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.

The initiative was spearheaded by the National Coalition Against Censorship, a New York–based nonprofit composed of more than 50 organizations. Its mission, per its website, is to help defend the right to free expression for “creators of all forms of art and cultural production.”

“Our cultural sphere is at its richest when artists and cultural institutions are able to reflect upon challenging social and political issues of our time,” Elizabeth Larison, director of NCAC’s Arts and Culture Advocacy Program, said in a statement. “By documenting these instances of art censorship, we hope to inspire greater accountability and dialogue within the artistic community and beyond.”

The art world has grown increasingly polarized in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent aerial bombardment and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military. (As of publication, more than 35,000 Palestinian in Gaza have been killed, according to the local health ministry.) Accusations of censorship at art institutions and college campuses worldwide spiked dramatically in the ensuing months.

An introduction to the index explains that it intentionally limited its data collection to incidents in which institutions “expressly canceled, withdrew, or abandoned a program or work after plans to present it had been communicated, and where the reason for the withdrawal was related to the perceived political content of the work, the personal politics of the artist, or the national or cultural associations tied up in the content of the work.”

It will not include cases in which artists significantly altered their own work after it had been curated, or cases where “the existing curatorial frameworks precluded an artwork from being selected in the first place.” Additionally, the map does not record employee firings, incidents of galleries severing representation of artists, or the expulsion of student groups from campuses.

Incidents indexed in the United States include the cancellation of a talk by Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen about his memoir A Man of Two Faces that was originally hosted by 92NY last October. According to the database, Nguyen had signed an open letter in the London Review of Books that was critical of Israel. The event was pulled from programming just hours before it was scheduled to start. For each entry, the index includes links to reporting on the cancellation.

Also mapped was the cancellation of a panel that included Berlin-based Palestinian artist Jumana Manna as part of a “Director’s Dialogue on Art and Social Change” at Ohio University’s Wexner Center for the Arts on November 14. Per the Art Censorship Index, the event was canceled in late October following after scrutiny was placed on Manna’s video Foragers, which focuses on the Israeli government’s “criminalization of the Palestinian practice of foraging wild plants.”

“Through this initiative, NCAC aims to raise awareness of this most recent trend of art censorship, advocate for the protection of artistic freedom, and empower individuals and organizations to identify and resist censorship efforts,” the NCAC said, adding that any suspected incidents of censorship can be submitted directly to the organization.

“It is the consensus of our community that our policies and actions, together with those of our partners, must actively support and uphold universal humanitarian rights at all times,” the KABK’s board of directors wrote in the letter.

The academy, founded in 1682, is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands. It is the first in the country to agree to an academic boycott of an Israeli institution, and it joins a growing list of colleges, mostly ones in the United States, that are facing calls from students to end collaborations with Israeli academies or cultural bodies, as well as corporations linked to weapons manufacturers.

In December, the KABK student union sent the academy’s administration a petition signed by 200 students, faculty, and alumni. The signatories condemned an initiative launched on October 16 at Bezalel Academy of Arts, known as the Bezalel Emergency Sewing Center. (Previously, the KABK also maintained an exchange program with the Bezalel Academy of Arts that was active between 2017 and 2019.)

Referring to the sewing center, the petition says, “Students are tasked with fixing uniforms for the Israeli military, the same military that goes into Gaza to enact genocide. Students are tasked to sew into every fixed uniform a tag that says ‘with love from Bezalel’. The very thought of this sounds obscene.”

The school did not immediately sever ties with Bezalel, citing a desire to “fight the reflex of adopting the conflict.” In a statement, KABK administration said, “In a world that is increasingly hostile, xenophobic, and aggressive, we ask you to side with us to enable all in our community to experience the safe place we must be.”

The student union subsequently organized a general assembly on April 24 that invited “a community-wide conversation on Palestine and the role of cultural boycotts.” 

In a letter sent following the assembly, the KABK’s board of directors thanked students for opening this dialogue and fostering an “internal alignment” over the school’s stance on an academic boycott. 

