New UNT interim provost warned of art censorship fallout

The University of North Texas administrator appointed interim provost this week had warned university leadership that the fallout from censoring an anti-ICE art exhibition "would damage the president," the dean of the university's art school wrote in a text message obtained by Urgent Matter.

The message is among hundreds of pages of records released Friday in response to a public information request, which show officials privately worrying about graduate recruitment losses, monitoring student protests and speculating about who paid for an ACLU billboard truck in the months after the show came down.

Albert Bimper, who had served as executive dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, was named interim provost and vice president for academic affairs on Wednesday. He replaces Michael McPherson, who moved into a role as senior adviser to president Harrison Keller after four years as provost.

McPherson and Keller exchanged texts in February about "barking from our friends in Austin" before the university removed "Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá," an exhibition by Brooklyn artist Victor "Marka27" Quiñonez that featured sculptures critical of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Urgent Matter previously reported.

Karen Hutzel, dean of the College of Visual Arts and Design, invoked Bimper in April texts to studio art chair Nicole Foran sent as the Dallas Observer published a cover story on the controversy, records show.

"Albert Bimper had basically warned leadership that this would damage the president. Along with my warnings," Hutzel wrote. "My main concern now is studio enrollments.”

The records do not indicate when Bimper issued his warning or in what form. Urgent Matter has reached out to UNT for additional comment.

Paid subscribers can read the full documents.

UNT records on anti-ICE exhibition cancellation fallout

Records released on July 10, 2026, in response to Urgent Matter’s request under the Texas Public Information Act.

Urgent MatterAdam Schrader

Hutzel told Foran in the same exchange that she was not reading the Dallas Observer's coverage.

"I'm not reading them. lol. But we knew this one was coming too," Hutzel wrote, adding: "It's on UNT as a whole."

The dean's enrollment fears came as Paho Mann, the studio art professor who organized a March 21 preview day for students admitted to the MFA program, told Foran the day before the event that another admitted student had turned the university down.

"We did get one more 'no' yesterday. They had been planning on coming to Preview Day," Mann wrote, adding that current graduate students were planning to remove their work from the studios and stage a protest during the visit. "I don't know. Ugh."

"I understand but it's unfortunate that the protests are directed so locally and not towards actual decision makers. I guess CVAD is the easier target right now sigh…," Foran responded. "Maybe we could only show them the ceramics grad spaces?"

"It feels like a lose-lose," Mann wrote back.

Foran later told Mann it was important that students "don't feel like we are trying to silence them and that we support their right to protest (even if it makes our jobs more difficult lol)," records show.

Faculty also privately weighed how the controversy might affect visiting artists, including a spring lecture by MacArthur fellow Wendy Red Star.

And the texts capture Hutzel and Foran reacting to a mobile billboard the ACLU of Texas and an anti-censorship group drove around campus reading "UNT ADMIN CENSORED MARKA27'S ART," which the Denton Record-Chronicle previously reported.

"I wonder who paid for that. The artist? It's basically a big advertisement for him," Foran wrote after Hutzel sent a photo of the truck outside the Hurley Administration Building.

"That was my guess. Stefanie had a student say it was aclu and a grad student. Idk tho. That sounds sus," Hutzel responded, apparently referring to gallery director Stefanie Dlugosz-Acton.

"The artist is getting a lot out of this. Good for him," Hutzel added.

Days after Urgent Matter published the Keller-McPherson texts in March, Hutzel texted Foran that she was bracing for a student protest and that "we're prepared to clean up before 10 tomorrow," ahead of the admitted-student preview day.

"I understand the president and provost didn't look too good with the texts tho. But oh well. This is the world we're living in now," Hutzel wrote in the same exchange.

Later that month, a student group calling itself NOISE accused the administration in a Reddit post of tearing down a memorial that students had built for the canceled exhibition, writing that it was "ripped apart in the dark of the night." The records do not show who removed the memorial.

That Reddit post was among the protest materials that staff forwarded to Jim Coll, the university's vice president for marketing and communications, whose text messages were also released Friday.

Melisa Brown, senior director of UNT Relations, and university employee Julie Payne sent Coll screenshots tracking a March 18 student sit-in, protest flyers, news coverage and the billboard truck, records show.

"FYI. Driving Denton now," Payne texted Coll alongside a photo of the truck taken from behind a car dashboard.

The records also contain the full text of an email McPherson sent to art school faculty explaining the cancellation — portions of which the Denton Record-Chronicle previously obtained — in which the provost denied that administrators punish dissent.

"In reference to a recent media report, I also want to reiterate that administrators do not direct, retaliate, or punish faculty members who express opposition to this decision, privately or publicly," McPherson wrote on March 6, hours after Urgent Matter published the "barking" texts.

McPherson resent the message on March 11, writing that the original "did not reach all of its intended recipients."

Hutzel, meanwhile, told faculty demanding answers that the decision "was not an internal decision nor is it a question for CVAD, rather a UNT one," and that she had offered leadership "many alternatives to try to keep it and warnings about what would happen," records show.

"I do know the Provost will not reply to non-UNT email addresses, if that helps," she added.

Hutzel asked faculty to submit proposed revisions to the college's exhibition policy by the end of March, which she said she would take to the Office of General Counsel and the Office of Compliance. The CVAD Galleries policy states the galleries do not censor exhibitors or their content, Urgent Matter previously reported.

The records also shed light on Keller's private handling of demands for accountability. Foran wrote in an April 8 email that "the president took accountability at our college wide meeting," an apparent reference to a March 27 open meeting with the college, and texted a colleague that Keller "said directly that accountability falls on him."

But when faculty senator Nadine Kalin asked Keller at an April 8 Faculty Senate meeting to schedule a campus-wide town hall on "freedom of speech and censorship of exhibitions," the president said he could not find a date before the end of the semester, according to Kalin's account in the records.

Kalin wrote that Keller acknowledged "a rewriting of policy may be in order" and that a senate subcommittee was drafting a resolution on the censorship for full senate consideration.

"I can image us asking the question every senate meeting going forward until a date is set by the president's office," Kalin wrote.

Foran told a graduate student the next day that plans for a university-wide town hall with the president were "loosely being made for Fall."

The records were released in response to a request Urgent Matter filed under the Texas Public Information Act as a follow-up to the request that produced the Keller-McPherson texts.

Quiñonez's exhibition, organized by Boston University Art Galleries, opened at the CVAD Gallery on February 3 and was scheduled to run through May before the university covered the gallery windows with paper and terminated the loan agreement.

The removal drew condemnation from faculty, the ACLU of Texas and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and the American Association of University Professors has since included UNT in an inquiry into academic freedom at Texas universities.

The Quiñonez cancellation is one of several flashpoints over artistic and academic expression at Texas public universities that Urgent Matter has documented this year.

At the University of Texas at Austin, records obtained by Urgent Matter showed administrators scrutinized an anti-fascist student art show and restricted who could participate before it opened — a show its student curator had staged partly in response to UNT's removal of the Quiñonez exhibition.

And at Texas Tech, two academic freedom groups have sued the university system over a course-content review that faculty say forced professors in the visual and performing arts to strip race, sexual orientation and gender identity from their classes.

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