Timothy Martin, a climate activist who smeared paint on a glass vitrine protecting an Edgar Degas sculpture in 2023, was sentenced to 18 months in prison last week. Martin had been found guilty of conspiracy and injury to government property in April.
The news was first reported by the News & Observer, a newspaper based in Raleigh, North Carolina, where Martin lives. In addition to the 18-month sentence, which will honor time already served since he was found guilty, Judge Amy Berman Jackson for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered that Martin pay $4,062 in restitution, as well as $200 for a special assessment. He must also serve 150 hours of community service, 20 of which must be focused on graffiti clean-up.
Martin, along with fellow activist Johanna Smith, smeared paint on the Degas vitrine at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in April 2023, as part of a protest with the environmentalist group Declare Emergency. The vitrine was protecting Degas’s Little Dancer, Age Fourteen, one of the museum’s most well-known sculptures.
“This is the work we have to do to wake up, grow up and step up. Right now, we’re living in a fairytale matrix created by the American empire,” Martin told the News & Observer earlier this year. “It really is a calling from our better selves that is in us, that’s been stolen from us and beaten out of us.”
According to the Department of Justice, Martin and Smith caused more than $4,000 in damage and the action caused the room displaying the work to be closed for 10 days in order for repairs to be made. Prosecutors had initially sought a sentence of five years for Martin. (Smith pleaded guilty in 2023, served a 60-day prison sentence, and paid more than $7,000 in restitution and fines.) The two have been barred from entering Washington, D.C. and from the city’s museums and monuments.
In a statement, the California-based nonprofit Climate Rights International said, “The sentencing of climate activist Timothy Martin to 18 months in prison for a peaceful protest at the National Gallery of Art is a grossly disproportionate sentence that undermines the United States’ obligations to protect freedom of speech and the right to peaceful assembly.”
