The town of Vail, Colo., has settled a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado on behalf of a Native American painter whose artist residency was abruptly canceled last year after she posted to social media a painting about her views on the war in Gaza.
The painting, which the artist, Danielle SeeWalker, posted to Instagram in March 2024, showed a woman wearing a Palestinian kaffiyeh and a feather and was titled “G is for Genocide.” “Some days, I have overwhelming grief + guilt for walking around privileged while people in Gaza are suffering,” SeeWalker captioned the image, angering some members of the local Jewish community, including a rabbi who complained to town officials.
Two months later, town officials said her residency through Vail’s Art in Public Places program had been terminated. It was scheduled to last 10 days in June while she completed a mural in Vail.
SeeWalker posted her painting to Instagram about five months after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people. At the time of the A.C.L.U.’s lawsuit, which argued that Vail had violated SeeWalker’s First Amendment rights when it canceled her residency, Israeli military operations had killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza, many of them women and children, according to local health authorities.
The settlement, which was announced last week, outlined four actions that Vail had agreed to take over the next five years, including hosting an annual powwow and providing annual cultural sensitivity training to employees in the town’s Arts in Public Places Department by an Indigenous-led organization.
The town also agreed to fund a new art program for underrepresented and economically disadvantaged people, and to sponsor and pay for a community forum on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A spokeswoman for Vail did not immediately comment on the settlement on Friday, but pointed to a statement released last week. It denied any wrongdoing, saying it was “committed to promoting diverse programming through its Art in Public Places efforts, as well as supporting underrepresented artists.”
SeeWalker, who is based in Denver and is a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota, said in an email on Friday that she was pleased with the settlement because it focused on giving a platform to underrepresented artists.
She said she was looking forward to joining members of Vail’s Jewish community, local Palestinian leaders and others in the community forum, to have, as she put it, a “fruitful dialogue where we may all seek to understand each other’s differing perspectives.”
Tim Macdonald, the legal director of the A.C.L.U. of Colorado, said that the settlement showed that the government could not get away with violating the First Amendment.
Vail’s cancellation of SeeWalker’s residency, he said in a news release, “follows a long pattern of suppressing and censoring the voices of Native American people.”
Derrick Bryson Taylor is a Times reporter covering breaking news in culture and the arts.
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