While protests at university campuses since October 7, 2023, have earned appropriate notoriety for their violence, tactics, and support for Hamas, similar demonstrations have been on view at America’s museums. In February last year, an open letter was signed by hundreds of “museum and culture workers” in New York City, “to protest the disgraceful silence of our institutions as Israel commits genocide in Gaza with the military and financial support of the United States,” and to demand a cultural and intellectual boycott of that state. As winter warmed to spring, these workers gathered for more frequent in-person protests at their places of employment, sometimes to great activist acclaim. A May protest at the Brooklyn Museum was described by ARTnews as “one of the most fervent Gaza solidarity actions yet to descend on a New York City art institution,” calling for the museum to condemn Israel’s attacks in Gaza and divest from corporations connected to Israel. The fervor even extended to the private home of the museum’s director, Anne Pasternak, which was defaced with graffiti and draped with a banner calling her a “White-supremacist Zionist.”
Such incidents, which have proliferated in museums, also have a distinctive character that reveals much about the contested status of museums and the nature of contemporary activism. Consider a single, low-key example. In August 2024, at a lovely museum in Queens, New York, devoted to the sculpture of Isamu Noguchi, a staff member was told he would not be permitted to wear a keffiyeh in the museum. It was explained that the keffiyeh — a scarf that has become associated with what was once called the “Palestinian cause” — was considered by the museum to be “political dress” that would offend some visitors and was thus deemed inappropriate for staff members to wear. Within days, a petition from some 50 staff members objected to the ban, walkouts were staged, and after the museum terminated three employees for noncompliance (and another for related reasons), international headlines were the result. A few months later, another protest there led to the posting of sarcastic museum labels: a seat was named “Bench of Banishment,” the fire alarm, “Alarm of Annihilation.” One wall label, according to a report in Hyperallergic, read, “This wall is a boundary the museum uses to erase culture, banning keffiyeh and firing staff who challenge its racist views.”
Several aspects of the Noguchi brouhaha are worthy of notice. First, in public declarations and protests, the keffiyeh was defended by its advocates as a cultural icon. The museum was accused of attempting to quash Palestinian culture. One of the fired workers said to Hyperallergic, “I am showing my support for Palestinians because I don’t really see this as a political thing. I was raised Christian and I believe in peace.” According to the article, “most workers at the Noguchi Museum feel that the prohibition amounts to the deliberate erasure of a people’s material culture.” Natalie Cappellini, one of the gallery attendants dismissed for the sartorial infraction, was quoted in the New York Times as saying that the keffiyeh is “a cultural garment and we are wearing it for cultural reasons.”
In other words, this was a matter of personal liberty and free speech, an honorable liberal exercise that the tyrannical institution was consigning to the Bench of Banishment. But when interviewed for the World Socialist Web Site, one of the dismissed gallery attendants, referred to in the interview as “Q,” offered a far more direct explanation: “When I wear a keffiyeh I am trying to draw attention to horrifying genocide in Palestine that is being conducted with our tax dollars.” Another dismissed employee discussed how his wearing the keffiyeh followed his “learning a little bit more about the colonial state of Israel and how it functions, the apartheid conditions, things like that.” He adds, “Four people have lost their jobs over a scarf. Meanwhile, there’s a genocide happening. The absurdity of this ban is rivaled only by the horror of the bloodthirsty actions of Israel in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon.”
So, when Cappellini told the Times that the “politicization of the keffiyeh” is something being “imposed” by the museum leadership, she was inverting the truth. The employees knowingly wore the scarves as political statements. And they are not the first to have done so. The keffiyeh — a garment traditionally worn by Bedouin and rural Arabs — came into widespread symbolic use when adapted by Yasser Arafat, by the hijacker Leila Khaled of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and by other leading figures in multiple intifadas, globalized and otherwise. Its ubiquity at protests against Israel and in organic food co-ops for the past several decades has been due entirely to what it symbolizes politically in the context of the conflict. And now it is being used to suggest that any dismissal of the protests is not because of objections to Palestinian terror or Islamist ideology or the tactics of demonstrators, but simply a matter of ordinary cultural prejudice, just as the phrase “from the river to the sea” is now treated as if it were some pastoral invocation rather than a call to destroy a sovereign state. We might call this defense a form of “keffiyeh-washing.”
