THE HEADLINES

SUSPECTS SOUGHT. An investigation is underway into the vandalism of the home of Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak. Per images shared on X by New York City Mayor Eric Adams, red paint was splashed across the front door and windows of Pasternak’s home. Between two columns, a banner was hung that read: “Anne Pasternak / Brooklyn Museum / White Supremacist Zionist,” an apparent reference to her institution’s ties to Israel. The residences of several Brooklyn Museum board trustees were also reportedly targeted. The vandalism follows a pro-Palestine protest at the museum on May 31 that saw approximately 1,000 demonstrators occupy its front lawn. Amid a heavy (and, later, heavily criticized) police presence, at least 34 demonstrators were arrested. In the case of Wednesday’s vandalism, Adams has vowed to find and “bring the criminals responsible here to justice.”

MEANWHILE, IN SWITZERLAND. While the art world eagerly takes stock of exhibitor sales at Art Basel, we’ve compared the wares of the 285 galleries on hand to determine the can’t-miss booths. Among the standouts are Sfeir-Semler Gallery, with exquisite masks by Egyptian artist Wael Shawky; Lisa Brice’s cobalt-blue riff on Gustave Courbet at Sadie Coles HQ; and a buzzy spread of textile works—some you can even sit inside!—at Meyer Riegger. Meanwhile in the Feature sector, dedicated to works made in the 20th century, São Paulo’s Almeida & Dale has debuted with pieces by Brazilian master Heitor dos Prazeres, who is well overdue recognition beyond his home country. Check out the full roundup here.

THE DIGEST

Hamja Ahsan, a British artist and curator, is facing prosecution from German authorities over 2022 social media posts that allegedly insult two German politicians, a violation under German law. The posts were made while he was in Germany as a participating artist in Documenta 15. [The Art Newspaper]

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has announced two significant leadership changes: Dee Minnite, the current interim chief collections, exhibitions, and design officer, will now permanently take up the role. Meanwhile, Sheila Shin has been promoted from chief experience officer to chief operating officer. [SF Chronicle]

A new study of ancient DNA from the remains of 64 people who were sacrificed at the Maya city of Chichén Itzá has led archaeologists to conclude that the vast majority of the remains belonged to men, upending popular (and, as the study notes, rather lurid) notions that the Maya only sacrificed young maidens. [CNN]

Pritzker Prize–winner Fumihiko Maki, the architect of elegant, understated buildings in his native Japan and the United States, has died at 95. [The New York Times] 

A Davenport couple has donated $14 million worth of art to Iowa’s Figge Art Museum, in what the institution has dubbed a “transformative” gift. [KWQC]

More than 100 years after the birth of Yannis Gaitis, one of Greece’s most prominent modern artists, the country is set to open the first museum dedicated to his legacy. [Ekathimerini]

THE KICKER

SERIOUSLY SILLY. Can’t make (or can’t afford) Coachella? Fear not, there’s always Clownchella. Rob Goyanes, writing for the Paris Review , compares the two events, the latter of which he actually attended. Coachella is a luxe music and art festival in California for see-and-be-seen social media users. Clownchella is a one-night clown festival consisting of five acts and costing 16 bucks. Goyanes, who’d long figured the history of clowning “had reached its terminus,” was tipped off to a “diverse and burgeoning clown scene” in Los Angeles that is revitalizing the form. He’d expected the conventional clown, red-nosed circus denizens, but the offerings were startlingly eclectic—and serious about silliness. The night reportedly ended with a session of “goat yoga,” in which the whole audience performed yoga while “goats jumped on people’s backs and ran around, chewed on people’s hair and pissed on the stage.” Mark your calendars for 2025.

Red paint was splashed across the front door and windows of Pasternak’s home. Unfurled between two columns was a banner that read: “Anne Pasternak / Brooklyn Museum / White Supremacist Zionist.” Beneath that statement, in a smaller, red font, were the words “Funds Genocide.”

The residences of several Brooklyn Museum board trustees were also reportedly targeted, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said on X.  

“This is not peaceful protest or free speech,” he wrote. “This is a crime, and it’s overt, unacceptable antisemitism. These actions will never be tolerated in New York City for any reason. I’m sorry to Anne Pasternak and members of @brooklynmuseum’s board who woke up to hatred like this.”

