By: Angelina Carson
And the high-profile virtue signaling continues.
This time it’s over tear gas.
A group of eight artists have informed those who run the Whitney Museum of American Art that they wish their art works to be taken out of the upcoming Biennial exhibit. The reason? The presence on the museum’s board of directors of someone connected to the sale of military supplies such as tear gas.
No, really.
The eight who have dropped out leave 67 artists and collectives in the Whitney Biennial, which ends September 22.
Featuring artists and collectives working in painting, sculpture, installation, film and video, photography, performance, and sound, the 2019 Biennial takes the pulse of the contemporary artistic moment. Introduced by the Museum’s founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1932, the Biennial is the longest-running exhibition in the country to chart the latest developments in American art, according to the museum.
“Since March, there have been protests at the museum and calls from artists and scholars for the museum to remove the trustee, Warren B. Kanders, who owns a company that distributes law-enforcement equipment, the Safariland Group,” according to The New York Times. “Mr. Kanders has vigorously defended the company. One artist selected for the Biennial declined to participate before the exhibit opened because of Mr. Kanders’s business. Dozens of others called for Mr. Kanders to resign, even as they took part.”
In a note to the curators that was made public on Friday by Artforum, four artists insisted that they were enraged to find out about Kanders’s connection to Safariland, but “were well into fabrication of major pieces” for the Biennial and decided to forge ahead.
“The Museum’s continued failure to respond in any meaningful way to growing pressure from artists and activists has made our participation untenable,” the four wrote in a copy of the letter provided to The New York Times. “The Museum’s inertia has turned the screw, and we refuse further complicity with Kanders and his technologies of violence.”
Often described as a snapshot of art in the United States, the Biennial brings together work by individuals and collectives in a broad array of mediums, according to its curators. “Over the past year and a half—an undeniably intense and polarized time in this country—we made hundreds of studio visits. While we often encountered heightened emotions, they were directed toward thoughtful and productive experimentation, the re-envisioning of self and society, and political and aesthetic strategies for survival. Although much of the work presented here is steeped in sociopolitical concerns, the cumulative effect is open-ended and hopeful.”