“We choose to discontinue to partner with an institution that is not opposing a government under serious investigation for breaching human rights and committing crimes against humanity or is supporting this,” the letter said.

The union also demanded that the KABK forge ties with the Dar al-Kalima University in Bethlehem, and provide the same tuition discounts to Palestinian students that were offered to Ukrainians after the start of Russia’s invasion in 2022. In response, the academy’s board said it will establish a humanitarian scholarship for two students from conflict regions beginning next academic year and will pursue the possibility of further partnerships. 

The Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design is also currently the target of a boycott by students, faculty, and alumni of Cooper Union, a prominent art school in New York City. Cooper Union’s exchange program with Bezalel first drew condemnation in 2010, when a student on an exchange program was reportedly blinded in one eye by a tear gas projectile shot by a member of the IDF. The student, a junior at Cooper Union, was participating in a protest against settler activity in the West Bank.

Last month, a petition demanding the end of the program began circulating within the Cooper Union community, and has so far accrued some 250 signatures.

Bezalel’s extensive exchange program with art schools also includes the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). After a pro-Palestine demonstration at the SAIC museum in May ended in dozens of student arrests, museum staff published an open letter in solidarity with the protestors. The letter called for an “end to any financial support of the Palestinian genocide, direct or indirect.” 

The gallery is dedicated to showing how renewable energy can help address climate change and opens on March 26. The Science Museum has been accused of “greenwashing” by allowing Adani Group’s renewable energy subsidiary to sponsor the gallery.

A video uploaded to X (formerly Twitter) shows activists protesting outside of the museum during its VIP opening the evening of March 21. On March 23, more than 150 people from several different environmental and social justice groups, including Scientists for Extinction Rebellion and Fossil Free London, protested inside the Science Museum.

During the protest, a large banner was unfurled in the institution’s Energy Hall in reference to accusations that Adani has been removing people from the indigenous Adivasi community from their ancestral lands in India.

Activists have also accused Adani of profiting from Israel’s war in Gaza through its production of drones and its partnership with Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons manufacturing company.

While the company did not respond to a request for comment from ARTnews, the head of Adani Green Energy told the Telegraph he was focused on finding solutions to climate change.

“Adani Green is making the transition happen and we are doing it on a very large scale. Not many people have heard of us in the UK but we are doing solar at probably the largest scale of any company anywhere in the world,” said Sagar Adani, the nephew of Adani Group’s cofounder and chairman Gautam Adani.

Adani said sponsoring the Science Museum is part of the company’s plan. “Bringing together people who care and who want to do something about it, not just making people cry or engaging in armchair activism,” he told the Telegraph. “Criticism is always welcome. But our focus is on solving problems.”

In response to the protests this weekend, Ian Blatchford, director and chief executive of the Science Museum Group, defended the choice of sponsor.

“Engaging our audiences with the science of climate change— the defining challenge of our time—is a key priority for the Science Museum Group,” he told the Art Newspaper, which first reported the news. “Our innovative new gallery will explore how we might achieve the urgent energy transition the world needs to see, a project made possible by generous sponsorship from Adani Green Energy, a major renewable energy business based in India whose huge population is expected to drive the biggest energy demand growth of any country in the world in the coming decades.”

Rhian Ashford from the Fossil Free Science Museum coalition said the museum had undermined its reputation by partnering with Adani.

“The Director of the Science Museum repeatedly refers to Adani Green as ‘a major renewable energy business’ but, every time, he fails to mention that the firm was literally used to help generate funds for the Adani Group’s vast Carmichael coal mine in Australia,” Ashford said in a written statement sent to ARTnews. “Governments and scientists agree that we must rapidly phase-out coal if we’re to reach net zero but the Adani Group is doing the exact opposite, taking lands from Indigenous communities in Australia and India in order to create new coal mines and power stations.”

In addition to running eight large airports, Adani Group is India’s biggest coal importer and a leading miner of the fossil fuel, burning much of it in the company’s eight power stations. It also operates the Carmichael coal mine in Australia, which has an annual yield of 60 million tonnes.