Adams added: “I spoke to Anne this morning and committed that this hate will not stand in our city. The NYPD is investigating and will bring the criminals responsible here to justice.”

ARTnews has reached out to the Brooklyn Museum for comment. 

On May 31, a large pro-Palestine march culminated at the Brooklyn Museum, where some 30 activists occupied the lobby for a demonstration, beating drums, waving banners, and calling for the museum to condemn the killing of Palestinians in Gaza. Activists also demanded that the institution disclose its financial ties to Israel and divest from them.

Amid a sizable police presence, approximately 1,000 protestors echoed their calls from outside. Some then climbed onto the ceiling of the museum’s glass pavilion, eventually unfurling a large banner from the museum’s roof that read “Free Palestine From Genocide.” According to Democracy Now, at least 34 demonstrators were arrested.

In the following days, activists decried the excessive force used against the crowd by riot police and members of New York Police Department’s (NYPD) Strategic Response Group onsite. In a statement to Hyperallergic, a spokesperson for the Brooklyn Museum said that “the police brutality that took place [on May 31] is devastating.” The spokesperson said that the museum did not call the NYPD. As the building is city property situated on city-owned land, officers do not need permission to enter the premises. 

The museum stated that it would not press charges against the protestors and promised to work with NYPD leadership to focus “on de-escalation going forward.”

The Brooklyn Museum, like other major art institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, has faced calls from artists, activists, and cultural workers to sever financial ties to Israel and to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. In many cases, activists have also called on these institutions to term Israel’s military actions in Gaza a genocide.

According to local health authorities, more than 37,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October 7 as a result of Israel’s air and ground campaign.

Protests at the Brooklyn Museum in December called out the institution’s corporate partnership with Bank of New York Mellon, which has investments in Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems and which has supported the Friends of Israel Defense Force Donor Advised Fund. (The Bank told the Financial Times in April that it invests in Elbit “as a result of requirements by its passive index investment strategies.”)

The Association of Art Museum Directors, an industry group for institutional leaders that counts some 240 members, including Pasternak, denounced the vandalism of her home in a statement issued on Wednesday. “We, the members of AAMD, unequivocally and forcefully condemn this antisemitic act,” the group wrote. “As cultural leaders—and also as people of different backgrounds and experiences—we understand the emotion and anger the Israel-Hamas war has wrought.”

“This,” the AAMD added, “does not mean that protestors have unencumbered rights to attack individual persons in pursuit of their cause. Whether at someone’s home or at a museum, this behavior is inexcusable. It does tremendous disservice to discourse and conflict resolution, and the ends simply do not justify the means.”

Starting at 4:30 p.m. inside the lobby, a group of cultural workers, artists, and New York City community members brandished banners, beat drums, and blew whistles, calling for the museum to condemn the killing of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as disclose and divest its financial ties to Israel. 

Outside the museum, a hundreds-strong march that began in downtown Brooklyn ended at its glass facade. Barred from entering the museum, some protestors plastered posters to the doors; others  climbed the steps to its exterior mezzanine and upward its glass ceiling, finally unfurling a banner across the museum’s neoclassical cornice that read “Free Palestine From Genocide”.

Police followed the protestors to the roof, while a helicopter circled overhead.

In a statement provided to press ahead of the protest by Cultural Front for Free Palestine, the newly formed advocacy coalition decried the lack of public statements from major art institutions on Israel’s seven-month long military campaign in Gaza, which has—as of publication—resulted in the death of more than 30,000 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry. The statement paid particular attention to Israel’s ongoing offensive of the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where some one million Palestinian had been seeking refuge. (Most have since fled amid the assault, the New York Times and the UN reported earlier this week.)

The statement calls for the museum to publicly recognize the war in Gaza as a genocide, citing evidence put forth by human rights entities such as the International Federation for Human Rights and the UN Special Rapporteur. The Cultural Front said it is also demanding a full disclosure of investments linked to companies that “profit from the arming of Israel” and a subsequent divestment from corporations linked to Israel, in addition to “all arms and surveillance manufacturers.”

“The Museum relies heavily on subsidies from the City of New York, along with the granting of the land it sits on, and so its financial doings should be publicly accountable. That process of accountability should also involve the disclosure of funds from donors and trustees who are heavily implicated in the Occupation,” the statement added.

