San Francisco artists' love letter to Gaza.
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I’ve been following and writing about the reaction to Indiana University’s cancelling an exhibition of the work of noted Palestinian artist, Samia Halaby.
Local supporters of the artist have responded by organizing a one night program off campus which was sold out.
“Check out the shit show at the Yerba Buena center in CA. They championed BLM but censored then canceled the latest exhibit. Same reason,” wrote my friend, artist and Arts teacher, Nicole Marroquin on my Facebook page.
The Yerba Buena Art Center is located in San Francisco.
According to the arts website Hyperallergic:
Eight artists altered their own artwork on display at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) during a pro-Palestine demonstration yesterday evening, February 15. Two of the artists alleged that the San Francisco arts center had prevented them from advocating for Palestine through their artwork and supporting text in the Bay Area Now 9 triennial exhibition, prompting the group to come together and co-organize the intervention, which they called “Love Letter to GAZA.”
At around 6:40pm local time, midway through the Center’s “Love Letter to SOMA” public event, artists Paz G., Tracy Ren, Jeffrey Cheung, Leila Weefur, Sholeh Asgary, champoy, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, and Courtney Desiree Morris altered their works with fake blood as well as spray-painted slogans, banners, and posters that read “Free Palestine,” “Ceasefire Now,” and an instruction to both the YBCA and the US government to “stop funding genocide.”
The protest at YBCA comes during a week in which pro-Palestinian demonstrators disrupted programming at other high-profile arts institutions.
Eight hundred people flooded New York’s Museum of Modern Art with pro-Palestinian chants and flyers, causing security to shut down the galleries.
Other protests have occurred at the Brooklyn Museum and Jewish Museum in New York, the British Museum in London, and the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin.
At YBCA, the artist champoy, along with several people wearing masks and keffiyehs, turned champoy’s boat sculpture into an altar for Gazan people killed in Israeli airstrikes, with their names and ages written on notecards.
Tracy Ren laid a banner on their wool rug installation that read “No more blood money — ceasefire now.”
Meanwhile, protestors from several Bay Area activist groups including Jewish Voice for Peace, Palestinian Feminist Collective, U.S. Palestinian Communities Network and Palestinian Youth Movement addressed the crowd through a megaphone.
“Art is a universal language meant to speak out against injustice. The institution of art, just like every U.S. corporation, is aligned with the state of Israel,” said Palestinian American muralist Chris Gazaleh. “As an artist, I use my art to educate about my people. Artists in general — we need to speak out against what is happening. It is our duty.”