A few commenters angrily added that Collins “has no talent” and “should stop being an art major.” When asked this question, Frazer Ward, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History, had a two-pronged response. On one hand, Ward situates Collins’ piece within a history of feminist postmodern artists—Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Yoko Ono to name a few examples that made Collins blush—who force a viewer to interrogate reality in a new way and whose work is part of a conceptual art tradition that substitutes language for image. On the other hand, after discussing this for a few minutes, Ward asked the question: “Why does anyone care if it’s a work of art or not?” The question of whether this project is art seemed to be wielded both to denigrate and elevate the project on the Confessional, both to instruct people not to pay attention to it and to celebrate it. Keller, of the Kahn Institute, weighed in on this impulse as well, saying that it feels “counter to the ethos of this campus” to insist upon putting something into a category simply because it makes one uncomfortable. 

“I don’t hate it, but it’s obviously about sexual assault, right?” a friend and fellow art major remarked to me midway through the project. This sentiment was echoed by members of the Confessional who wrote that these questions, specifically the ones interrogating a viewer’s understanding of the truth, were ones asked of them in the process of reporting incidents of assault. This reaction took Collins by surprise, who penned the questions to be specifically in reference to the first iteration of the project. Nevertheless, this unanticipated response clearly rattled Collins, who confided in me midway through the week that she hadn’t been sleeping well. 

When asked what she made of this response, Keller borrowed a phrase from Roland Barthes’ foundational essay “The Death of the Author,” saying that “every act of reading is an act of rewriting,” meaning that every individual will bring their experiences with them to their interpretation of these words. This seemed to be Collins’ intention, inspired by the implication of the viewer through the use of the pronoun “you” in Barbara Kruger’s work. But the consensus from both Collins’ fans and detractors seems to be that it was one that was somewhat miscalculated with regard to these specific questions. 

Unlike 2019’s non-events, “Telling the Truth” ended not with a gathering but with an explosion in the number of posters put up. As we trudged through the freshly fallen snow, stacks of 75 posters each in hand, I thought about my involvement in the project over the last week. How would I explain it to someone who wasn’t there, to someone who did not understand the distinct contours of life at Smith College that made this the sensation that it was? What does the reaction to this work say about public discourse in our community? And most importantly, how can I fight for my version of the truth?

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Because people have so many questions for Collins herself, here, with her permission, is a transcript of parts of an interview that I conducted with her midway through “Telling the Truth.”

MS: How did you come up with the idea for this piece? Both the first and second parts. 

PC: The original part of this project, which was called “Sincerely, Anyone” happened in December 2019 as a result of taking Frazer Ward’s class on Modern, Postmodern and Contemporary art history,  specifically from his lectures on conceptual art. I was looking at Yoko Ono and her instructions for paintings in “Grapefruit,” Sol Lewitt, Lawrence Weiner’s piece called “Statements.” But there are also other artists that have come up since, like Jenny Holzer, who may be a more direct comparison to what this project actually looks like. At that point, I was just trying to come up with something that could be my final project and that tapped into that kind of work, and it ended up being this guerrilla poster campaign. I tried to write it as an open letter, thinking about ideas of public and private, suggestion and response and trying to make people do a double take. I wanted to write things that you might read one way the first time you saw it and differently the second time––things that would prompt some kind of shift in the way we’re interacting with things. 

The revival of this project was at the request of [some of the members of] the Year on Democracies Lab and the Kahn Institute. Originally, they asked if I wanted to do a semi-public interview about the project and I was apprehensive, because the reason why it worked so well last time was because it was anonymous—“Sincerely, Anyone.” This project comes from the idea that there’s been a 50% turnover in the student population since then, so it’s all about the ways that we tell stories about our own experiences––how would an upperclassman explain to an underclassman about this thing that happened on campus two years ago? It’s about perspective and hindsight and memory. I never felt like I was done with the project in 2019, but I don’t know if I would have done another iteration like this if somebody hadn’t wanted me to. 

MS: What would you say to people who are saying that this is “lazy”?

PC: I think that if you call this lazy, you’re not reading it well enough or considering the fact that it took much longer than five minutes to write something down, print out a copy of it, and put it up somewhere. I took a long time thinking about how I wanted to revisit this and what it should say. Not only that, but just the actual organization of postering the entire campus—this project is 1,000 posters, in all different parts of campus, over a whole week. The fact of going out every night for hours hanging up posters—just the legwork of it is enough to prove that it’s not lazy. Laziness is my least favorite criticism, because I think it’s just not true.