The Brooklyn Museum has previously been targeted by pro-Palestine demonstrations. On December 8, around 20 protestors affiliated with the activist groups Decolonize This Place and Within Our Lifetime staged a guerilla action inside the lobby, echoing the calls of similar demonstrations to “disclose and divest.” The next day, hundreds of protestors gathered at the museum as the starting point of a planned march that swept across the Brooklyn Bridge and ended at City Hall. Both protests called out the museum’s corporate partnership with Bank of New York Melllon, which has investments in Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems and has supported the Friends of Israel Defense Force Donor Advised Fund. (The Bank told FT in April that it invests in Elbit “as a result of requirements by its passive index investment strategies.”)

Pro-Palestine protestors have also demonstrated at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Famous art schools, such as Cooper Union in New York and the Rhode Island School of Design, have experienced occupations and walkouts by students, faculty, and alumni dissatisfied with a presumed apathy to the war in Gaza. 

“People are assembling in the spirit of reparation and care for communities conquered and looted by colonialism,” the Cultural Front said. “These include far-flung places and neighborhoods just a stone’s throw from here. Land, wealth, and culture are among the historical plunder, and institutions like the Brooklyn Museum are a direct beneficiary.”

On Friday at the Brooklyn Museum, police and museum security staff dispelled protestors inside the museum lobby—no protestors entered the galleries—around 5:20 p.m. By then, the floor was scattered with synthetic red poppy petals, which has been adopted as a symbol of resistance by protestors due to the flower’s indigeneity to Palestine. The protestors, holding banners that read among other slogans, “Silence = Death,” remained peaceful. Several tents had been erected in the lobby by protestors intending to transition into an overnight occupation. 

By 6 p.m. protestors had gradually moved away from the museum entrance — and descended from the atrium roof— though a crowd remained outside. Clad in keffiyehs and waving the Palestinian flag, a group scrawled slogans across Deborah Kass’ OY/YO installation: “Fuck Bullshit Museum” and “NYPD KKK”; arrests were eventually made. Police began removing the banner from the museum (with apparent difficulty) to a chorus of boos. 

The Brooklyn Museum did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

Six decades later, McCartney has returned to New York, where he is now showing his pictures in “Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm,” which provides an intimate glimpse into what life was like on and off the stage as a member of one of music’s most influential bands. Following a successful run at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the exhibition will open tomorrow at the Brooklyn Museum, where it will remain on view through August 18.

Catherine Futter, director of curatorial affairs and senior curator of decorative arts at the Brooklyn Museum, told ARTnews that the exhibition began in 2020 with the rediscovery of McCartney’s contact sheets.

“[McCartney] was having a conversation about [late wife] Linda McCartney’s collection in an exhibition of her work with his photo curator, Sarah Brown. He mentioned that he thought he had taken photographs in late 1963 or 1964, during the rise of Beatlemania,” Futter explained. “When he wondered whether they still existed, Sarah said ‘Yes, the contact sheets are in the archives.’”

McCartney and Brown soon began sorting through the contract sheets, leading him to choose roughly 280 works that he wanted to include in the exhibition. McCartney made a conscious effort to select photographs that create a visual timeline that highlights The Beatles’s extraordinary rise to superstardom between 1963 and 1964.

Upon entering the exhibition, visitors are greeted by black-and-white photographs of The Beatles’s early years that consisted of gigs in London and the group’s hometown of Liverpool. The four young men, all in their early to mid-20s, sport crisp suits and what would later become their signature haircuts that the media would dub “mop top”—a medium-length, boyish hairstyle with a heavy fringe that was considered untidy for the 1960s.

The settings of McCartney’s photographs quickly transform from gigs in English concert halls to the stage of The Ed Sullivan Show. On February 9, 1964, some 73 million TV viewers looked on as The Beatles performed for live broadcast. That was as sure a sign as any that these musicians had become celebrities, and the men themselves recognized the stark contrasts between their lives pre- and post-fame. As the exhibition illustrates, The Beatles arrived in Paris in January 1964 to great jubilation and fanfare with an 18-day run at the Olympia Theatre. A mere three years earlier, McCartney and John Lennon had arrived in Paris as hitchhikers and aspiring musicians. Living under an umbrella of anonymity at the time, they attended the concert of Johnny Hallyday, considered the “Elvis of France.”

