Art Teacher Fired After Saying ‘Vagina’ 10 Times While Lecturing Kids on Georgia O’Keeffe

The lecture, on controversy, was to a class of eighth-graders.

Allison Wint. Photo via YouTube.

Everyone knows that Georgia O’Keeffe’s flower paintings are highly suggestive, often resembling vulvas. And now everyone knows that you apparently cannot talk about that if you’re a middle-school substitute art teacher in Michigan, thanks to national attention to a controversy roiling the school system in Harper Creek, near the city of Battle Creek.

Allison Wint, 24, tells the Detroit Free Press that she was fired after repeatedly invoking the female sexual anatomy in a lecture on controversy that she delivered to a class of eighth-graders. She had been teaching at the school since January.

According to the paper, Wint recalls her lecture going a little something like this: “Imagine walking into a gallery when [O’Keeffe] was first showing her pieces, and thinking, ‘Am I actually seeing vaginas here, am I a pervert? I’m either a pervert or this woman was a pervert.’”

Wint says that her own little vagina monologue got her terminated the next day.

Not so fast, says Harper Creek Middle School superintendent Rob Ridgeway, who insists that Wint was let go not so much for the content of the lecture as for departing from the set curriculum without informing the school beforehand.

But seriously, Wint herself says that she used the word vagina “maybe ten times.”

“She was not terminated due to uttering the word ‘vagina,'” Ridgeway told the Free Press.

On the other hand, the paper quotes school principal Kim Thayer, saying she confronted Wint the day after the controversy-themed presentation, saying that she had used the offending word “without previous approval.”


Follow Artnet News on Facebook:


Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward.
Article topics