Another rhetorical gesture used by the Noguchi protesters and by those reporting on it was to invoke the sculptor himself, who they confidently say “would condemn the current Gaza genocide.” What his stance would be on the matter, “there is little doubt.” Too true, there is no need to speculate where Noguchi stood on the “cultural and intellectual boycott” of Israel: He designed the stunning Billy Rose Sculpture Garden at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
But there is an even more revealing workers’ statement in the Noguchi debacle. As one worker told the World Socialist Web Site, “This is something that me and my coworkers, and also fellow concerned community members, have been really trying to project: that the museums are political spaces.” It turns out that the deliberate confusion created here between the cultural and the political is concerted and typical of many other examples of museum activism. The activist ambition — the attempt to transform social structures through the application of pressure — is to treat culture entirely as a manifestation of the political: Culture must be completely answerable to the absolute and far more expansive demands of politics.
Museums and cultural centers are not just the setting, the battleground, as it were, for these cultural-cum-political fights; they are seen as part of the oppressive apparatus the protesters are attacking. The museum is part of the Western colonial project, not merely the place of battle but the object as well, a target of such high value that it can be likened to an enemy’s military arsenal.
At the Brooklyn Museum demonstration, and at many others, a common chant and poster copy is “NYPD KKK IDF: They’re All the Same.” The cause of Palestine is metonymic, standing for a grander whole that embraces every progressive cause. Gaza never stands in isolation.
Where did this kind of museo-activism come from? To a certain extent, from within the art world itself. The activist ambition may even have its origins in some of the ideas that have flourished in Western culture over the past two centuries: Art should challenge the status quo and spur change. It should apply pressure. Beginning in the mid-19th century, the target of cultural opposition was the bourgeoisie and the notion of a respectable “middle class,” which the artist would help overturn. That impulse gave birth to what was once called the “avant-garde” — a term that has military associations, as if the artist were part of the forward guard in a battle for social and institutional transformation.
Contemporary museum activism has a different and much larger enemy. After decades of influence from postmodernism, postcolonial studies, and multiculturalism, the target, either explicitly or implicitly, has become the West itself — its prestige, its influence, its organizing principles, its heritage, and its achievements. The activist artist will aim to undo the West’s purported evils, which are assumed to be, by definition, greater than those of any other culture, past or present. And so we get a culture that is restless, contentious, ironic, humorless, recklessly iconoclastic, and possessing great self-love for its supposed risk-taking and idealism. Being an activist has become the artist’s and intellectual’s self-celebratory vocation.
What does this mean for museums? They are in the crosshairs. Activist polemics, in taking the West as their nemesis, must also grapple with the museum, an institution that has, for centuries, codified and collected and represented that culture and is largely its creation. In its origins, the museum’s purpose was not to challenge a culture or supplant it, but to preserve and enhance it, passing on its most cherished ideas and ideals and creations. The great museums of Europe were built as secular temples, presenting core beliefs and achievements. Such museums were celebrations not just of their national cultures but of their national cultures’ reach: They traced the paths of imperial power, giving a home to artifacts that had been wrested or discovered on sea voyages or missions of conquest.
This enterprise is now widely condemned, and there were indeed examples of real malfeasance that have been widely discussed. But the “Imperial museum” also showed how much there was to understand. How did vastly different human beings, so alien in custom and appearance, see the world? The museum enterprise led to an expanded idea of human possibility and to a quest for universal principles. It transformed the world and transformed the West’s understanding of the world.
The Imperial museum evolved into what might be called the Enlightenment museum. But beginning a half century ago, the activist charge against the Western ideas that led to the very creation of museums began to be aimed at museums themselves. In this new dispensation, the museum is not to be the curator of Western culture, but its critic or even its opponent. By the 1980s, there were explicit calls for new forms of museums. The Enlightenment museum was elitist. The new museum would be populist. The Enlightenment museum was governed from the top down; the new museum would be overseen from the bottom up. Museums given shape by their collections would give way to museums shaped by audience and visitors. They would become, in part, community centers and would reject the models of previous centuries. The new museum would also counter the Enlightenment’s attempts at universality by focusing on the West’s past injustices and celebrating its less privileged groups, now freed to recount their own histories of suffering and opposition.
