Hundreds of artists and cultural workers call on Brooklyn Museum to end silence on Gaza genocide


In response to this week’s opening of The Brooklyn Artists’ Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, celebrating the institution’s 200th anniversary, hundreds of artists and cultural workers have signed an open letter demanding that the museum end its silence on the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The letter reads in part:

For close to a year, the wider Brooklyn Museum community of neighbors, employees, and artists, have repeatedly asked the Museum’s administration to make a statement denouncing the ongoing genocide against Palestinians enacted by Israel, to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Palestine, and to divest from war profiteering. Museum workers published an open letter in support of Palestine on November 12th 2023, recognizing that ‘American institutions’ silence on this matter contributes to the erasure of this genocide from the historical record’ and highlighting contradictions between the Museum’s stated values and its silence on the atrocities being committed by Israel. The Museum has since failed to respond to its employees and community while fostering a climate of fear among visitors and staff who support Palestinian liberation.

The open letter calls out the hypocrisy of museum officials:

The Brooklyn Museum’s values, as listed on the website, claim that the institution “endeavor(s) to bring attention to issues of social justice through our programming and partnerships, amplifying the voices of those who have been historically marginalized, and hope to inspire action and impact.”

The signatories then demand that the museum denounce the genocide, boycott official Israeli cultural institutions, end the presence of the New York Police Department (NYPD) at the museum, honor free speech and freedom of expression and end its corporate partnership with the New York Bank Mellon, “which has investments in Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems and has supported the Friends of Israel Defense Force Donor Advised Fund.”

Brooklyn Museum [Photo by ajay_suresh / CC BY 2.0]

Many of the artists whose work is included in The Brooklyn Artists’ Exhibition signed the letter. One of them, Chitra Ganesh, told Hyperallergic, “I remember being deeply inspired as a young artist, seeing [left-wing painter]  Leon Golub and Nancy Spero speaking out in front of the Brooklyn Museum in support of artistic freedom around the Sensation exhibition in 1999, when Chris Ofili’s work was vandalized.”

But the days when the museum displayed Golub’s paintings of US-supported Latin American military torture or came under attack in 1999, as Ganesh points to, from the city’s reactionary mayor Rudolf Guiliani, seem like the distant past.

The initial sentence in the museum’s self-description on its website claims, “We are committed to addressing exclusions and erasures of Indigenous peoples, and confronting the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism in the Museum’s work.” Clearly the Museum should add another phrase to the sentence—“except for the Palestinian people.” The page continues, trumpeting the museum’s “commitment to exploring, understanding, and appreciating our differences, while acknowledging how structural inequities and systems of oppression impact our work.”



Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *