US museum directors are facing pushback over exhibiting work by Palestinian artists, just one form of censorship among many cited in a survey put out this week by PEN America, the Association of Art Museum Directors, and the Artists at Risk Connection.
It is still safer, perhaps, for museums to show work by Palestinian artists than it is exhibit art critical of other subjects. Eighteen percent of the directors who responded for the survey said they were likely to receive complaints over exhibiting work by Palestinian artists; 13 percent said something similar about showing art by Israelis. By contrast, 30 percent said they feared an outcry over showing art critical of Christianity, and 28 percent worried about the prospect of exhibiting art critical of Donald Trump—a figure that is particularly striking, given that the survey was conducted in the summer of 2024, prior to the election.
But it is art by Palestinians that is given considerable attention in the survey, which situates this form of censorship within a pattern that extends back years. It cites one director as saying that, earlier in their career, they “experienced considerable pressure from donors and some members of the public not to exhibit the work of Palestinian artists, especially if it addressed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the history of Israel.” (All of the 95 respondents were members of the AAMD, an industry group that includes the leaders of nearly every top US museum, but the identities of these institutional directors were not publicly reported upon the survey’s release.)
And it is not just the content of the work itself that is an issue. Museum directors said they also faced pressure when they planned to exhibit artists who had made pro-Palestine statements in the past. There were even in cases where the work in question utilized imagery that recalled symbols seen at pro-Palestine protests.
The survey detailed one situation that centered around a painting depicting a watermelon, a symbol used by activists because the fruit has similar colors to the Palestinian flag, which many have claimed is being censored on social media. Staff at the museum claimed that the fruit was a coded pro-Palestine symbol and called for the watermelon to be removed from the commission. The museum director declined to do so, believing that, in the context of this work, the watermelon was merely a fruit and little else. “I refused as I did not want to censor the artist,” the director said.
While it was unclear which museum and which artwork were being referenced here, there has been at least one notable controversy over Palestinian art at a US museum. At the end of 2023, Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum of Art canceled a survey for Samia Halaby, a Palestinian painter who went on to receive a special mention when she showed her art at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Although another portion of the show did ultimately go on view at Michigan State University’s Broad Art Museum, the cancelation of Halaby’s Indiana show became a lightning rod in debates surrounding the institutional treatment of Palestinian art amid Israel’s war in Gaza.
There have been a host of Palestine-related art controversies abroad, particularly in Germany, where conflagrations between museums, artists, and activists have grown increasingly tense. But within the US, these controversies have generally focused on behind-the-scenes matters rather than artworks or artists themselves. New York’s Noguchi Museum, for example, found itself in hot water after it fired workers who had donned keffiyehs on the job.
One thing was clear from the survey: many US museum directors are worried about censorship, and few have policies in place to deal with it.
According to the survey, 90 percent of respondents worked at institutions where there were no written guidelines about what constitutes censorship. The survey advised remedying this situation, noting, “Ultimately, the most important advancement made by a written policy is its ability to identify qualities of censorship in a given situation and to serve as a reference guide of sorts under these circumstances. Perhaps even more than fighting against a case of censorship, it can serve as a protection strategy against it.”
