The Wing Luke Museum, founded in Seattle in 1967 to showcase the culture, art, and history of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, currently has no executive director. Joël Barraquiel Tan, who moved from Hawaii to Washington to lead the institution, stepped down in September 2024 after less than three years in the postiion.
His statements to the press about his departure did not explain his reasons. But they were evidently connected to a walkout, in May, by two dozen Wing Luke Museum (hereafter WLM) staff. At issue was signage in an exhibition at the museum, “Confronting Hate Together,” presented jointly by the WLM, the Washington State Jewish Historical Society, and the Black Heritage Society of Washington State. The exhibition planned to “[focus] on the activism and responses to hate and discrimination taken by three communities,” namely Asians, Jews, and blacks, “which historically overlap and intersect in their experiences living within the highly discriminatory Redline boundary of Seattle.”
The protesters objected to a panel provided by the Jewish Historical Society which noted, factually, that “antisemitism is often disguised as anti-Zionism” and that “pro-Palestinian groups have voiced support for Hamas.” The walkout absented half of the museum’s staff and closed the WLM for several days. Protesters demanded, via Instagram, that the museum “remove any language in any WLM publication and question any partnerships that attempt to frame Palestinian liberation and anti-Zionism as antisemitism.” They further demanded that the exhibition “[platform] community stories within an anti-colonial, antiwhite supremacist framework.”
Facing internal opposition at the WLM, the three organizers abandoned the prospect of presenting the exhibition jointly. The Jewish Historical Society announced in August that it would partner with the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle to seek another venue for the display. “Immense harm has been caused to the Jewish community by not being able to show the exhibit,” they said in a statement. “The anti-Jewish ideas and attitudes that fueled the WLM employee walkout (whether conscious or not) have yet to be adequately acknowledged.”
It is 2024, and we cannot even confront hate together.
Several major American universities have recently adopted policies of institutional neutrality, and more are expected to follow their lead. The adoption was prompted by disastrous statements from high-profile college presidents regarding the massacres by Hamas of Israelis in October 2023. In many cases, the missives were belated and failed to condemn antisemitism with adequate conviction. Former University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill made hers more than a week after the attacks. Her comments were obliged to account for Penn’s hosting, in late September, the Palestine Writes festival, which featured prominent anti-Israel eliminationists. The following December, Magill humiliated herself in testimony to Congress in which she said that a call on campus for the genocide of the Jews might only be actionable “if the speech turns into conduct.” Evidently, a full-throated condemnation of anti-Jewish racism that might have impugned pro-Palestinian movements was no more welcome at Penn than at the WLM.
Magill subsequently resigned under pressure from Penn donors. Interim President Larry Jameson announced in a September university-wide email that, “It is not the role of the institution to render opinions—doing so risks suppressing the creativity and academic freedom of our faculty and students.” According to The Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn would henceforth not issue statements regarding “political, judicial, or military actions and evidence of discrimination or violations of human rights.”
This policy and others like them will excuse universities from any future obligation to express support for Jews in the manner that many of them expressed support for African Americans in 2020. But so be it—such proclamations were connected to an explosion of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that ultimately have injured universities’ credibility in a manner that may not be reparable. And one wonders whether an analogous policy might have prevented the meltdown at the Wing Luke Museum.
The scenario in which a vocal, disgruntled faction drives a museum to a destructive conclusion is not unique to the WLM. In 2020, a combination of community outrage and a breakdown of communication between curators and an artist resulted in the cancellation of an exhibition of work by Shaun Leonardo at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland. That too prompted the resignation of the director, Jill Snyder, accompanied by accusations by the artist of censorship and “institutional white fragility.”
Staff discomfort at the National Gallery of Art was said to play a role in the cancellation of the 2021 start of a four-museum exhibition, “Philip Guston Now.” NGA Director Kaywin Feldman told Artnet, “Ever since the killing of George Floyd, staff members were voicing increased concerns about proceeding.” (Guston, an expressly antiracist artist who died in 1980, had painted—among much else—a series of Klansmen.) Subsequent reporting at The New York Times indicated that Feldman sought the oppositional voices among NGA staff, then, having elicited them, cited them as cause to postpone the exhibitions for three years. This would be a Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy version of what happened at MoCA Cleveland and the WLM, but the public is obliged to speculate until a full accounting of what happened comes to light.
Institutional neutrality wouldn’t be a reasonable policy at the museums, but institutional plurality would be, if accompanied by a commitment to the display of art per se. Institutional plurality would insist on a wide range of views over the course of the exhibition calendar, rather than oblige any single exhibition to represent all possible contentions regarding a subject. Should someone find the content of an exhibition objectionable, the museum would be available to present another exhibition that presents the alternative view.
A commitment to the display of art, as a desideratum in itself, would manifest as policy that the museum will exhibit an object intended for exhibition even against demands from audience or staff that it be hidden. The justification for this is the principle of free expression. Shaun Leonardo, the Washington State Jewish Historical Society, and posthumously, Philip Guston are entitled to their respective views. Outraged Clevelanders, irritated WLM workers, and Kaywin Feldman are not entitled to prevent them from being aired. The activist community of Cleveland might be forgiven but not accommodated. Staff at WLM should have been reprimanded for their lapse of professionalism. Whether the complaints at the NGA were legitimate or fabricated, Feldman is guilty of malpractice and should have been forced out just as Liz Magill was.
The director of an avowedly pluralistic museum committed to the display of art could say to a discomfited audience or staff, “We are showing this work because that’s what we do; we can address your objections in another exhibition.” Institutional plurality in the museums would accomplish what institutional neutrality promises at the universities, to situate the institutions as venues of expression rather than expressions in themselves.
They won’t survive as the latter. The universities and the museums have developed reputations for endorsing progressive political and social views at the expense of any others. That would hardly be the sole reason that university enrollments are cratering and attendance has not returned to pre-Covid levels at many museums, but it doesn’t help. Polls consistently show a deterioration of confidence in higher education, a trend driven by but not exclusive to conservatives. The museums, in certain respects, are black boxes, but it would be unsurprising to learn that pessimism about them is increasing accordingly and prompted by a similar sense of alienation.
The universities, in spite of themselves, have stumbled upon a way to salvage their credibility. Whether the museums follow suit remains to be seen.