“You’re seeing through the lens, through the eyes of somebody who’s experiencing a cultural shift,” Futter pointed out. “You’re seeing … through Paul’s eyes what really is the middle of a teenage revolution, a youth revolution. You get the intimate view of being within this very tight circle of people, from The Beatles, their manager, their producer, and their girlfriends.”

As The Beatles’s fame rises across these photographs, McCartney bears witness to all the attention the group began to receive. As the band proceeded with its US visit, stopping in New York, Washington, D.C., and Miami, McCartney’s lens faced off with hundreds of photographers desperate to capture the band’s every move. “It’s almost like a battle of cameras, all these lenses and eyes looking at each other, examining each other,” Futter said. “As you experience this work, you’re experiencing this journey of young men who are rising in fame and are catapulted into superstardom.”

Beyond the curation of his photography, McCartney was also responsible for the visual and auditory elements that create this engaging exhibition. The walls of the museum are lined with his recollections of the era. He was also instrumental in the color choices for the exhibition. For the section that highlights the band’s time in England in 1963, McCartney chose a rich shade of crimson red. “He wanted the walls to be resonant of the music halls that they played when they were just starting up,” Futter explained. “For the portion of the exhibition which reflects their time in Miami, [McCartney] wanted a bright blue so it was reflective of the sky.

According to Futter, McCartney’s level of involvement in this exhibition is a testament to his artistic versatility. “We can’t think of Paul McCartney as being just in one category or one silo,” she continued. “We often think of Paul McCartney as an auditory or music artist, but you can see from his photographs, he really has a visual aesthetic and a visual eye. Many of the photographs in the exhibition are not just snapshots—they’re also really well-crafted, well-composed works of art.” 

“Look at that picture of John,” Futter said, gesturing toward a portrait McCartney took of Lennon in Miami in 1964. Lennon’s expression is candid. He isn’t wearing his signature sunglasses as a protective shield from onlookers. Donning a terrycloth shirt, he is relaxed as he makes direct eye contact with the camera.

This photo emphasizes how this exhibition strips down and humanizes each Beatle, and illustrates a vulnerability and naivety that could have been captured only at the onset of the band’s career. “That picture doesn’t exist for a professional photographer,” Futter said. “That’s an expression that can only be captured by someone you have an intimate relationship with.”

THE HEADLINES

PORTRAIT OF A STATESMAN. A preparatory painting of Winston Churchill by Graham Sutherland, which served as a study for what became the portrait the British leader despised so much, it was later set on fire, is now on view at Blenheim Palace, in the Cotswolds. In May, it will head to Sotheby’s in New York. The portrait-burning incident was immortalized in The Crown, and the work apparently drew Churchill’s ire (a painter himself), because it showed him with “gritty realism,” or as he was: an aging statesman with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

RIGHTFUL RETURN. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has returned an ancient statue to Iraq, after the institution’s newly appointed provenance researchers found it was likely looted. The Sumerian sculpture, titled “Man Carrying a Box, Possibly for Offerings,” is from the third millennium BCE, and was acquired by the museum in 1955. But “after provenance research by the museum’s scholars established that the works rightfully belong to the Republic of Iraq … the museum offered to return the work,” in a ceremony in Washington D.C., stated the Met. The museum has been under pressure to ensure its collection is clear of objects with suspicious origins, following a slew of recent seizures by law enforcement.

THE DIGEST

Canada’s Information Commissioner has ruled the Ottawa science museum Ingenium can legally release documents about a sensitive former exhibition featuring a forensics collection, including the skull of one murder victim and the bones of another from the 1920’s and 1930’s, exhibited in 2006. Art historian Jamie Jelinski had requested to see documents about the traveling exhibit but was refused access to information about the show, titled “Autopsy of a Murder,” because the museum argued releasing related images and texts violated human rights and privacy laws. [The Globe and Mail]

The Brooklyn Museum has appointed its first composer-in-residence, the 27-year-old cellist Niles Luther. He has created musical scores to accompany the museum’s new exhibition “Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo 9 feat. Takashi Murakami),” and plans to go further, “anchoring compositions of high phonoaesthetic value within visual art objects,” in what he calls “Art Music.” [The Art Newspaper]

