The Year in Museums: Political Unrest on One Side and Major Gifts on the Other

In case you were distracted, there were a number of well-regarded art exhibitions that took place at museums around the country this year. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York exhibited 160 works in a show of “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” while the Museum of Modern Art displayed 110 rarely seen drawings, prints and sculptures by Kathe Kollwitz and the Whitney staged its 81st Biennial, which closed in August. We saw the proliferation of colonialism themed art exhibitions around the world, and several institutions brought dance into their hallowed halls. And Surrealism turned 100, inspiring numerous shows. As to what distracted you, there were repeated instances of protests at art museums in 2024, with activists condemning the war in Gaza, human-caused damage to the environment and the presence of Sackler Family money and influence at these institutions, as well as their own pay and working conditions.

Art museums, like elite colleges and universities, have become a focus of political and cultural unrest. Activists throw tomato soup at paintings or glue their hands to the floor or picture frames in order to… well, no one is quite sure. Raise awareness, perhaps? In February, climate protesters demanded the ouster of Museum of Modern Art board chair Marie-Josée Kravis (whose husband co-founded the Kohlberg Kravis Roberts private equity firm that has invested in oil and gas projects), littering the lobby with confetti. The cleaning crews at art institutions have certainly been kept busy. This past summer, Harvard University decided against renaming—actually, de-naming—its Arthur M. Sackler Museum and Building, a request that came in late 2022 from a group of students protesting Arthur Sackler’s personal relationship to the national opioid crisis.

Museum directors and their boards face difficult decisions: Should they state their positions on political and social questions? Are they in any way obligated to? If visitors or staff express strong views on these questions using the institution as a platform, does the museum have to accept that it has become a forum for free speech or should it view these demonstrations as a distraction from their mission? In April, almost 100 current and former staffers at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, criticizing the museum’s silence on the war in the Middle East, released an open letter demanding the institution’s leaders issue a statement on the Israeli-Gazan conflict. Two months earlier, a group of staffers at the Museum of Modern Art, as well as artists and others working in various cultural institutions, called on the museum to demand Israel establish an “unconditional ceasefire.” The Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York, made its position clear, firing three staffers in September for violating the institution’s newly created ban on wearing kaffiyehs to work in order to show their support for Gazans. That firing led to a brief staff walk-out and claims that the museum was violating its values.

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On the other side of the country, dozens of staffers at the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle, Washington, walked off the job in May to protest an exhibition, “Confronting Hate Together,” which many in the institution viewed as fomenting hate by linking a desire for a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza conflict to anti-Zionism.

When not angry at the conflict in the Middle East or the state of the environment or whatever fat cat is on the board of directors, other museum staffers have turned their attention to their own working conditions at these institutions, seeking to form or join unions (as at Glenstone in Potomac, Maryland, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in New York State and the Denver Art Museum in Colorado) and to secure higher wages (as at Mass MoCA). It would seem that museums are not happy places to work at these days.

This year saw a cyber attack in January on Gallery Systems, a service provider to numerous museums (among them the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the now-closed Rubin Museum in New York, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College in Arlington, New York, and Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas), the cancellation of an exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in February and the firing of the museum’s chief curator, Eik Kahng, because of a “lack of diversity” among the two dozen artists represented in the show and the closing of exhibitions of Native American objects at both the Cleveland Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History in New York as a result of new federal regulations requiring museums to obtain consent from tribes before displaying cultural items. In June, an exhibition of the work of painter Kehinde Wiley was canceled at the Joslyn Museum of Art in Omaha, Nebraska, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and Pérez Art Museum Miami after three people came forward with allegations of sexual assault.

The Art Institute of Chicago, which also put on a number of notable art exhibitions in 2024, spent much of the year locked in a legal tussle with both the heirs of Austrian collector Franz Friedrich “Fritz” Grünbaum and the Manhattan District Attorney’s office over a 1916 painting in the museum’s permanent collection, Egon Schiele’s Russian War Prisoner, which the heirs claim was looted by the Nazis as Grünbaum was taken to his death in a concentration camp but which the museum contends it purchased legitimately in 1966. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit “arrested” the painting, keeping it at the Art Institute until after a legal decision is offered as to who should own it.

