During the reopening of many New York galleries as the new season was starting last week, a host of different commercial art venues along Chinatown were affixed with anti-Zionist posters. Many of these messages denounced the owners of said galleries.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - DECEMBER 11: Pro-Palestinian protestors gather outside of the New York Times building to protest the newspaper’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war on December 11, 2023 in New York City.
A Call to 'Stop Selling to Zionists' Posted on Art Galleries
Among the spaces that were hit by this wave of "guerilla protests" are the renowned New York galleries Maxwell Graham and 56 Henry, with the former recently starting its initial exhibition of the year on Jan. 12.
Photos of the affixed posters were shared to Instagram by the ad hoc coalition, Writers Against the War on Gaza or WAWOG, which also noted that they weren't the ones who were behind this "movement."
Messages that were attached to the glass windows of the two galleries both make mention of "colonizing Palestine" and "gentrifying Chinatown," seemingly citing these commercial businesses as "complicit with genocide."
Reiterations of "DO NOT SELL ART TO ZIONISTS" were also posted in the aforementioned galleries' doors, walls, and windows. Other art businesses within Chinatown were also targeted the previous week, with Fierman confirming that it was one of the said galleries.
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Exacerbated by the Lévy Gorvy Dayan Controversy
Another art gallery that the "hurricane" of posters ran through was Lévy Gorvy Dayan, which was already subjected to a similar set of accusatory messages last December.
This time, the posters denounced its owners Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy, and Amalia Dayan after publicly replying to a pro-Palestine missive sent by Artforum and signed by artists whose numbers are in the thousands last October.
Later on, Artforum also shared a response letter of its own with a "change" in tone as it criticized the prior missive as containing a "one-sided view" before denouncing "all forms of violence in Israel and Gaza" altogether.
In the following days after that particular statement was released, the art publication's editor David Velasco was axed.
Even posters attached to other art galleries like the Dia Art Foundation and the David Zwirner Gallery, whose photos were also shared by WAWOG's Instagram, contained accusations addressed to Lévy Gorvy Dayan, alleging the company was "not distressed by the massacre of Palestinians."
In the post made by WAWOG, an unnamed collective of "autonomous art workers" also wrote: "We address LGD because their aggressive collusion with the zionist project is bound to police militarization, displacement, and activist suppression here in NYC."
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