MS: Last time people had their criticisms and aired them and that was that, but this time people seemed really intent on outing you and saying, “This is the person who did it.” What do you make of the obsession with having people know who did this? 

PC: Part of why I got so much response was because the project was anonymous and because people didn’t realize right away that it was an art project. That was part of what made it frightening to people. Because we are in the Smith bubble, where there’s only so many people on campus, and to see all these things going up but not know what they were or where they were coming from, whether it was one person doing it or 10 or 100 people, made it a much more intense experience for many people. So this time, whoever is trying really hard to make sure people know who I am is doing that in a way where they say, “It’s her art project, just ignore it.” This is trying to undercut or diminish the possibility of it being uncertain. As soon as you say this is a project by one person for this purpose—and they don’t really have the purpose right—it makes it less upsetting for people to try to figure out how they should interact with it. If you’re being told that it’s an artwork, whether or not you want to think that it is, that is a different way to approach something. So, I think it’s to try to diminish the power of the project.

I think it’s also because people were really angry that I made this last time and saw it all the way through, even though people had basically given me a cease and desist at one point. They had said over the course of the last project that I owed everybody an apology and an explanation, which I didn’t necessarily feel like I did. I think this is their way of making me have to own up to it, but I do wonder what they want to have happen, or happen to me, as a result. Do you really just want nobody to pay attention to what I’m doing, or do you want me to have to pay consequences for the work? To use my full name [on the Confessional] feels especially vindictive to me. 

MS: When the posters first started going up, people responded really strongly, outing you and saying that you’re a horrible artist etc., etc.—

PC: That’s been so much fun for me!

MS: —And then it kind of dropped off in the last few days. How do you feel about the sudden lack of response, and do you think that the work is as powerful without the outrage of the masses?

PC: It’s worth noting that the Confessional is where I’m seeing most of the responses this time, and not on Facebook or in person as much. I think the drop-off in response is just that people are distracted by Rally Day, and the snow and other things going on in the world. This is all understandable, but it does kind of make me wonder—are you really impacted by this in the way that you’re saying that you are? Over the course of the week, I’m only increasing the number of posters going up, and if you’re upset at the 20% mark but by 75% you suddenly don’t care anymore, it makes me wonder how much you’re really, genuinely upset. I think the Confessional is a place where people go to be angry and divisive, and when there’s something else to be angry and divisive about, they just move on. 

Last time, a similar thing happened after Thursday Seelye Lawn, which was one of the “happening” components of that project, where people thought that nothing happened, which I would argue against. That was the point in the first project where people, all of a sudden, stopped paying attention in the same way. It was kind of like, “Well, nothing happened,” and pretty soon after that, the criticism changed from being mostly about how the posters were anxiety-inducing to being more about how I was wasting paper. One of the funniest criticisms at that point was that it was typical of an art major to waste all this paper, while STEM majors have to work their butts off to figure out how to save the planet. (Laughs.) What are you talking about? I thought that was so funny, and I still do. But in a similar way, the response started out as so strongly against the project for one reason, and then it was so easy to pivot and be upset about it for another reason. I feel like if that’s the case, you don’t have enough to be angry about in the first place, and need to find another reason to be angry. 

I don’t think the work is less powerful because there’s not as much Confessional discourse about it. I hope that the work will be proven to be powerful by other responses that I get, hopefully to this article. I feel like the people whose opinions I really value and respect, who know my body of work as a whole, who have helped me through my time here, and even people who just know me as a person, those are the people whose opinions I really care about, and that’s where I’ve gotten the best, most constructive feedback. 

MS: What have you learned from this whole experience?

PC: Many things. I’ve learned a lot about anonymity, and making public work and dealing with public response. In general, I’ve learned about organizing a project; I started out thinking that I could do it alone and realized that I couldn’t and that it needed to be a group effort. This work doesn’t look like anything else that I do, but I feel like it’s really important to be multifaceted and make all kinds of different things that inform each other. Something else that I’m walking away with is an appreciation for having professors and friends who are interested and invested enough in your work to help you see it through and help you think about it better. Like I said, I may not have come back to this if I hadn’t had that kind of support. I think I’ve also reinforced what I knew already, which is that the loudest voices will always sound like the majority. You will never hear from the people who are totally neutral and don’t care at all. It’s easy to get distracted by the noise––it makes it harder to see things through to completion, which I’ve been glad I’ve been able to do anyway. I think I’ve learned that I can go into a project knowing the ways it’s going to be hard, but that at the end, it’ll still feel worthwhile, and change the way I think about what I’m doing in my work and as a person in the world.

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Write to tellingthetruthposters2022gmail.com to tell your truth about your experience with this project.