A Spanish antiques dealer was arrested for the sale of a 3,500-year-old Egyptian sculpture, which he allegedly purchased in Thailand knowing it had been looted, according to Spanish police. Worth some $202,000, the Egyptian bust surfaced at the last TEFAF art fair in Maastricht. [The National]

A new branch of the Albertina Museum has opened in Klosterneuburg, Austria featuring its collection of post-1945 art, which numbers over 65,000 pieces. For its opening exhibitions, works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein greet visitors, and later, Mel Ramos, Alex Katz, Jannis Varelas, and Kiki Kogelnik. [El Pais]

Two Russian artists have been added to a list of “terrorists and extremists” by the Moscow regime, because of a play they created about Russians seduced by Islamic jihadism in Syria. Evguénia Berkovitch and Svetlana Tetrïïtchouk have been in pre-trial police custody for one year for “justification of terrorism.” [Le Figaro and AFP]

Lego art sculptures by former lawyer Nathan Sawaya have gone on view at Melbourne’s Showgrounds in the traveling exhibit “The Art of the Brick.” The artist has shown his creations around the world, and one was included in a Lady Gaga video. “I love what I do, but it is a job … not a hobby,” he says. [The Guardian]

THE KICKER

IN THE MAKING. After leaving his position as editor-in-chief of New York magazine, and then failing as a painter, Adam Moss took to writing. He interviewed over forty artists, from Stephen Sondeheim, Kara Walker, to Sofia Coppola, about their creative process, to help “demystify” it, for the new book The Work of Art. He found “it was the making that consumed them, and many were kind of indifferent to the results,” Moss told The New Yorker. Cue his friend, Ian Adelman, also featured in the book for his sandcastle art, “a pure example, because they disappear.” Adelman makes “Frank Gehry-esque towers of slopes and swirls and terraced pathways,” writes Michael Schulman, who observes him at work alongside Moss on a sandy beach near New York’s West Side Highway. As Adelman walked away from his finished sandcastle, two teenagers started to play with it. “I expected it to last a little bit longer than that,” he said, vexed.

St. Félix, a staff writer at the New Yorker, and Giovanni, an acclaimed poet, were set to appear at the museum following a screening of Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, a recent documentary about that writer that won an award when it debuted last year at the Sundance Film Festival. The event is co-hosted by PEN America, an advocacy organization that aims to support freedom of expression in the US and elsewhere.

In their statement, posted to Instagram on Friday, St. Félix and Giovanni said they had “withdrawn from the program in response to the refusal of both PEN America and Brooklyn Museum to stand in solidarity with people of Palestine and against genocide.”

A spokesperson for the Brooklyn Museum did not respond to requests for comment.

“We very much regret that the event with the Brooklyn Museum was cancelled,” PEN America said in a statement to ARTnews. “As a free expression organization of course we respect every individual’s right to voice their own perspective on the conflict and to respond as their conscience dictates. We mourn the immense loss of Palestinian lives, and the destruction of museums, libraries, and mosques that contribute to a vibrant cultural community.  We have also voiced our shared anguish for the Israelis whose families were killed or taken hostage.”

Both the Brooklyn Museum and PEN America have been criticized for a perceived lack of response to the conflict in Gaza, where Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 30,000 people since the October 7 Hamas attack, according to the Gazan health ministry.

When the Brooklyn Museum was protested by pro-Palestine activists last December, a spokesperson said, “we support any group’s right to peacefully assemble.”

PEN America has been denounced by many prominent writers for its position on the conflict in Gaza. On February 3, more than 500 signed an open letter that accused PEN America of being “silent” on the issue, calling on the organization to “wake up from its own silent, tepid, neither-here-nor-there, self-congratulatory middle of the road and take an actual stand against an actual genocide.”

On February 7, PEN America issued a statement that called for a “mutually agreed upon ceasefire” in Gaza while also noting the October 7 attack by Hamas, which killed more than 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostages. Of the attack, the organization wrote that it was “devastated by and mourn these grave and ongoing losses.”

The Brooklyn Museum talk is the latest example of an arts event in the US that has been impacted by Israel’s war in Gaza. An Indiana University exhibition by Palestinian artist Samia Halaby was canceled earlier this year, and several artists exhibiting at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco altered their work in support of Palestine, leading the museum to close certain galleries.

