August 5, 2024
Artists

Pro-Palestinian artists face ongoing censorship in the US, while rich art collectors demand student protesters be “dragged off campus”


The systematic censorship in the US of artists who express sympathy with the plight of the Gazan population and oppose the genocidal policies of Netanyahu-Biden continues.

*The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) has felt obliged to create an “Art Censorship Index,” primarily reporting the most egregious, official acts of censorship favoring the murderous Israeli military attacks on the Palestinians.

*In an episode that the NCAC has not yet had time to list, Native American artist Danielle SeeWalker recently had an invitation rescinded to be artist in residence in Vail, Colorado, the Rocky Mountain resort town. The artist had done a painting G is for Genocide, of a woman wearing a keffiyeh, and posted an image of the work on Instagram.

G is for Genocide, Danielle SeeWalker

*Meanwhile, chat messages obtained by the Washington Post reveal that a secret cabal of wealthy art collectors and “art-world stakeholders,” with connections to major museums in New York and elsewhere, discussed plans to put pressure on Mayor Eric Adams to break up the protests by students at Columbia University and other campuses.

The NCAC index provides information on a series of episodes in which institutions have acted on behalf of pro-Israeli forces to clamp down on artists’ free speech. The WSWS has written about a number of them, including the exclusion of Palestinian artist Jumana Manna from a panel at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio; the cancellation of a career retrospective by Palestinian artist Samia Halaby at Indiana University; the shutting down of scheduled showings of Israelism, a film critical of Zionist policies, at Hunter College in New York and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia; and the “postponement” of an appearance by Vietnamese-American Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.

It notes the cancellation of appearances by author Nathan Thrall, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, at a number of venues, including the Writers Bloc in Los Angeles and the University of Arkansas.

The Burning Man festival in Nevada, which pledges itself to “community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance,” removed from its website a pro-Palestinian art work, a proposed 8-by-14-foot fiberglass installation in the shape of a watermelon, a symbol of resistance to Israeli occupation. The title of the work was “From the River to the Sea,” and various pro-Zionists objected, claiming that the slogan constituted “language that advocates for the annihilation of Israel.”



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