My Call-Out Wall Exhibition

My Call-Out Wall is a student art exhibition at Berkshire State University that makes public accusation its medium and invites visitors to add their own. Its most personal consequence falls on Brendan Fletcher, whose portrait and a caption drawn from Amber’s private anger transform a painful relationship into a public verdict. The installation’s interactive invitation gives the crowd a role in that judgment, while the changing words beneath Brendan’s face reveal how complicated the line between calling someone out and defining them can become.

The Installation and Its Invitation

The exhibition occupies the Student Center gallery, where student paintings and sculptures fill the space. Brendan arrives after Sanjay has warned him that his face will be on display. The Call-Out Wall is impossible to miss: two rows of larger-than-life portraits cover an entire wall, each accompanied by a caption. Its card identifies the artist as Katherine Q. Douglass, class of 2017, names the work My Call-Out Wall, and describes an interactive project in which friends call out people for behavior that damages the community and threatens its safety. Visitors, the card says, are welcome to add their own call-outs.

The portraits are acrylic on canvas. There are ten faces, nine male and one female, but no names; instead, each face is paired with an accusation. A red-haired man is labeled GROPED ME ON THE DANCE FLOOR; an Asian student, THINKS HE’S WHITE; a blond woman, LIES RIGHT TO YOUR FACE. Other captions call people a CULTURAL APPROPRIATOR, an EXTREME HOMOPHOBE, and a GASLIGHTER, while three portraits are labeled RAPIST. The wall thus withholds identifying names while making the accusations conspicuous. Its format asks viewers to read a face and a charge together, even though the gallery text supplies no process for examining the claims.

Brendan’s Portrait

Brendan recognizes himself without difficulty. His portrait is among the work’s most visible images, and its painted grin makes him appear pleased to be included, though he is distressed by what the caption says. The words beneath his face are HUGE DISAPPOINTMENT. The expression and the label pull in opposite directions: the cheerful likeness seems to endorse a display that Brendan experiences as devastating. He cannot stop looking at it, even when Sanjay asks whether he wants to leave.

Sanjay questions whether the installation might violate due process. Brendan brushes aside the concern, saying he does not care about due process, but the objection points to a tension built into the piece: it offers public judgment without a corresponding public hearing. Brendan’s reaction is not just to being accused of a particular act. The caption reduces him to a sweeping assessment of his character, printed beneath an image that makes the judgment recognizable and difficult to escape.

Cat, Amber’s friend, appears beside Brendan, rubbing hand sanitizer into her hands. She greets him coldly and comments that she struggled with his eyes because they were a little asymmetrical. When he asks whether she made the work, she shakes her head. Her denial does not erase her involvement in the caption’s history: she had helped Amber decide what words should appear beneath his face. Cat then says, “I told you not to hurt her.” The exchange connects the gallery’s public accusation to the intimate injury that preceded it, without making the painting itself a full account of either person’s experience.

How the Caption Changed

Two days before the encounter at the Student Center, Amber helped transport the paintings from the art building. When she uncovered Brendan’s portrait, the caption read HORRIBLE HUMAN BEING. Cat presented it as a gift to Amber. Amber objected: Brendan was not a horrible human being; he was something else. Cat reminded her that the original phrase had been Amber’s own words, spoken after their disastrous date, when she felt raw and betrayed and Cat had been supporting her.

Amber acknowledged that she had said it in anger and needed to vent. Cat offered possible alternatives, including DATE RAPIST? and MISOGYNIST?, but Amber did not consider those accurate either. She settled on huge disappointment and asked Cat to change the caption. The finished label therefore preserves Amber’s judgment while recording her refusal to turn it into a more serious accusation she did not believe. At the same time, Amber was unwilling to withdraw the words altogether or give Brendan reason to think she had forgiven him; thinking about their date still made her feel sick and degraded. The revised caption is less sweeping than the first, but it remains a public sentence on a private conflict.

Aftermath and the Wall’s Stakes

At a house party with Cat and the artists, Amber finds that the group is excited about the Call-Out Wall and wants it to become a permanent installation in the Student Center. They laugh at Brendan’s repeated texts asking for a moment of her time. Amber can see a kind of poetic justice in his being silenced and defined by other people, but the satisfaction does not last: the more she thinks about him, the guiltier she feels. She considers blocking his calls, then decides that calling him out while removing every chance for him to respond would feel harsh and cowardly. Her unease does not amount to forgiveness; it shows the difficulty of treating public denunciation as a clean ending to a relationship.

When Brendan later asks Amber whether she really thinks he is a huge disappointment, he describes the exhibition as brutal. Amber hesitates. She knows Cat had worked on the project all semester, but had not realized Brendan was part of it until she saw his portrait during the move. She does not deny that the caption came from her words, and she does not retract it. The installation’s force lies in that unresolved division: Amber’s pain is real, her chosen caption is narrower than the alternatives, and Brendan is left facing a public image that cannot show the full history behind it. By inviting further call-outs, the wall turns that conflict into a model for communal judgment while leaving its consequences—shame, guilt, and the question of whether a response remains possible—to the people caught in its frame.