“This is a new era for museums and at the Brooklyn Museum we have been working really hard to meet the moment,” said museum director Anne Pasternak during a media briefing Thursday at the museum’s restaurant, The Norm.

That will include two landmark exhibits opening Oct. 4, and kicking off the museum’s yearlong anniversary celebration: “The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition,” a major group show highlighting the borough’s artists and curated by a committee that includes artists Jeffrey Gibson, Vik Muniz, Mickalene Thomas, and Fred Tomaselli; and a major reinstallation of the museum’s American Art galleries that foregrounds a rethinking of the American collection’s presentation. Led by Stephanie Sparling Williams, the museum’s Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art, the new installation specifically centers Black feminist and BIPOC perspectives.

The museum, which first opened its doors in October 1824, will roll out numerous additional exhibits and initiatives throughout its anniversary year: “Museum on Wheels” (July) is a tricked-out Airstream trailer that will travel to local communities offering experiential art programs; “Solid Gold” (November) explores the role of the most precious metal in art history, fashion and global culture from 1st-century funerary masks to the metallic hued couture of Dior, Schiaparelli, Ferré, and more; “Brooklyn Made” (February 2025) features art and design made in Brooklyn from the 19th century to today.

There also will be an exhibit unveiling recent acquisitions given in honor of the museum’s anniversary. Those works are still under wraps, said Pasternak, but she characterized some of them as “transformative.”

The museum also will present “Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend an Inch,” the first major retrospective of the sculptor who, in 1918, became the first person of color to graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design, and went on to work in Paris during the interwar years. The exhibit, which will debut at the RISD Museum, opens at the Brooklyn Museum in March 2025.

The museum—which has mounted blockbuster fashion exhibits—including Christian Dior, Thierry Mugler and, most recently, Africa Fashion—has doubled its attendance and endowment in recent years, Pasternak said. And it has very intentionally used data to chart a course for the future. “Who is coming and why? What do they like? What do they not like?” added Pasternak. “What does it mean to truly serve the viewer?”

It has also used the anniversary to mine its own collection for overlooked pieces; the reinstallation of the American Art galleries, for instance, will include more than 450 works of art and material culture of the Western Hemisphere from 4000 BCE through today, nearly a third of which have never before been installed.

Pasternak also detailed the many less sexy and behind-the-scenes improvements that the museum has undertaken recently including a pollinator garden and honeybee houses on the museum’s roof, a new boiler system, more and actually comfortable seating in galleries (spurred by feedback from visitors), a revamped 9,500-square-foot education center (which opened in January), a redesigned website (coming in July) and a sorely needed new phone system because, as she noted, the old phone system was unsustainable since “the two guys who know how to fix it are now in their late 90s.”

And KP Trueblood, the museum’s president and chief operating officer, hired in 2021 after a stint in the Obama White House, stressed that the museum’s fundraising efforts also have gone toward prioritized hiring (the museum’s staff is comparatively small with 300 full-time employees) and paying competitive salaries, “so you don’t have to have a trust fund to come work at a museum.”

Images and videos posted on Instagram show several banners unfurled inside MoMA’s atrium. The banners said “Free Palestine, From the River to the Sea”, “Ceasefire Now”, “Cultural Workers Stand with Gaza” and accusing members of the institution’s board of trustees of funding “genocide, apartheid” and “settler colonialism”.

Around 3:30 p.m., protestors at MoMA handed out over 1,000 custom-printed mock museum guides calling out the museum’s board of trustees—Leon Black, Larry Fink, Paula Crown, Marie-Josée Kravis, and Ronald S. Lauder. The printed statement said “While MoMA purports ideologies of ‘change’ and ‘creativity,’ the Board of Trustees directly fund Zionist occupation via arms manufacturing, lobbying, and corporate investment. At the same time, the museum derives its legitimacy from artists and cultural workers, including those actively engaged in anti-colonial struggle”.

Fink is the CEO of multinational investment corporation BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, with $9.42 billion in assets. It has been criticized in the past for its investments in arms and defense. Black, meanwhile, is the founder of private equity firm Apollo Global Management, which owns a defense and security company.

After activist protests in 2021, Black stepped down as chairman and chief executive of Apollo Global Management after a review of his donations to Jeffrey Epstein. The ARTnews Top 200 Collector also stepped down as chairman of MoMA’s board that year.

