end art washing
What is moma divest?
MoMA Divest is a grassroots campaign part of the larger transformative movement exposing the harms done by powerful arts and cultural institutions, and demanding accountability and reparations.
why moma divest?
why Moma Divest
MoMA Divest recognizes the central function of museums and the art world in the global system of racial and militarized capitalism. These are not abstractions. The concrete and violent connections between finance, art, and policing/militarization can be clearly laid out. Indeed, they have been laid out by years of research, organizing, and protest around these issues by a range of groups whose work we must all acknowledge.
The so-called Art World is organized around the accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, the protection of that wealth through police and the military, and its laundering through luxury high-priced objects called ‘art’ stored in restrictive spaces called museums or galleries.
It is no coincidence that the same people serving on the boards of MoMA (and Columbia University and NYU) also serve on the board of the NY Police Foundation, run military companies like Blackwater or General Dynamics, own private prison companies like Core Civic and Geo Group, and finance mining and oil companies that require the protection of the military when they displace people and destroy the planet.
Consequently, this also provides a powerful strategic entry for confronting and abolishing these problems, and reimagining alternatives. An attack on that so-called art world is an attack on this system of enshrined inequality and violent dispossession. To abolish MoMA is to abolish the function it serves in racial capitalism and with it comes the hope of redistribution, reparation, restitution, of reimagining and remaking - a world without MoMA is in effect a world without rabid inequality, war and prison profiteering.
Points of Unity
Honoring our legacies
We continue in the organizing tradition of movements that have come before us, and in solidarity with grassroots groups working towards radical change nationally and internationally.
Commitment to Transformation
We are actively working towards: decolonization, abolition, reparations, just transition, restitution/reunification and redistribution. Transformation NOT reform.
leadership
Voices, experiences, and contributions of QTBIPOC folx and those directly impacted by systems of harm determine our analysis and guide our actions.
our solidarities
We are committed to international solidarity with all people resisting imperialism, occupation, militarism, racism and racial capitalism, corporate takeovers, dispossession and gentrification, class inequality, and extractivism.
All of us or none of us
We believe in collective liberation and understand that our struggles are linked. We do not compromise anyone's liberation.
