Decolonizing the Cultural Workplace: A New Organizing Front

Targeting the Museum

Institutions rarely undertake fundamental overhauls without strong pressure from external voices of conscience. Groups of individuals with creative capital—artists, writers, and, yes, labor advocates—can play that role, functioning as catalysts to accelerate the forward thrust of the decolonial movement. My own participation in this work dates to 2011, when I helped to establish the Gulf Labor Coalition, an international group of artists and critics formed to combat the abuse of migrant workers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). ³ We chose to target the lavishly funded effort of the Abu Dhabi authorities to license some of the world’s top museum brands—the Guggenheim, Louvre, and the British Museum—for a new cultural quarter under construction on Saadiyat Island in the UAE. These new branches were being acquired to add luster to the Emirate’s strenuous efforts to promote the national brand at the same time as they would help sell luxury villas on the island. In common with other Gulf countries, the UAE relies on vast numbers of mistreated migrant workers from South Asia to build out the infrastructure of its fast-growth emirates. Its kafala (sponsorship) system of worker recruitment, labor camps, and punishing working conditions all have colonial roots in a region with a long history of authoritarian rule, implanted by foreign powers and perpetuated internally by absolute monarchies. Under the kafala regime, workers arrive heavily indebted and tied to their sponsor or employer—with few labor protections, they are subject to harsh work discipline and surveillance, and are beaten and deported if they complain or go on strike.

. . . [T]he Gulf Labor Coalition . . . chose to target the lavishly funded effort of the Abu Dhabi authorities to license some of the world’s top museum brands . . . for a new cultural quarter under construction on Saadiyat Island in the UAE.

“High Culture/Hard Labor” is the slogan we gave to the Saadiyat formula of arts-driven growth, and it rests on a simple moral principle—no one should be asked to exhibit, curate, or perform in a museum built on the backs of abused workers. ⁴ Adopting the playbook of anti-sweatshop campaigners who sullied the brands of top garment producers—beginning with Nike in the 1980s—by exposing the misery of their subcontracted workforce, we decided to leverage the museums’ high-profile names in an effort to raise labor standards for the UAE’s migrant workers. Because most of the Gulf Labor core members were based in New York City, we had more local traction with the Guggenheim than with the Louvre or the British Museum. So, we concentrated on publicly pressuring the Guggenheim leadership in New York to adopt a model set of worker standards for others to follow.

The campaign took many forms: an international boycott of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi that attracted thousands of signatories from artists, critics, and curators; direct dialogue with the museum’s leaders and trustees along with the Abu Dhabi officials tasked with delivering Saadiyat Island’s cultural quarter; coordination of non-governmental organization (NGO) and trade union partners to put pressure on the museum; field research in Abu Dhabi to take testimony from workers; publications and publicity in a variety of forums; a yearlong program of commissioned artworks, called “52 Weeks”; and direct action that involved a series of spectacular occupations of the Guggenheim in New York and Venice. ⁵ The occupations were carried out by Gulf Labor’s direct-action wing, G.U.L.F. (Global Ultra Luxury Faction), composed of comrades who had been active in Occupy Wall Street spin-offs like Occupy Museums and Strike Debt. ⁶

Not surprisingly, the activities of our group ran up against government repression in the UAE. Several members—Walid Raad, Ashok Sukumaran, Guy Mannes-Abbott, and I—were barred from entering the UAE. As a result, it was no longer possible to establish and develop relationships on the ground with workers, although some Gulf Labor members were able to interview workers in India who had been deported from the UAE for organizing. In the United States, the museum leadership broke off dialogue after we brought to the negotiating table the heavy guns of international unions and NGOs: Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Federation of Trade Unions, the Building and Woodworkers International, and the Delhi-based Society for Labor and Development. Despite this rupture in discussion, construction of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi was frozen soon after, and, as of this writing, has not resumed. The authorities learned that there is a price to pay for labor rights abuses after all.

Shortly after the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi project ground to a halt, the architect Michael Sorkin and I ran a related campaign along with members of the Finnish arts community to oppose the Guggenheim’s plans for another museum branch in Helsinki. We staged an architectural competition as an alternative to the official competition run by the Guggenheim and mobilized trade unions to lobby the city council to reject the museum’s chosen plan. ⁷ In the course of both wins, in Abu Dhabi and Finland, the creativity of our tactics was recognized by our labor and human rights NGO partners who were not institutionally equipped to launch such initiatives.