Journalist Afeef Nassouli, a producer for the Wall Street Journal, spoke to a woman named Ariel, who identified themselves as a member of the grassroots political group ACT UP New York—originally formed in response to the AIDS crisis— about how she personally led an affinity group of anti-Zionist Jews, artists, and ACT UP members to the protest at MoMA “because we are all here to take a stand against genocide.”

According to an Instagram post by Alexa Blair Wilkinson, a photojournalist and graphic designer who attended the protest, no arrests were made and the sit-in dispersed around 6pm.

The protest at MoMA was organized by the Writers Against the War on Gaza and the New York chapter of the Palestinian Youth Movement. A statement read out loud by protestors said “This action builds on the work of Strike MoMA, Gulf Labor, Art Workers Coalition, and more broadly, on resistance movements including the undying fight for Black Liberation, prison abolition, and Indigenous sovereignty.”

Estimates of the crowd of protestors at the Museum of Modern Art ranged from “more than 500” to “more than 800” people.

Earlier on Saturday, Within Our Lifetime, a grassroots Palestinian-led community organization, held a preotest at the Brooklyn Museum.

Photographer Stephanie Keith posted on Instagram that “NYPD made about 10 arrests while the protest was in front of the Museum including @protestnsurvive who is a credentialed member of New York City media.”

MoMA and the Brooklyn Museum did not respond to ARTnews‘ requests for comment. Writers Against The War on Gaza said in an email statement, “WAWOG does not give comment to publications owned by Penske Media.”

This concludes negotiations that began in January 2022 between the staff’s union, Local 2110 UAW, and museum administration, and shows that a labor movement that is sweeping other sectors is continuing to impact art institutions.

“We’re thrilled to have finally reached this agreement with the Museum,” Elizabeth St. George, an assistant curator of decorative arts, said in a statement. “I will now have the opportunity to do the work I love at a Museum I love in a workplace with union rights.”

Per union spokesperson Maida Rosenstein, the agreement guarantees a 23 percent wage boost over the life of the contract, raising the minimum wage and promising annual raises. The cost of health care benefits will also drop, while expanding its coverage to part-time staff averaging 20 hours per week. Some $50,000 has also been set aside for professional training.

A spokesperson fo the Brooklyn Museum told ARTnews: “We’re so pleased to have reached an agreement with our UAW-represented staff. We believe this agreement reflects the Museum’s ongoing commitment to important wage equity investments across the organization, and is the right decision for our staff and the economic sustainability of the Museum. We thank the UAW Local 2110 and staff representatives for their collaboration in the collective bargaining process and look forward to continuing our important work together.”

In August 2021, some 130 employees of the Brooklyn Museum, including curators, conservators, editors, fundraisers, educators, and members of the visitor services department, voted overwhelmingly to unionize. They affiliated with the Technical, Office, and Professional Union, Local 2110, part of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) union, which also represents workers at the Museum of Modern Art, the Bronx Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among other cultural institutions across the US.

Contract negotiations with Brooklyn Museum leadership had stalled on issues of healthcare benefits, job security, and wages. According to the union, employees had not received a wage increase since 2020. Throughout negotiations, the union and their supporters became familiar presences at the museum’s luxe events, including the Thierry Mugler VIP gala and the Artists Ball, in a bid to bring attention to their cause. 

“The hard work of Museum staff is behind the Museum’s incredible exhibitions and programs,” said Samantha Cortez, a senior registrar. “Having a contract that raises our pay rates and spells out legally enforceable rights is an acknowledgment of the important contribution we make as a staff.”

Throughout the ’90s, Campos-Pons worked on an installation-based trilogy titled “History of a People Who Were Not Heroes,” and the second entry in this series, Spoken Softly with Mama (1998)—a work she made in collaboration with composer and jazz musician Neil Leonard—opens the show. Against a black wall rest four blown-up archival photographs of Campos-Pons’s family, and three video screens that show various dreamlike shots of the artist; these seven upright elements are, in fact, ironing boards. Carefully arranged on the floor before them are dozens of glass irons and mirrors. The work pays homage to Campos-Pons’s women ancestors who have sustained the family by doing domestic work. “Their caretaking seems to have helped guide her on a path toward social justice,” art historian Selene Wendt writes in the exhibition catalogue.