Thus was born the “Identity museum,” an institution devoted not to the universal but to the particular, and not to a civilization but to an identity. The Identity museum has become the characteristic museum of our era. Over the past 25 years, museums have opened devoted to black Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, Latino Americans, American Indians, and Chinese Americans. The very idea of an Identity museum is to avoid impartiality and narrative distance. Despite their intention of radical specificity, each focusing on a different identity, most if not all Identity museums tend to project an identical narrative map shaped by identity politics. Each group is shown undergoing trials due to racism and discrimination until it learns to find its voice and demand its rights. Every Identity museum insists on its distinctiveness, but the overall activist narrative is rigorously uniform. (Only Jewish-American museums, as far as I can tell, fail to follow this formula, partly because the history of American Jews does not typically fit the identity-based political paradigm.)
Nearly every Identity museum I have seen also incorporates some kind of call to action, to extend the political movement that led to liberation. In this way, the Identity museum has been a harbinger of what was to become even more explicit in recent years as museums have increasingly become activist institutions.
The American Alliance of Museums, a trade organization, has published multiple essays supporting the trend toward Activist museums. One, from 2016, begins by attacking the idea of “neutrality” in museums and argues that a museum focused on American penitentiaries should adopt an activist stand to change “criminal justice policies.” The School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester in England has been giving out Activist Museum Awards since 2019. That year also saw the publication of an anthology entitled Museum Activism,edited by Robert R. Janes and Richard Sandell. The collection gives a sense of the scale of this worldwide movement, with almost unanimous agreement on the principles that should govern new museums and reconfigure old ones.
“Only a decade ago,” the book begins, “the notion that museums, galleries and heritage organizations might engage in activist practice — marshalling and directing their unique resources with explicit intent to act upon inequalities, injustices and environmental crises — was met with widespread skepticism and often derision.” No more. “Museums, as social institutions, have the opportunity and the obligation to question the way in which society is manipulated and governed. Activism also means resistance — the critical questioning and re-imagining of the status quo.” One essay in the anthology, “Growing an Activist Museum Professional,” said it was time to set aside the “long-cherished cornerstones of museum practice — impartiality and objectivity.” And by impartiality and objectivity, the critics mean the Western Enlightenment and its heritage.
These arguments have been transforming even the most traditional museums, many of which have also become self-consciously activist.
- In 2013, for example, the National Archives unveiled a major exhibition to prepare its million annual visitors to see original copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with the Bill of Rights. The exhibition showed not how the ideas in these foundational documents succeeded despite social flaws, but how extensively, throughout our history, they have been dishonored, again and again. Important qualifications are diminished by narrow focus and the complete absence of historical context.
- An exhibition about American art and the natural environment that appeared at Princeton University and other museums attacked the Western view of nature as well as the West’s purported systemic racism.
- A major exhibition supposedly celebrating the settling of the American West at the Arch in St. Louis is peppered with condescending disdain for the entire idea.
- Even symbolism is put in service: At the nation’s first museum devoted to the American Revolution, which opened in Philadelphia in 2017, a display about 18th-century American laborers seeking greater equality showed a shoemaker’s hammer and a farmer’s sickle arranged in the shape of the symbol of the Soviet Communist Party.
This progressive and progressing partiality has disrupted the permanent exhibitions of major museums as well. The Brooklyn Museum’s main exhibition is now displayed with a series of apologies for overrepresenting the “taste of these white, urban, mostly male donors.” One panel at the museum declares a “priority” of the museum: to “explore the dynamics of race, gender, class, and colonialism.” The existence of the museum itself is apologized for, as is now ritualistic in museological circles, with “land acknowledgements” that note that the building is located on territory that belonged, from time immemorial, to various American Indian tribes. No insight is provided of what this building and its contents did to illuminate the world, or to display artifacts that would have never been otherwise preserved. And no celebration is offered of the large-scale Western civilization the museum was actually built to preserve and offer up for contemplation.