In the aftermath of the Gulf Labor Coalition’s work, a core group of G.U.L.F. activists—Amin Husain, Nitasha Dhillon, Yates McKee, and myself—formed a new organization called Decolonize This Place. This group took its name from a spring 2016 protest at a Brooklyn Museum show (called “This Place”) about Israel/Palestine, but it took formative shape when Artists Space, a non-profit gallery and arts organization in Lower Manhattan, invited us to take up a three-month residency in the fall of that year. Eschewing a standard exhibitionary model, we set up the gallery as a space for intersectional organizing among grassroots groups in New York City. Our long-term goal was to build connections between and among five pillars of organizing—Indigenous insurgence, Black liberation, global workers, Free Palestine, and opposition to urban gentrification. The initial targets of our actions included the Brooklyn Museum, Artis—an organization that sends artists and curators on tours of Israel–and, most conspicuously, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), the nation’s premier ethnographic institution.

The American Museum of Natural History’s . . . dioramas and cultural halls had barely been touched since the early twentieth century, when they were heavily influenced by the imperialist legacy of Teddy Roosevelt and other champions of white supremacy, and when the museum served as an epicenter of the eugenics movement.

The AMNH is a colonial artifact trapped in an earlier time when scientific racism was normative. Its dioramas and cultural halls had barely been touched since the early twentieth century, when they were heavily influenced by the imperialist legacy of Teddy Roosevelt and other champions of white supremacy, and when the museum served as an epicenter of the eugenics movement. Unlike many natural history museums elsewhere, it had not taken one step down the path of decolonization, and so millions of visitors, including New York City’s schoolchildren, annually experience cultural harm from exposure to displays that place the culture of colonized peoples alongside dioramas of animal habitats; for example, the Hall of African Peoples directly and unambiguously connects to the Akeley Hall of African Mammals.

Beginning in 2016, each year on Indigenous People’s Day, we staged an Anti-Columbus Day Tour of the museum, providing a critical alternative to the framing of the institution’s artifacts. ⁸ Adding our voices to the international movement to remove colonial statues, we also called for the city to dismantle a monument to Theodore Roosevelt, featuring the former president on horseback, flanked, in subservient fashion, by the figures of an African and Native American on foot. By the time of the fourth annual action, this popular tour was attracting as many as a thousand participants. In talks with museum officials, we urged the formation of a Decolonization Commission, with representation from community stakeholders. To date, there is no such commission, but in June 2020, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio agreed to remove the statue, and the museum mounted an exhibit to “contextualize” Roosevelt’s racist views and the museum’s own “imperfect history.” Repatriation of some Native artifacts is under consideration.

But the overriding problem with the “natural history” presented by the AMNH is that the art and culture of Global South populations is included under the rubric of Nature. By sharp contrast, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sitting on the other side of Central Park, enshrines European and North American cultures, along with their Greco-Roman-Egyptian “forebears,” under the rubric of Art. For each museum to provide a more defensible version of global cultural history, the two institutions would need to collaborate on a bold exchange of their respective contents, arranged in new ways to tell better stories. To acknowledge the original occupants of the land, they should also collaborate with the city on a “land back” initiative to re-establish some version of Indigenous access and control over an area of Central Park between the two museums.

After the AMNH actions, Decolonize This Place turned its attention to a chronic problem—the reliance of museums on affluent board members, whose wealth is drawn from industries that harm many of the communities served by the institutions themselves: weapons manufacturing, mining extraction, private prison expansion, and development projects that gentrify neighborhoods, among many others. In 2019, we conducted a lengthy campaign at the Whitney Museum, involving weekly actions inside the museum lobby. It resulted in the ouster of Warren Kanders, one of the museum’s major benefactors and vice-chair of its board. Kanders is the CEO of Safariland, a manufacturer of military and police equipment. His direct association with tear gas and material used in the repression of protestors and other civilian populations all over the world was a liability in the eyes of artists and their communities who had firsthand experience of police repression or whose conscience was pricked by his record of artwashing these industrial practices through his philanthropic involvement with the museum. ⁹

The campaign win followed the successful efforts of PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), a group of artists who have successfully targeted the opioid-profiteering Sackler family’s patronage of several museums. ¹⁰ Other precedents include the Art Not Oil Coalition in the United Kingdom, which employs a variety of tactics to protest oil industry sponsorship of the arts, ¹¹ and Occupy Museums’ 2014 protest against the creation of a four-block-long plaza in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, named for donor David H. Koch. ¹²

Spoils of Modernity

Most recently, Decolonize This Place has been a central participant in the Strike MoMA campaign, ¹³ an initiative of the International Imagination of Anti-National Anti-Imperialist Feelings (IIAAF) arts collective. Strike MoMA is a direct-action initiative by artists targeting New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and was sparked by public criticism of board chair Leon Black’s cozy relationship with the disgraced Jeffrey Epstein. A well-heeled financier with a coveted art collection that includes one of the prized versions of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, Black was forced to step aside in an effort by the museum to ride out the scandal. As with most elite cultural and educational institutions, the MoMA trustees are beneficiaries of corporate wealth and power that is at odds with the liberal, humanist values espoused by the institutions themselves. They can and do exert undue influence on curation, acquisitions, and programming in ways that reflect the interests of their donor class.