Last March, the research group Culture Unstained published an investigation into the partnership between the Science Museum and Adani that said it “was pushed through without the Board reviewing the Museum’s own report into the controversies surrounding the sponsor.” The Art Newspaper reported the investigation used documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests and showed the museum “had produced an internal due diligence report which identified instances of alleged corruption and fraud, as well as human rights concerns associated with the Adani Group.”

The Science Museum’s sponsorship agreement with Adani Group was announced in 2021. In response to the agreement, museum trustees Hannah Fry and Jo Foster resigned, and former director Chris Rapley stepped down from the institution’s advisory group. In 2022, the agreement also prompted a boycott by more than 400 teachers and educators and the cancelation of an event after two scientists withdrew their participation.

The Science Museum also has sponsorship agreements with fossil fuel companies BP and Equinor.

Activists also held pro-Palestine protests at the British Museum and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on March 24. The event at the British Museum highlighted the institution’s partnership with BP, and was organized by Energy Embargo for Palestine, a new UK-based group. The protest prompted the museum’s early closure.

The organization also launched a boycott campaign, urging members of the public not to visit the museum, to avoid professional collaborations, and to end memberships. The protestors cited news of BP being one of six companies that Israel’s energy ministry awarded gas exploration licenses last October.

The British Museum announced its own £50 million deal with BP last December. However, records of the institution’s board meetings showed trustees raised ethical and security concerns several months before the deal’s approval.

On March 8, the organization Palestine Action, posted a video to X (formerly Twitter) showing an unidentified protestor defacing the 1914 painting by Philip Alexius de László with red spray paint and then slashing the canvas in several places. The work is housed at Trinity College, a school that is part of the University of Cambridge. Two activists with Palestine Action also doused a memorial to Balfour at the UK House of Commons in November 2022 with ketchup. The Art Newspaper reports that the pair were acquitted by a jury at Southwark Crown Court.

Sally Davies, master of Trinity College, said in a statement, “I am shocked by [the] attack in our college on our painting. I condemn this act of vandalism. We are cooperating with the police to bring the perpetrators to justice.”

Balfour is a controversial figure in modern Middle East political history. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was a public pledge by Great Britain declaring support for the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. The pledge was in the form of a letter from Balfour, then the country’s foreign secretary, and was addressed to Lionel Walter Rothschild, a prominent figure of the British Jewish community. That declaration formed the basis for the British Mandate for Palestine and paved the way for the establishment of the state of Israel after World War II. 

Since the October 7 attack by Hamas, which killed 1,200 Israelis and took over 200 hostages, more than 31,000 Palestinians have been killed amid airstrikes and a ground invasion by Israel, per the local health ministry. Demonstrations have grown increasingly common at major museums and galleries worldwide, where powerful art world figures have been accused of failing to condemn the destruction in Palestine.

On March 11, a group of 158 employees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art delivered an open letter to the museum’s director and CEO, Max Hollein, demanding he publicly call for a ceasefire and release a statement about the destruction of Gaza and Palestinian cultural heritage.

Last month, hundreds of protesters gathered inside the Museum of Modern Art and outside of the Brooklyn Museum, brandishing banners that read “Ceasefire Now” and “Cultural Workers Stand with Gaza.” Protesters have also accused several members of the MoMA’s board of trustees of funding “genocide,” “apartheid,” and “settler colonialism.” Pro-Palestine protests have also disrupted operations at the British Museum, San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada.

The painting of Balfour has been linked to a more recent controversy involving the University of Cambridge and Israel. In February, Middle East Eye reporter Imran Mulla published an investigation on the university’s investment in defense companies with contracts in Israel. Trinity College, the university’s best-known college, has invested approximately $80,000 last year in Israel’s leading arms company, Elbit Systems, according to the report. 

