Double Crossing Brooklyn
Updated November 18:
Yesterday dozens of demonstrators joined the Brooklyn Anti-Gentrification Network (BAN), Artists Studio Affordability Project (ASAP), and artists from the Brooklyn Museum’s upcoming AGITPROP! exhibition to protest the 6th Annual Brooklyn Real Estate Summit.
What fossil fuel companies are to science and natural history museums, real estate companies are to art museums. Cultural institutions imbue cultural capital upon corporations that do not act with the interests of our communities–the museum’s communities–in mind. In brokering sponsorship deals, or venue rentals, museums help to provide these companies’ “social license to operate”. The entanglements of art, real estate, the “creative class” and gentrification are well documented. We know that artists and arts institutions can be engines of displacement–but can they act as cogs in the machine?
Together with community groups and local residents we called on the Brooklyn Museum to cancel the Brooklyn Real Estate Summit, and to implement a new rental policy that precludes the museum from hosting the summit in the future–thereby demonstrating leadership and serving as a model for museums everywhere.
Here is documentation from the day’s events, along with our mili-tents, which will soon be on display within the museum’s walls. Reporters got a kick out of that–check out WNYC’s coverage here.
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Posted November 16:
Not An Alternative will be in an upcoming retrospective of activist art, called AgitProp, at Brooklyn Museum in the new year. We’re showing work we developed in the context of the foreclosure crisis, in collaboration with Picture the Homeless and the Occupy movement.
Called Mili-Tents, these interventionist sculptures later appeared in the People’s Climate March, as Right To The City Alliance used them to make connections between rising tides and rising rents. The work speaks to issues of migration, displacement, gentrification, and homelessness.
Given the above, we are particularly concerned that the Brooklyn Museum will play host tomorrow to the 6th Annual Brooklyn Real Estate Summit–a gathering of more than 600 land sharks intent on maximizing profit at the expense of people.
Please join Not An Alternative and Picture The Homeless, the Brooklyn Anti-Gentrification Network (BAN), Artists Studio Affordability Project (ASAP), and other artists, activists, community groups, and concerned New Yorkers for a day of action outside the Summit:
Tuesday, November 17
@ Brooklyn Museum
- 7:30am – 1pm = demonstration organized by BAN. 12pm press conference.
- 4pm – 6pm = satirical protest / counter-exhibition call Double Crossing Brooklyn–a riff on the museum’s recent exhibition Crossing Brooklyn, which celebrated Brooklyn’s diversity.
Tomorrow’s protests have already been covered by NY Times, Art Net, Politico, Hyperallergic, Non-Profit Quarterly and other media outlets–and they haven’t even happened yet!
Brooklyn Museum has been responsive to our concerns–reaching out to artists and activists to with an interest in hosting a dialog. But we need more than dialog–we need action. Cultural institutions need to stop conferring cultural capital and legitimacy to corporations that are undermining the missions of those institutions and the public good.
Museums see more visitors annually than sporting events and theme parks combined. They represent vital societal infrastructure–playing a significant role in transmitting information, shaping culture, and defining norms. But market ideologies increasingly steer their operational and programming decisions. There’s a tug of war going on between public and private interests.
Many of us around the world are working to disentangle our museums and cultural institutions from private interests–to fight for these institutions, which represent resources and infrastructure at scale–as spaces for the public good.
Join us tomorrow, along with Picture The Homeless and a fleet of Mili-Tents, to protest the 6th Annual Brooklyn Real Estate Summit, and to call on the Brooklyn Museum–a publicly-funded institution–to align with its mission of “serving its diverse public”.
xo
Not An Alternative
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