Strike MoMA has called attention to the “interlocking directorates” at the top—trustees who also sit on the boards of companies and financial firms and whose power derives from their commanding positions in the corporate economy and the world of high culture. ¹⁴ Traditionally, the involvement of ultra-wealthy in the cultural sector has been a source of soft power, but now that art collecting is a key source of wealth in itself, there is less daylight between the two. Artworks, like Black’s The Scream, circulate between their own private collections and the exhibitions of elite museums, acquiring value en route, while the galleries are made available as after-hours venues for high-society galas and soirees.

In the spring of 2021, Strike MoMA presented ten weeks of virtual and onsite protests, workshops, panel discussions, mixed-media messaging, and “Ruins of Modernity” tours of midtown Manhattan skyscrapers that drew attention to the MoMA trustees who also serve on corporate boards. In the wake of the Israeli attacks on Gaza in May 2021, these Strike MoMA actions also addressed war crimes committed by the Israeli Defense Forces, drawing attention to board members (Paula Crown, Ronald Lauder, Daniel Och, and Steven Tananbaum, in addition to Black himself) with direct ties to the promotion of Zionist indoctrination programs like Birthright or to the Israel military itself. Similar links were developed, through trustees, to the popular uprising in Colombia, the grassroots fight against gold mining in the Dominican Republic, and the austerity regime imposed on the people of Puerto Rico. The only response to our actions from Glenn Lowry, the museum’s director, came in a leaked email to staff in which he accused the protesters, bizarrely, of wanting to “[disassemble] MoMA and all museums so they no longer exist.” Arrogantly eschewing all forms of direct dialogue, his more revealing reaction was to beef up security measures and staff around the perimeter of the museum, which already boasts an array of high-tech fortress gates that rise into place after MoMA closes.

The mobilization of guards and gates is only the thin end of a security wedge that is central to the philosophy and economy of the art world. Curator and filmmaker Awam Ampka recently pointed out that, ironically, many of the looted artifacts being repatriated by Western museums to African countries in the name of decolonization were not meant to be carefully conserved; they were originally crafted to perform a cultural or religious function and it was assumed they would degrade over time. ¹⁵ The urge to quarantine, hoard, and safeguard these objects to preserve their life only kicked in when they entered a Western art system tied to external valuation. The professions of art conservation and restoration emerged historically to perform that role. Their applied expertise dovetails with the connoisseurs who authenticate artworks to boost the economic and social value of art and artifacts, and, ultimately, to serve the speculative market.

Those who want arts and culture to live among us, as part of a commons, need to insist on alternative values; art is most cherished when it circulates in our daily lives, and, like us, it passes away, and that is okay.

For the moguls who see the art world as an acquisition field of shiny assets in need of protection, the provision of these security services—from the conservationists and authenticators to the guards at museums, galleries, and freeports—may seem rational and necessary. But the prioritization of security is not culturally self-evident. It is the mark of a market society that depends on the condition of relative scarcity without which commodities have no value. Those who want arts and culture to live among us, as part of a commons, need to insist on alternative values; art is most cherished when it circulates in our daily lives, and, like us, it passes away, and that is okay. A more formal way of putting this is to prefer usufructuary rights—conferring temporary use of someone else’s property—over proprietary ones. This distinction has always been key to colonial economies aimed at expropriating Native or common resources, and it is central to the intellectual property system that perpetuates colonial inequalities to this day: for example, the TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) agreement at the cold heart of Covid-vaccine colonialism, which protects the revenue rights of pharmaceutical patent holders.

Agitation about the expediency of culture for the wealthy and powerful is hardly news, but its decolonial turn has opened up a new front of activism and utopian striving.

Agitation about the expediency of culture for the wealthy and powerful is hardly news, but its decolonial turn has opened up a new front of activism and utopian striving. Strike MoMA asks us to imagine a post-MoMA artworld in which museums divorce themselves from the ultra-rich, renounce the superstar mentality, and join the solidarity economy where creative people seek to support themselves through mutual aid and where institutions are peoples’ forums, not entrenched bastions of privilege.