In an online statement, Palestine Action wrote: “Arthur Balfour, then UK Foreign secretary, issued a declaration [in 1917] which promised to build ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine, where the majority of the Indigenous population were not Jewish. He gave away the Palestinians’ homeland—a land that wasn’t his to give away. … Britain’s support for the continued colonization of Palestine hasn’t wavered since 1917.”

The artists—Diedrick Brackens, Yto Barrada, Mounira al Solh, and Cian Dayrit—have requested their works be removed from the center’s current textile arts exhibition, “Unravel: the Power and Politics of Textiles in Art,” following the lead of the collectors, Lorenzo Legarda Leviste and Fahad Mayet, who last week pulled their loan of two quilts by Loretta Pettway. A work by Pacita Abad, loaned by Art Jameel in Dubai, has also been withdrawn. In total, nine artworks have been removed from view.

A Barbican spokesperson confirmed that the works will be removed from the show. “We respect the decision of the artists to withdraw their works from Unravel. The works will be removed from display and signage will be put in place,” the spokesperson said.

Brackens, an American weaver who explores the historical complexities of queer and black identities, withdrew his work fire makes some dragons.

“I want to be clear that my textile and larger practice and what I [have] known about this institution,” he said in a statement shared with ARTnews. “It is disheartening that this exhibition has to be dismantled work by work in order to expose the complicity of the institution in silencing those of us who are speaking out against the historical and ongoing violence being committed in Gaza.” He added that the continued withdrawal of works by artists he finds inspiring has “unfortunately” meant the “sullying” of the curatorial team’s “well-intentioned vision.”

On February 29, Legarda Leviste and Mayet withdrew two quilts by Pettway, a member of the Southern American artist collective Gee’s Bend, from the show following reports that the Barbican would no longer present a lecture series organized by the London Review of Books set to take place over February and March. The decision was made in protest of the center’s “censorship and repression” and “in solidarity with Palestine,” the couple said in a statement later published online.

The Barbican Centre has since installed a plinth where the two Pettway works were displayed. Affixed to that plinth is text reading: “These two works have been withdrawn at the request of the lenders, as an act of solidarity with Palestine, in response to the Barbican’s decision to not host the London Review of Books (LRB) Winter Lecture Series.” 

Mishra’s planned talk, titled “The Shoah after Gaza,” examined the historical connections between the Shoah (the Hebrew term for the Holocaust) and the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, where 31,000 Palestinians have died since October 7, per the local health ministry. “The Shoah after Gaza” was ultimately held at St James Church in Clerkenwell.

A statement from the Barbican published February 14 said that no official agreement to host the talk was finalized before the details of the event were “prematurely” publicized. The center’s senior leadership did not have time “to do the careful preparation needed for this sensitive content.”  

In a statement to the Art Newspaper,  French Moroccan artist Yto Barrada cited the “creeping normalization of censorship across art institutions.

“Today, we cannot take seriously a public institution that does not hold a space for free thinking and debate, however challenging it might feel to some staff, board members or anxious politicians,” she wrote, adding that that she requested that the reason for her withdrawal “be indicated in the gallery,” echoing the statement that accompanied the withdrawal of Loretta Pettway’s quilts.

Barrada concluded: “I pray for peace, justice and an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.”

A Barbican spokesperson said the exhibition would not close early due to the removals. 

Chief executive Clare Spencer said in a statement that the center regrets “not [being] able to get the necessary logistical arrangements in place to host the LRB Winter Series.” She continued that the center is now “thoroughly reviewing the circumstances in which this decision was taken.” 

[Update 03/12/2024: The article has been updated to reflect that the total of artists participating in the protest is now six, with a total of nine artworks pulled from “Unravel”.]

The activist group Palestine Action shared a video on X of an unidentified protestor dousing Balfour’s portrait, a 1914 work by Philip Alexius de László, in red spray paint and then slashing the canvas almost entirely to pieces. The work is housed at Trinity College, a school that is part of the University of Cambridge.