The transformation has affected science museums as well. A permanent exhibition of fossils at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History devotes extensive attention to contemporary climate change as interactive displays urge young people to “make a difference,” even offering a suggestion that they create “music about environmental justice.” It is now almost impossible to go to a museum to get a clear understanding of, say, Newton’s laws of motion. Instead, we are urged to act or think in a certain way. Ecological causes rank high. But, inspired by multiculturalism, the point may also be to criticize the West for failing to recognize other cultures’ achievements or views of science, as in a major 2010 international exhibition that celebrated Islamic science with exaggeration and inaccuracy. Yale’s new version of its Peabody Museum, which opened last year, even turns the distortion on itself, misrepresenting the Peabody’s own history to strengthen its polemic against the accomplishments of Western science.
The real scandal of all of this is not that the Activist museum discards notions of neutrality for advocacy, but that it overlooks its own inaccuracies in order to serve its ideology. It has turned the museum landscape and culture into a subsidiary branch of politics. Taken in this context, the following statement by one of the fired Noguchi Museum gallery attendants seems inevitable: “I’m 26 years old, and it’s hard for me to watch people much older than me, with more experience, more established, who have no principles, who have no values that they stand behind.” This person has likely never seen a non-Activist museum, nor has a conception of what principles and values are in fact being upheld.
But this perspective from a museum worker can hardly be surprising. A 2023 essay published by the American Alliance of Museums argued that creating an effective Activist museum requires hiring an activist staff. The result, we are assured, would be “a more engaged, vibrant, and inclusive institutional culture that will benefit internal and external stakeholders and allow the institution to embrace its mission fully.” Many museum studies curricula at universities give unusual attention to such activist ambitions. And there were many such examples of staff activism even before Gaza became the great cause. In 2020, staff at the Guggenheim Museum called on the institution to commit itself to “concrete action and change,” demanding that it “terminate any and all contacts and agreements with the NYPD (within the next month),” that it replace members of the executive staff who would not commit to “restorative justice,” and that it meet with “BIPOC leaders” and create a permanent full-time director-level position “dedicated to advocating for racial equality.” A full-scale report in The Atlantic pointed out that one casualty was the museum’s chief curator, whose life was overturned and career ended by baseless accusations of racism.
Given all this, it should have been no surprise that museums were the sites of so many demonstrations. The staff was intentionally recruited for its activist attitudes. Should anything different have been expected then, once Gaza was in the news?
But there is reason for some hope. While demonstrations at universities have shown that there are few administrators willing to confront the intellectual carnage on display, at most museums and many cultural institutions, action was taken. This may be because the museum or cultural institution could not always nestle into a progressive bubble. They may have become activist in spirit, but they still had to lure a wider public. And they had some responsibility to the artifacts they were enjoined to preserve and care for, even if — as in some museums — the artifacts are hidden or ignored or undercut.
In addition, even when a museum is densely populated with progressive devotees, the Gaza protests, with their implicit support of Hamas, have shocked some of the very people who have, over the past decade, overseen the growing dominance of activist ideas in museums and universities. Sure, the protests rounded up the usual suspects, with allusions to racism and colonialism; the standard-issue high-moral pose was adopted; and the Nazis were ritually invoked, thus justifying outrage and violence in response. But to those retaining some sense of perspective, and their positions of leadership, it was clear that something didn’t fit.
Will the jarring aspects of these events also cause some others to begin to question the activist project itself as one that distorts history in order to reach its conclusions? Among some Jews, and among some curators, and among a few university administrators, and perhaps even among some professors, the disjunction between theory and fact might shake the foundation of their convictions. In order for paradigms to shift, perhaps they must first be shaken by incompatibilities that cannot be explained away.
This is also the context for President Trump’s much derided executive order in March, targeting the federally-run Smithsonian institutions. “Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.” It correctly identifies the problem but not its source in the museums’ educational and professional apparatus that has been developing for the past several decades. Addressing that will require more than a fiat. And the solution will not be a matter of giving a more “positive” spin to American history and ideas; it will require embracing a broader historical context than activist politics currently allows.
Is such a transformation imminent? Is it possible that the Activist museum will, like the Activist university, suddenly find itself marginalized rather than embraced? Can we hope that the sheer absurdity of the protests and the charges being made might lead to an even greater round of self-questioning? Will it still seem important, a generation hence, to treat all of culture as a political masquerade?
We may know, soon enough.
For additional reading on this topic:
How We Got Here: An Intellectual History by EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
