As the Brooklyn Museum prepares to open its anniversary open-call exhibition this Friday, October 4, a statement of solidarity with Palestine co-authored by a group of artists in the show has drawn over 200 signatures and counting from art and cultural workers. The letter is reproduced in full at the end of this article.
Urging the Brooklyn Museum to “end its silence on the ongoing genocidal violence against the people of Palestine,” the missive echoes earlier calls by museum staffers and community members since the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the Occupied West Bank following Hamas’s October 7 attack.
“As we witness the livestreaming of slaughtered civilians, bombed out schools, decimated hospitals, razed refugee camps, and traumatized children who have lost their entire families, we ask: When will the cultural institutions that claim to represent us hear our concerns and speak out against these atrocities?” reads the letter, led by artists including Tuesday Smillie, Chitra Ganesh, Amaryllis R. Flowers, and Alex Dolores Salerno.
The statement also asks museum leadership to commit to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, divest from companies and individuals linked to Israeli military interests, and “end all NYPD presence” at the institution. The Brooklyn Museum has been the site of multiple pro-Palestine protests led by numerous activist groups in recent months, including a massive demonstration on May 31 that was met with an aggressive response from the New York Police Department and dozens of arrests. Less than two weeks later, the homes of Director Anne Pasternak and three board members were vandalized with anti-Zionist graffiti; a videographer who filmed the incident was charged with a hate crime in August.
Multiple co-authors and signatories are participating in The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition, a community show organized in celebration of the museum’s 200th anniversary. For some, like Ganesh, their relationship with the institution goes back decades.
“I remember being deeply inspired as a young artist, seeing 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,” Ganesh, who had a solo exhibition at the museum in 2014, told Hyperallergic.
This legacy of outspoken advocacy, and the museum’s stated commitment to illuminating social justice issues, jars with its “silence on the atrocities being committed by Israel,” reads the letter, whose signatories include artists Nan Goldin and Demian DinéYazhi’, among others.
Read the letter in full below. The list of signatories is regularly updated and can be viewed here.
On the eve of the Brooklyn Museum’s 200th Anniversary, we the artists and community of Brooklyn and beyond stand together to express our unequivocal solidarity with the people of Palestine and the Palestinian struggle for liberation. We take the occasion of the Brooklyn Artists’ Exhibition, celebrating the Museum, where over 200 artists and scores of cultural workers are exhibiting work and providing our labor, as an opportunity to amplify continued calls to condemn the ongoing atrocities waged against the people of Palestine. We once again urge the Brooklyn Museum, an institution with a history of supporting freedom of speech and dissent, to end its silence on the ongoing genocidal violence against the people of Palestine.
We are horrified, deeply disturbed, and heartbroken by the military bombardment and settler colonial violence over the last year that has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, not including the hundreds of thousands of deaths from injury, acute lack of medical care, starvation, disease, and those people missing under rubble, predominantly women and children. We recognize that this genocidal violence builds on more than 76 years of bloodshed, including the forced removal of Palestinians from their homes, ongoing military enforcement of an apartheid state, the brutalization of civilians, relentless bombing of designated safe zones, weaponized starvation, and illegal annexation in the West Bank. Over 76 years of terror perpetrated by the government of Israel, in the name of Zionism, with American financial and military support.
As artists and cultural workers, we are committed to building a practice, ethos, and creative expression rooted in the potential of art to spark a deeper shared humanity and transcendent ideas of justice. As we witness the livestreaming of slaughtered civilians, bombed out schools, decimated hospitals, razed refugee camps, and traumatized children who have lost their entire families, we ask: when will the cultural institutions that claim to represent us hear our concerns and speak out against these atrocities? In a contemporary arts landscape that proclaims institutional interest in expanding diversity within the field, leverages the optics of representation and inclusion to promote an image of support for racial justice, queer feminisms and de-colonial practices, we ask the Brooklyn Museum to address its silence on the most brutal and deadly military aggression of the 21st century.
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 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.” That is why we, the undersigned call on the Brooklyn Museum to immediately:
- Unequivocally denounce Israel’s genocide, call for an immediate, permanent cease fire and arms embargo, in a permanent post across all social media platforms utilized by Brooklyn Museum.
- Commit to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
- Committing to PACBI is a commitment to not function as an ideological tool for normalizing and legitimizing Israeli apartheid by boycotting: Israeli cultural institutions, cultural products commissioned by an official Israeli body or a non-Israeli body that promotes Israel, events and activities sponsored by an official Israeli body or a complicit institution, and other normalization projects. It is not a boycott of Israeli individuals.
- End all NYPD presence at the Brooklyn Museum.
- During the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020, the Museum opened its lobby and restrooms to protestors, and shared images of the Rally for Black Trans Lives on social media –aligning themselves with US-based social movements. Today, the Museum collaborates with the NYPD who brutalizes protestors, murders members of our community for minor offenses like fare evasion, and shoots innocent people. Their violence does not keep Brooklyn’s communities safe. The NYPD is not welcome in community spaces.
- Commit to honoring free speech and freedom of expression, including solidarity with Palestine.
- In 1999, the Brooklyn Museum fought back against state censorship in defense of Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” under threats by mayor Rudy Guiliani. Just last year, the Museum supported an artist intervention in solidarity with Ukraine in response to Russia’s invasion of the Donbas region. This history must be honored. There can be no policing, punishment, or retaliation for visitors and Museum employees for expressing solidarity with Palestine.
- Provide documentation proving that Brooklyn Museum has ended its Corporate Partnership with Bank of New York Mellon, which has investments in Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems and has supported the Friends of Israel Defense Force Donor Advised Fund.
- Bank of New York Mellon’s name has been removed from the website, but has the Corporate Partnership ended? We want clarity and transparency.
