Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri has declined to accept an award next month from New York’s Noguchi Museum after three of its employees were fired for violating a new internal policy banning keffiyehs, a garment symbolic of Palestinian solidarity.
“Jhumpa Lahiri has chosen to withdraw her acceptance of the 2024 Isamu Noguchi Award in response to our updated dress code policy,” the Long Island City institution said in a statement on Wednesday, as first quoted in the New York Times. “We respect her perspective and understand that this policy may or may not align with everyone’s views.”
Museum director Amy Hau added in a subsequent statement published on its website that the ban “is intended to prevent any unintentional alienation of our diverse visitorship, while allowing us to remain focused on our core mission of advancing the understanding and appreciation of Isamu Noguchi’s art and legacy”.
The keffiyeh ban has sparked backlash from cultural workers, activists, and members of the Queens, New York, community since its introduction to the museum dress code on August 14. Per internal correspondence reviewed by ARTnews, the museum’s approximately 70 employees were informed of the development via an email from Hau; protests immediately ensued.
In a statement emailed in August to ARTnews, workers decried the ban as “censorship” and said it is “particularly worrisome” given the life and legacy of sculptor Isamu Noguchi, “who himself faced discrimination and voluntary internment as a Japanese-American, and created work that directly addressed political themes, including crimes against humanity, and he intended for his art to be explored by a wide variety of perspective,” per the statement.
Some 50 workers of the museum participated in two walkouts that month and sent a petition to leadership demanding that the ban be repealed, and no disciplinary action be taken against staffers who choose to wear the garment on site.
Neither demand was heeded. In September, three museum employees were terminated for not adhering to the ban. A fourth employee, the director of visitor services, was also terminated. In response, keffiyeh-clad demonstrators rallied outside the museum, calling for the resignation of Hau.
“Arbitrarily deciding whose culture is political is a terrible precedent for a culture institution to set,” Trasonia Abbott, one of the four terminated employees, said at the September 10 demonstration. Protestors have accused Hau of inconsistently enforcing the ban among staff, with an inordinate focus on the museum’s employees of color.
Abbott, who is Black and goes by they/them pronouns, said that prior to their termination, they were taken off the museum’s premises for a meeting with leadership, during which they were ordered to remove their keffiyeh. According to Abbott, they were the first employee pulled into such an off-site meeting, despite several staffers having worn the head scarf in highly visible locations in the museum for months after October 7. Abbott’s then-manager, an employee of Middle Eastern descent who served as director of visitor services, had already been fired.
The keffiyeh ban has threatened a reputational crisis at the Noguchi Museum, as critics question its proximity to the avowedly antiwar sculptor. Isamu Noguchi’s politics were essential to his practice; in 1942, as an act of solidarity, Noguchi voluntarily interned at the Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona, one of many prison camps built to confine Japanese citizens and American citizens of Japanese descent on the West Coast following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Noguchi, a New York resident born to a Japanese father and American mother, was exempt from the directive. The museum has paid homage to his activism, centering it prominently in materials on its website, and held a retrospective on his self-internment in 2017—all of which has been decried by protestors as hypocrisy.
“The museum itself is political,” Natalie Cappellini, one of the three employees terminated over the ban, told ARTnews at the September demonstration. She further pointed out that the museum had previously taken a stance on issues of police brutality and violence against Asian Americans. “This entire time, [Hau] has continuously asserted that banning the keffiyeh is a way for the museum to maintain an apolitical air, to maintain that the museum is a sanctuary. But a ban is a stance.”
ARTnews has contacted the museum for comment.
