Visitors to the Brooklyn Museum on Saturday, January 18, may have met some of the artists included in one of the institution’s current exhibitions, but under normal circumstances this would not be the case. At the entrance, some of them handed out flyers with the message ‘Stop the Genocide’, spelled out in the museum’s signature font with an interlocking Ox, framed by the pattern of a keffiyehthe Arab headscarves known as symbols of Palestinian solidarity.
They are part of a group of 22 participants The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition they called on the institution to “take a clear public moral stand” on Palestine after administrators failed to issue a statement denouncing Israel’s attacks on Gaza and rejected their requests to grant keffiyehs to add to their works of art 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 – will host the show for the entire duration of the show, which kicked off on October 4 and ends next Sunday, January 26. (Seven others did not confirm whether they agreed to be named at the time of publishing this article.)
In solidarity with the artists’ demands, nearly two dozen community groups and local collectives in Brooklyn sent a message letter to the museum management last Friday, January 17.
The group’s efforts began before the opening of the exhibit, an open display of borough artists timed to coincide with the Brooklyn Museum’s 200th anniversary. Days before the show debuted to the public, hundreds of people signed an open letter urging the institution to “end its silence on the ongoing genocidal violence against the people of Palestine.”
The 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 evidence that it has continued its partnership with the Bank of New York Mellon had terminated. has some investments at the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems. (Hyperallergic has contacted BNY Mellon for comment.)
The following month, 22 artists in the exhibition – out of a total of more than 200 – asked to change the displays of their work and hang keffiyehs next to their pieces in what they called a ‘collective artistic intervention’.
The museum refused, arguing that artists had formally agreed that the works would be exhibited as submitted and that agreeing to such a change would leave room for other change requests that could not be honored. One of the artists, Ronen Gamil, told Hyperallergic.
Gamil said the museum also told artists that it had “learned from their previous concession to selectively allow an alteration of a work in support of Ukraine’s war with Russia.” (In 2022, the Brooklyn Museum packaged Deborah Kass’ yellow outdoor sculpture “OY/YO” (2015) in blue fabric in solidarity with Ukraine.)
“First the museum said the work had to be exhibited as submitted according to the loan form,” another artist in the group, Catherine Tafur, said Hyperallergic. “I felt this was unfair because I know that artists have changed their work during exhibitions in other locations. The museum then said that changing the display would open the door to other requests, likening 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 focuses the political violence she witnessed growing up in Peru, and that the anti-colonial views she has cultivated are a result of this personal experience. “Speaking out against Israel’s colonialism is a natural extension of my work,” she said.
The Crown Heights institution’s legacy as a center of pro-Palestinian activism dates back at least to 2016, when groups protested an exhibition of photographs of Israel and the occupied West Bank, whose financiers This includes Charles Bronfman, co-founder of Taglit Birthright, and Bank Hapoalim, one of Israel’s most important banks. The activists installed guerrilla wall stickers with the Arabic names of the locations depicted in photos.
Over the past year, the museum has been a site of mass protests against Israeli attacks on Gaza, including organizations United Nations, Amnesty InternationalAnd Human Rights Watch have characterized it as a genocide.
At one such protest last May, dozens of activists were arrested and allegations emerged that the museum did not do enough to stop the violent police response to demonstrators. (In a statement to Hyperallergic (At the time of reporting, the Brooklyn Museum said that “the police brutality that occurred was devastating” and claimed it had not alerted New York police to 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’. Officials in New York described the vandalism as “anti-Semitic” and three people were charged with hate crimes in connection with the November incident. Of the four museum leaders whose homes were targeted, only Pasternak is Jewish.
Some see the Brooklyn Museum as inextricably intertwined 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 Blessed Virgin Mary” (1996) by Catholic groups. Artist Chitra Ganesh narrated it Hyperallergic last fall that she was “deeply inspired” at that moment as a young artist.
Citing the museum’s statement stake Some see the institute’s reluctance to speak out on Palestine as a contradiction.
“I think many museums want the art, but not the artist. They want the object, but not the person behind it,” says Wendy Cohen, one of the Brooklyn Artists Exhibition participants behind the most recent organizational effort Hyperallergic. “They want the accolades of working with living artists, but not the reality of competing with our voices.”
The museum offered the artists the opportunity to remove their artwork from the exhibition. Instead, Cohen explained, the group decided to mobilize and take its message publicly, invoking a responsibility to “address and challenge museums.”
“By keeping our work in the show, we’re saying we’re here and we’re not going anywhere,” Cohen said. “We will use the platform this opportunity provides to advocate for human rights.”
“We hope that the Brooklyn Museum will rise up, show social courage in breaking the widespread silence and complicity in the decades-long atrocities in Palestine-Israel, and that their responsible actions will set off a chain reaction among other cultural and academic institutions, municipalities and beyond, to pave the path to justice and peace in that country,” Gamil said.
Cohen added: “My art is about love, family and memory. Aren’t these all things we are advocating for when we talk about our shared humanity and moral obligations to speak out against genocide?”