Palestine Action captioned the video: “Palestine Action spray and slash a historic painting of Lord Balfour … Written in 1917, Balfour’s declaration began the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by promising the land away — which the British never had the right to do.”

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was a public pledge by Great Britain declaring support for the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. The pledge was in the form of a letter from Britain’s then-foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, and was addressed to Lionel Walter Rothschild, a prominent figure of the British Jewish community. That declaration formed the basis for the British Mandate for Palestine and paved the way for the establishment of the state of Israel.

The declaration, which called for the protection of “existing non-Jewish communities” civil and religious rights, has been deplored by Palestinians since its original announcement. On the occasion of the declaration’s centennial anniversary in 2017, the British government said that it should also called “for the protection of political rights” of Palestinian Arabs, and their “right to self-determination.”

Aside from Balfour’s infamy among Palestinians, the painting may have been targeted due to the University of Cambridge’s links with Israel. In February, Middle East Eye reporter Imran Mulla published an investigation detailing the university’s millions of dollars in investment in defense companies with contracts in Israel. Trinity College, the university’s best-known college, has invested approximately $80,000 last year in Israel’s leading arms company, Elbit Systems, according to the report. Mulla reiterated that finding on X on Friday in posts referencing the defacement of the painting.

The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians has since issued a legal notice to Trinity College, warning that its investments in Elbit System could make its officers, directors, and shareholders  “potentially complicit in Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Around 30 protestors silently distributed fabric petals around the exhibition space in protest of Rovner’s “cultural appropriation” of the poppy flower, which features predominantly in the works on view at Pace. Poppies grow abundantly in Palestine and are symbolic for many Palestinians of their ancestral connection to the land; each fake petal held the name of a murdered Palestinian artist or writer. Activists also wore red T-shirts baring the Arabic word for poppy, a confrontation of the title of the show, “Pragim”—meaning poppies in Hebrew—and the artist’s celebration of the wildflowers that grow “in her field in Israel”, as stated by the exhibition materials.

Max Levin, an arts writer and cultural worker who participated in the demonstration, told ARTnews that Pace’s curatorial statements about Rovner’s work are “contradictory and ultimately normalize occupation, apartheid, and genocide.”

Speaking via email, he said: “On the one hand, the work is “centered on universal questions of the human condition— bringing issues of identity, place, and dislocation to the fore.” On the other hand, Rovner “erases visual information, obscuring specifics of time and place through gestural, abstract qualities.” (These are Pace’s press release words.) Rovner and her supporters appear glad to have it both ways — to appear as if they’re being political in a kumbaya both-sides kind of way, and then also to be obscuring facts of the Israeli appropriation of Palestinian land and culture.”

Per the demonstrators’ accounts, and photography taken by Hyperallergic and demonstrators, and later shared with ARTnews, the protestors, who reportedly arrived at Pace’s Chelsea space in Manhattan around 6:30 p.m., were approached by gallery security who attempted to remove their red veils.

According to Hyperallergic, one man asked why the petals didn’t bear the names of “raped women and burned babies,” in reference to claims of sexual violence and mutilation committed by Hamas during the October 7 attack that killed more than 1,200 Israelis and involved the taking of more than 200 hostages. Those claims are currently under investigation by the United Nations.

Pace employees reportedly led both activists and visitors outside, and temporarily closed the exhibition for approximately thirty minutes.

Levin, however, said that he was “heartened that some of the attendees at Pace also spoke up vocally in defense of the action last night, and there were great conversations with people on the sidewalk. All 250 fliers that were printed were given out to attendees and staff.”

Activists also criticized Rovner’s video installation Signaling (2023), which features rows of waving figures referencing the over 100 hostages taken by Hamas on October 7; in it, the chest of each person appears to emit a red glow. The video has appeared in Times Square, as well as in public sites in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

“Tonight, Pace again uplifts normalization—any project that invokes ‘Israel’ and Palestine without affirming the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people and naming the brutal conditions of occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism under which they live,” read a flyer handed out at the opening. “Rendering 100 waving ‘Israelis’ and the Zionist dog whistle #BringThemHome, [Signaling] distorts the reality of occupation and necessity of resistance, ignoring millions of Palestinians under siege,” it continues.

