A mural expressing solidarity with Palestinian people at the University of North Carolina (UNC) in Chapel Hill has been boarded over by university administration, according to The Daily Tar Heel. The art piece hung in the lobby of the Hanes Art Center for over a year before it was concealed without warning on the night of 17 August, following orders from the university’s chancellor Lee Roberts and interim provost Jim Dean.
Annette Lawrence, the chair of UNC’s art and art history department, told The Daily Tar Heel that she was preparing for a class on the first morning of the autumn semester when she noticed white plywood boards had been screwed into the mural’s panels. Neither she nor anyone else in her department was informed of the administration’s decision.
In an email to The Daily Tar Heel, a university spokesperson wrote that the chancellor and interim provost had instructed UNC’s facilities services team to remove the piece before classes commenced. The university’s vice chancellor for finance operations informed the art and art history department by phone on the morning of 18 August that the mural had been covered up.
“Because it was physically affixed as a mural to UNC property and could not be easily removed, the mural has been covered,” Howard Wertheimer, the university’s interim associate vice chancellor for facilities services, wrote to a member of the art department in an email obtained by The Daily Tar Heel.
The mural is composed of collaged black, red and green prints, in reference to the colours of the Palestinian flag, layered together in a pattern similar to a keffiyeh, , a textile that has become a symbol of the Pro-Palestine movement. The text “I told you I loved you and I wanted genocide to stop” in capital letters is emblazoned on top of the design.
The mural was created by community members and students in the university’s “Studio Art 490: Art as Social Action” course, taught by the artist Hồng-An Trương, in the wake of the police violence on UNC’s campus during the dismantling of a Gaza solidarity encampment. The university’s police force detained 36 students on 30 April 2024, arresting six, amid a widespread administrative and police crackdown on campus resistance movements across the US that year.
“It was shocking,” Trương told The Daily Tar Heel. “I mean, to see the mural erased, covered up—it felt like a violation.”
Jim White, the dean of UNC’s College of Art and Sciences, told The Daily Tar Heel: “It was my understanding that the artwork would be up for approximately one year. The artwork was on display for a year, and the time had come for it to be taken down and for other artwork to go up. It was on my list of things to talk with the department about early this semester.”
A university spokesperson added: “Rather than take the chance of damaging the mural, the decision was made to cover it with plywood until a way to remove it and fix the damaged wall was determined… The mural will be removed, the wall will be repaired and all of the art will be given back to the department to be returned to the artists.”
In the aftermath of the mural’s concealment, a satiric wall panel was affixed to the wall next to the work that reads: “UNC Chancellor’s Office, a practice in censorship, 2025.” Meg MacKenzie, the faculty liaison for the Art Student Graduate Organisation and the Graduate and Professional Student Government senator for the department, called the mural cover-up a “blatant act of censorship” in a written statement to The Daily Tar Heel.
This is not the only example of institutions of higher education in the US cracking down on free speech since the Hamas terror attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023—in which more than 1,200 people were killed and around 250 were taken hostage—and the launch of ensuing war in Gaza, in which more than 60,000 people have been killed according to the local health ministry. In 2023, the Cranbrook Academy of Art removed Palestinian flags hung in solidarity in campus dorm rooms. In 2024, the Eskenazi Museum of Art at the Indiana University in Bloomington canceled a solo exhibition by the Palestinian American artist Samia Halaby citing “safety concerns”. In March 2025, the Rhode Island School of Design shut down a Pro-Palestinian student exhibition held on campus.
Linda McMahon, the US secretary of education, identified UNC as one of 60 universities under investigation for allegedly failing to protect Jewish students against antisemitism in March of 2025. That investigation’s findings could jeopardise the university’s federal funding.
