Photo courtesy of Mary Tartaro

A Blacksburg artist used tam-pons in designing this dress.

The drama began with a white wedding dress -- a piece of art -- sewn together from tampons and sanitary napkins.

On one side is its creator, Mary Tartaro. She included the dress in a solo art show, which was scheduled to open today at a Roanoke College gallery.

On the other side is the gallery director, Talia Logan. She had her doubts.

Tartaro said she was told the work was too controversial for the college and the locals.

Logan said she simply thought the dress clashed with the artist's metal sculptures.

And while there are two ways of looking at the disagreement, no one will be looking at the tampon wedding dress, because Tartaro pulled her entire exhibit from the Olin Gallery on Tuesday evening, raising the cry that she had been censored and leaving the college without its first show of the season.

"I don't know who you'd want to protect from white tampons," Tartaro said of the piece, titled "Moon Bride." The Blacksburg artist, who is also the mother of twin high school-aged boys, said the wedding dress would have pushed spectators to ask questions about contemporary women's issues.

"I didn't know it was a Lutheran school," she said.

However, Logan said that nixing the dress was within her rights as gallery director.

"She's considering this censorship and I'm considering this curating," she said, adding that the dress was not a good match with Tartaro's "absolutely wonderful" biomorphic metal sculptures.

What's more, Logan said, "the Kotex wedding dress has been done before."

Tartaro installed her artwork in the Olin Gallery on Friday, a solo show she earned by placing first at the college's juried art exhibit last spring. Among her familiar metal creatures, she included new pieces designed to address feminism and environmentalism, she said.

Logan said that she had not previewed these new works, which included "Moon Bride" and a series called "Alters to Progress," showing animals that had been stuffed, mounted and arranged to look as though they had been crucified on, among other items, computer hardware and medical supplies.

"I would not consider myself conservative," Logan said. She has worked in Chicago and New York, she said, and as an artist herself, has had artwork censored that was considered erotic.

But Tartaro's new pieces hurt the show's continuity, Logan said, and were going to be scratched from exhibit. "If anyone had come into the show, they would have thought it was a group show."

Logan noted that she had approved a separate Tartaro work that included feminine hygiene products.

Tartaro, who is also the director of Perspective Gallery at Virginia Tech, said she understands the challenges of putting on a campus show. She had agreed to pull the animals, despite working on her taxidermy for months.

But to prohibit exhibiting the wedding dress was going too far, in her view. To take a stand against a climate of fear, she said, she rented a truck and cleared her entire exhibit from the Salem college's gallery Tuesday evening.

"Unfortunately, a number of my pieces were deemed too controversial," Tartaro wrote in a statement she circulated among friends, notifying them of the canceled show.

Logan said Thursday that she never said the work was controversial. "I stressed that I didn't feel like it was cohesive."

Ashley Kistler, director of the Anderson Gallery at Richmond's Virginia Commonwealth University, said the curator's job is to pick the artist and the artwork, with a careful eye toward the patrons.

"The situation is such these days that you have to be sensitive to your particular community," Kistler said. "But having said that, I also believe the context of the gallery in a college should be a place for experimentation."

In lieu of Tartaro's work, the Olin Gallery plans to show photographs from its permanent collection, Logan said. And Tartaro said she has hatched an idea for a new exhibit this spring: one made up entirely of censored works.