Climate protestors call for removal of MoMA’s board chair over ties to fossil fuel industry

Round 100 protesters rallied on the predominant entrance to the Museum of Trendy Artwork (MoMA) in New York on Friday (15 September) and known as on the establishment to take away its board chair, Marie-Josée Kravis, resulting from her husband Henry Kravis’s ties to the fossil gasoline trade.

Chanting slogans like “Henry Kravis disgrace on you, we deserve a future too”, activists from a number of organisations in addition to members of communities feeling the brunt of local weather change and fossil gasoline extraction—together with residents of the Gulf of Mexico coast and hereditary chiefs of Indigenous communities—protested exterior the museum’s 53rd Road entrance, handing leaflets to passing workplace employees and vacationers (lots of whom then went into the museum).

Many protesters brandished indicators that includes the distinctive typefaces and imagery of Ed Ruscha, whose main retrospective simply opened on the museum. A number of held up a large banner with the phrases “MoMA Drop Kravis” rendered within the museum’s signature sans-serif font. Small teams of MoMA safety officers and New York Police Division workers seemed on; after round an hour the protest peacefully concluded to chants of “we’ll be again!”

Henry Kravis is a co-founder, co-chair and co-chief govt of KKR, one of many world’s 5 largest non-public fairness companies, whose funding portfolio contains firms within the oil and gasoline sectors within the US, Canada, the UK, Europe and the Center East. In keeping with activists, 78% of the companies’ investments are tied to fossil fuels. Marie-Josée Kravis has served on MoMA’s board since 1994 and, previous to succeeding Leon Black as chair in 2021, had been board president from 2005 to 2018. The couple’s contributions to the museum have included a 1948 Henri Matisse portray valued at $25m, the Jasper Johns sculpture Painted Bronze (1960) and lots of different works. A gallery for efficiency and set up artwork named after the couple—the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio—was inaugurated when MoMA’s most up-to-date enlargement opened in 2019.

“MoMA is a serious cultural establishment and as such has a duty to not affiliate itself with local weather criminals,” says Renata Pumarol of the group Local weather Defenders. “No establishment needs to be exempt from the repercussions of supporting the fossil gasoline trade.”

Spokespersons for the museum didn’t reply to requests for remark.

Along with calling on the museum to take away Marie-Josée Kravis as board chair, activists stated the museum ought to change the title of the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio and strain KKR to shift its investments away from fossil fuels.

“An enormous quantity of funding continues to be going to fossil fuels and numerous it’s coming from non-public fairness,” says Michael Kink, the manager director of the Robust Economic system for All Coalition. “KKR and Kravis may very well be local weather heroes funding clear power tasks, however as a substitute they’ve been caught shopping for when everybody else is promoting.”

The protest’s timing dovetailed with a number of poignant occasions, together with the primary day of member previews for Rising Ecologies Structure and the Rise of Environmentalism, a brand new MoMA exhibition about inexperienced structure. It additionally comes amid a string of protests in New York Metropolis main as much as the launch on 17 September of Local weather Week (till 24 September), a sequence of occasions and demonstrations across the metropolis timed to coincide with the 78th session of the United Nations Normal Meeting (19-26 September), the place sustainability, local weather change and local weather justice determine prominently on the agenda.

“If MoMA was being trustworthy, it will create a fact and reconciliation committee to look at its historical past of taking cash from the fossil gasoline trade,” Kink provides. “As an alternative, the museum is constant its harmful custom of laundering the reputations of fossil gasoline firms.”

The museum, since its founding, has been related to and supported by the Rockefeller household, whose fortune largely derives from the corporate Normal Oil. To this present day, its board of trustees contains each Sharon Percy Rockefeller and lifelong trustee David Rockefeller, Jr. Presumably by pure coincidence, on Friday the Rockefeller Basis introduced it is going to make a $1bn funding in climate-related programmes over the subsequent 5 years.

An identical local weather protest in June, timed to disrupt the museum’s annual Celebration within the Backyard fundraising gala, occurred to coincide with thick smoke from file wildfires in Canada blanketing New York Metropolis.