Amidst all the outside turbulence, museums remain big buildings with expensive-to-care-for collections that require a lot of money to keep afloat, and not everyone survives. New York’s Rubin Museum, which focuses on Himalayan art, closed its doors in early October after twenty years, making its collection available online and through traveling exhibitions. The Bellevue Art Museum in Washington State has been in existence for fifty years but found that the cost of operating “has never been sustainable and it has relied too heavily on ‘one-time’ big donors. We are caught in a cycle of financial instability that prevents us from reaching our potential,” according to a statement released by the institution. That closure took place in early September. The Museum of Art at the University of New Hampshire had planned to replace its HVAC system last year in order to make it eligible for accreditation by the American Alliance of Museums but, instead, chose to use its money elsewhere and just close the museum permanently.

Not fatal but still painful, the Newport Art Museum in Rhode Island laid off four staff members in September, leaving the institution with no curator, while the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia cut twelve positions from its full-time staff roster and, in Maine, the Portland Museum of Art eliminated thirteen positions, the result of financial strains lingering from the Covid pandemic.

Closing a museum can seem more tragic than a museum that never opened in the first place. Supporters have sought to transform the Mexico City home of surrealist painter and novelist Leonora Carrington into a museum, but a dispute between the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, which owns the house, and its workers’ union has ended that plan. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art also saw its plans to set up a satellite campus—with an 84,000-square-foot building at the South Los Angeles Wetlands Park—scuttled due to higher-than-anticipated costs. Concurrently, other institutions were hiring engagement officers and brand officers.

Cultural objects have had a tough year around the world. In July, Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander’s monumental 2023 sculpture Witness was beheaded in the early hours of Monday morning, July 8, on the grounds of the University of Houston campus—no one left a note of explanation, but the artist was asked to repair the piece. The vandal remains unknown, as is the person who beheaded Esther Strauss’ recently created sculpture Crowning, depicting the Virgin Mary giving birth to Jesus, that was displayed at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Linz, Austria. Fully repaired, however, is a 3,500-year-old ceramic jar that a four-year-old boy toppled when visiting the Hecht Museum in Israel with his family. (The boy’s father told the BBC that his son was “curious about what was inside,” leading him to climb up and look.) Still presentable but somewhat worse for wear is the first official portrait of King Charles III, which was on display at the Phillip Mould Gallery in London when animal rights activists covered the king’s head with an image of the British cartoon character Wallace from the Wallace and Gromit comedy series. Unlike the souped paintings at various museums (including the Mona Lisa, hit with pumpkin soup in January), the Jonathan Yoo portrait was not covered by glass.

In March, a pro-Palestinian protester sprayed red paint on, and then slashed, a 1914 portrait of Lord Arthur Balfour, which was hung at Trinity College of the University of Cambridge in England. Balfour, a British politician and prime minister, is best known for the 1917 “Balfour Declaration” that established a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine and led, thirty-one years later, to the creation of the State of Israel. In June, a pair of environmental activists from the group Just Stop Oil were arrested for spray-painting several boulders at England’s Stonehenge. One of the two released the statement: “Either we end the fossil fuel era, or the fossil fuel era will end us.”

In most instances, activists who attack artworks face few, if any, legal consequences. Most of the paintings that have been souped are covered by protective glass, making the restoration process more a matter of clean-up than repairing actual damage. Pursuing criminal charges against activists is seldom done because prosecutors in the U.S. and elsewhere are increasingly reluctant to go to trial for what ultimately are petty offenses, and museums are not apt to bring civil charges against protesters because the legal expenses of paying lawyers and court costs are far greater than the actual damages they might win. Still, it was notable when a British judge sentenced a pair of environmental activists in September to 27 and 22 months in prison, respectively, for tossing tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 Sunflowers at London’s National Gallery in 2022.

There are, of course, things that have taken place at museums around the country unrelated to politics. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was gifted more than 300 prints by artists from or working in Mexico, including pieces by Diego Rivera, Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White, while the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., received a donation of twenty box constructions and seven collages by Joseph Cornell, and the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, was given more than three hundred works by European artists of the Renaissance and later (among them, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Hans Memling, Jacopo da Pontormo, Peter Paul Rubens, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun and Jean-Antoine Watteau), as well as funding for a new wing to house the artworks and $45 million to cover the costs of the collection’s care.

See, it wasn’t all bad.