But Spoken Softly with Mama is also undergirded by a more sinister history: the legacy of chattel slavery, which ebbs and flows through much of Campos-Pons’s work. Slavery made Black women’s role as domestic laborers distinct from other women’s—they were often forced to work in the homes of others, not just for their own families. A critical gaze gives the ironing boards the contour of slave ships that would have brought kidnapped Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas.

A 1994 photograph from the series “When I Am Not Here / Estoy Allá,”one of the artist’s first works using large-format Polaroids, similarly considers the impact of slavery on Black motherhood. In this image, we see Campos-Pons’s torso painted blue, adorned with curving white lines that mimic waves. The blue nods to Yemayá, the orisha of the sea and motherhood in Santería. Two baby bottles that drip breast milk hang from her neck, connected by a tube. (At the time, Campos-Pons had recently given birth to her son Arcadio.) Cradled in her hands is a carved wooden ship. The photo cuts off her head and legs; this mother’s body has been fragmented by forced migration, severed from her roots.

Forced migration recurs in TRA (1991), for which Campos-Pons pairs 60 black-and-white portraits of generations of Afro-Cubans from Matanzas, once the heart of Cuba’s sugar plantation economy, with five boards shaped like boats. This time, upright wooden planks are painted to resemble the infamous diagram of a slave ship, numerous Black bodies shown cramped together in the hull. The work is powerful to behold.

The Brooklyn Museum exhibition, which will travel to three venues across the country, leans heavily on Campos-Pons’s use of multipart, 20-by-24 Polaroids. Her technical prowess in staging these scenes—mini-performances in themselves—is in full effect in works like Finding Balance (2015). In 28 Polaroids that together comprise one scene, Campos-Pons stands before the camera, her face painted white. A birdcage rests atop her head, and she wears an antique Chinese robe, a nod to her Chinese ancestors who were brought to Cuba as indentured servants to work on the sugar plantations.

Another Polaroid knockout is the nine-part grid Classic Creole (2003). In the center, a yellow flower rises from a tall fabric-wrapped form that close inspection reveals to be a human body. On either side, strings of beads rise up like trees in a clever play with scale. The work evokes cultural, bodily, and natural roots all at once. “I am from many places,” Campos-Pons has said. “I live with that duality and multiplicity in my mind, and in my soul, and in my body. My roots are a bunch of dispersed fragments in the planet, in the universe, in this incredible miasma that is the world.”

Those metaphorical and literal roots run throughout the exhibition. Replenishing (2001) is a work that references retracing her lineage: it depicts the artist and her mother when they were finally able to reunite in Cuba. In the h-shape composition (for hogar, or home), her mother appears at left in a blue floral dress, the artist, at right in a white dress. The dresses represent the colors of orishas Oshun and Yemayá. Both women hold strings of beads that knot together and meet in the central Polaroid.

Umbilical Cord (1991) similarly traces the artist’s matrilineal side. In a linear grid, we see 12 black-and-white photos, 6 of them torsos with white crosses painted on them, alternating with 6 photos of arms with the left hand outstretched; a thread projecting from each work connects them all. These images show the women in the artist’s family. In Cuba, it is through the left hand, called “the hand of the heart,” that bloodlines are extended from woman to woman. In her work, Campos-Pons makes monumental the various histories and cultures that flow through her family’s veins.

The legacy of slavery came to feel even more present to the artist after she moved South in 2018 to Nashville, relocating from Boston, per the wall text. In Tennessee, she became fascinated by the magnolia trees that grow all around the city. As she walks about Nashville, she photographs them; by now, she’s accumulated hundreds of images of these trees. She digitally printed one of those images on a mixed-media triptych, Secrets of the Magnolia Tree (2021), framing a self-portrait. As cocurator Carmen Hermo writes in the catalogue, “What have these trees themselves seen, their lives extending far longer than ours? Irrigated by the actions and inactions of humans as much as the water cycle, these trees hold memories, too.” Campos-Pons is still attending to the trees, hoping to learn more of the histories they hold. In all her work, time collapses as history and the present intertwine. Soon, the trees’ stories will reveal themselves to her.

Correction, October 11, 2023: An earlier version of this review identified Neil Leonard as Campos-Pons’s husband; he is her former husband.