Pace previously came under fire for its decision to exhibit Rovner during the bombardment of Gaza by Israel. In January, Pace’s New York flagship was spray-painted with pro-Palestine messages, joining the list of New York gallery to be tagged with phrases related to the war in Gaza. Images posted to social media and reviewed by ARTnews showed Pace’s facade spray-painted with phrases such as “Free Gaza.” Additionally, the gallery was splashed with red paint intended to mimic blood spatters. At the time, Pace was navigating a social media controversy spurred by an Instagram post promoting the debut of Signaling in Times Square. The initial caption did not mention the Palestinian death toll in Gaza, which as of today surpasses 30,000, according to the local health ministry; at least 300 Palestinians have been killed in the Occupied West Bank.

Among the top-liked comments on the post was one that accused Pace of “art-washing a genocide.”

Pace subsequently edited the caption to include a death toll and a line saying the gallery previously “omitted the broader context of the ongoing conflict in Gaza and the horrific loss of life.”

Contacted by ARTnews for a comment on the demonstration, a Pace spokesperson said, “Our mission is guided first and foremost by our artists. Our role is to provide a platform for their ideas, to present their vantage points, and to amplify their work to our audiences. We believe in the art gallery as a place for discourse and feel it’s our responsibility to offer this space.”

Editor’s Note, 3/11/2024: A previous version of this article said that demonstrators were “met with resistance by security guards.” That statement has been amended for greater specificity.

According to Hyperallergic, which first reported the news on Tuesday, some former CalArts students in the exhibition wanted to edit their artist statements ahead of the show’s opening on January 20 to account for the conflict in Gaza, where, according to the local health ministry, more than 25,000 people have been killed in Israeli airstrikes and a ground invasion since the October 7 Hamas attack.

But, when they tried to do so, the graduates said, CalArts and UTA Artist Space told them they couldn’t change their statements. Moreover, according to some graduates, UTA partner and creative director Arthur Lewis said the show would be canceled altogether if a protest were to be held at the opening. Some artists in the show had planned to read a statement about Palestine at that event, according to Hyperallergic.

A spokesperson for UTA denied this in a statement to Hyperallergic, saying that Lewis “had not requested censoring any specific words or particular position,” while also adding that he “had only expressed that he did not want the exhibit they’d agreed to host to turn into a protest.”

In response, seven artists—Laura Ohio, Zoe Josephina Moon, malavika rao, GIAHN, Jungsub Eom, lauren mcavoy, and Ásgerður “Ása” Arnardóttir—pulled their work from the show not long before it was to go on view.

“We respect those students’ decision to withdraw from the exhibit,” a UTA spokesperson told ARTnews.

A CalArts spokesperson told ARTnews in an email that the school “did not request or require the artists to amend their statements, nor would we ever do so.”

“It is a central tenet of CalArts to foster an environment where challenging discourse can thrive, and differences can be expressed with thoughtfulness, empathy, and rigor,” the spokesperson wrote. “The Institute has a very clear and long-standing practice of noncensorship regarding any work of art, design, performance, or publication on the campus, which extends to anyone representing CalArts in any official sense.”

UTA Artist Space is the exhibition space run by United Talent Agency, which represents a range of celebrities and artists, including Ai Weiwei, Arthur Jafa, Derrick Adams, and Petra Cortright. The show there in which these former students’ work was set to appear, “Infrastructures,” runs through February 3. It features a range of 2023 graduates from CalArts’s Art, Art & Technology, and Photography & Media programs. Thirty-two artists are currently included in the exhibition.

As is typical for MFA shows held at commercial galleries and other art spaces, the art included is paired with statements by its makers. In the case of “Infrastructures,” at least one participant, Zoe Josephina Moon, had already discussed Palestine in her statement submitted for the show months before its opening, but per Hyperallergic, she was asked to edit hers.