Visitors to the Brooklyn Museum this Saturday, January 18, may have met some of the artists included in one of the institution’s current exhibitions, but not under normal circumstances. At the entrance, several of them were handing out flyers with the message “Stop the Genocide” spelled in the museum’s signature font with interlocking Os, framed by the pattern of a keffiyeh, the Arab headscarves known as symbols of Palestinian solidarity.
They are part of a group of 22 participants in The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition calling on the institution to “take a clear public moral stance” on Palestine after administrators failed to issue a statement denouncing Israel’s attacks on Gaza and denied their requests to add keffiyehs to their artwork displays after the exhibition opened.
The artists — including Aisha Tandiwe Bell, Wendy Cohen, Alex Dolores Salerno, Leo Fine, Amaryllis Flowers, Ronen Gamil, Chitra Ganesh, Sumin Hwang, Nina Katchadourian, Tuesday Smillie, Catherine Tafur, Darryl DeAngelo Terrell, Zac Thompson, Sophia Wallace, and Betty Yu — have been organizing for the duration of the show, which opened on October 4 and comes to a close this Sunday, January 26. (Seven others did not confirm whether they consented to being named by the time of this article’s publication.)
In solidarity with the artists’ demands, nearly two dozen community groups and local Brooklyn collectives sent a letter to museum leadership last Friday, January 17.
The group’s efforts began ahead of the opening of the exhibition, an open-call show of artists from the borough timed with the Brooklyn Museum’s 200th anniversary. Days before the show debuted to the public, hundreds signed an open letter urging the institution to “end its silence on the ongoing genocidal violence against the people of Palestine.”
That missive also asked the museum to call for a ceasefire, commit to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), and provide proof that it had ended its partnership with the Bank of New York Mellon, which has some investments in the Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems. (Hyperallergic has contacted BNY Mellon for comment.)
The following month, 22 artists in the exhibition — out of a total of over 200 — asked to alter the displays of their work to hang keffiyehs next to their pieces in what they called a “collective artistic intervention.”
The museum declined, arguing that artists had formally agreed for the works to be displayed as submitted and that agreeing to such a modification would leave room for other alteration requests that could not be accommodated, one of the artists, Ronen Gamil, related to Hyperallergic.
Gamil said the museum also told artists that it had “taken lessons from their past concession to selectively allow an alteration of a work in support of Ukraine’s war with Russia.” (In 2022, the Brooklyn Museum wrapped Deborah Kass’s yellow outdoor sculpture “OY/YO” (2015) in blue fabric in solidarity with Ukraine.)
“First the museum said the work must be displayed as submitted according to the loan form,” another artist in the group, Catherine Tafur, told Hyperallergic. “I found this to be disingenuous because I know artists have changed their works in exhibitions at other venues. Then the museum said that changing the display would open the door to other requests, and compared it to displaying Israeli and American flags.”
“This comparison misrepresents our intent,” Tafur said. “Our request was to show a condemnation of genocide and support for an oppressed people. Waving an Israeli flag during this war shows support for genocide, and an American flag shows patriotism. There is no comparison.”
Tafur added that her artistic practice often center the political violence she witnessed growing up in Peru, and the anti-colonial views she has cultivated are a result of this personal experience. “Speaking out against the settler-colonialism of Israel is a natural extension of my work,” she said.
The Crown Heights institution’s legacy as a hub of pro-Palestine activism dates back to at least 2016, when groups protested an exhibition of photographs of Israel and the Occupied West Bank whose funders included Taglit Birthright co-founder Charles Bronfman and Bank Hapoalim, one of Israel’s leading banks. The activists installed guerrilla wall labels listing the Arabic names of the sites depicted in photos.
In the past year, the museum has been a site of massive protests against Israel’s attacks on Gaza, which organizations including the United Nations, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch have characterized as a genocide.
One such protest last May saw the arrests of dozens of activists and drew allegations that the museum did not do enough to stop the violent police response against demonstrators. (In a statement to Hyperallergic at the time of reporting, the Brooklyn Museum said that “the police brutality that took place was devastating” and claimed that it did not call the New York Police Department on protesters.) Months later, the homes of four museum leaders including Director Anne Pasternak were defaced with red paint and graffiti messages such as “white supremacist Zionist.” New York officials described the vandalism as “antisemitic,” and three individuals were charged with hate crimes in connection with the incident in November. Of the four museum leaders whose homes were targeted, only Pasternak is Jewish.
Some see the Brooklyn Museum as inextricably entwined with a history of political action and the fight for freedom of expression. In 1999, crowds gathered outside the neoclassical building to protest attacks on Chris Ofili’s painting “The Holy Virgin Mary” (1996) by Catholic groups. Artist Chitra Ganesh told Hyperallergic last fall that she was “deeply inspired” as a young artist in that moment.
Citing the museum’s stated commitment to platforming “issue of social justice,” some see the institution’s reticence to speak out on Palestine as a contradiction.
“I think a lot of museums want the art but not the artist. They want the object but not the person behind it,” Wendy Cohen, one of the Brooklyn Artists Exhibition participants behind the most recent organizing effort, told Hyperallergic. “They want the accolades of working with living artists, but not the reality of contending with our voices.”
The museum offered the artists the option to remove their artworks from the exhibition. Instead, Cohen explained, the group decided to mobilize and make its message known publicly, invoking a responsibility to “engage with and challenge museums.”
“By keeping our work in the show, we’re saying that we’re here and we’re not going anywhere,” Cohen said. “We’re going to use the platform that comes with this opportunity to advocate for human rights.”
“We hope that the Brooklyn Museum will rise up, demonstrate social courage in breaking the widespread silence and complicity in the decades-long atrocities in Palestine-Israel, and that their responsible actions will instigate a chain reaction among other cultural and academic institutions, municipalities, and beyond, to pave the path towards justice and peace on that land,” Gamil said.
Cohen added: “My art is about love, family, and memory. Aren’t these all things we’re advocating for when talking about our shared humanity and moral obligations to speak out against genocide?”
