After a February 15 pro-Palestine protest, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ response that spurred calls for a boycott, the center’s interim CEO has stepped down over the whole mess.
You may remember that during the George Floyd protests of 2020, the SFMOMA saw top executives resign over a dustup over a Black Lives Matter-themed Instagram post, and a comment the museum deleted from that post’s thread. Fast forward to the current day, where the Israel-Gaza protests have the nearby Yerba Buena Center for the Arts embroiled in their own controversy, which has shut the galleries down. And the Chronicle reported Wednesday that institution’s interim CEO Sara Fenske Bahat has resigned over the controversy.
BREAKING: In the wake of protests, censorship accusations and calls for a boycott at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), museum interim CEO Sara Fenske Bahat has resigned.https://t.co/rgjXQZbCVo
— KQED Arts & Culture (@KQEDarts) March 7, 2024
The saga started on February 15, when a group of artists in an exhibit called Bay Area Now 9 altered their own works during a public event with banners reading “Ceasefire Now” and “Stop Funding Genocide,” while shouting into megaphones. The gallery has been shut down since, and Bahat had the works de-installed. The artists and Yerba Buena Center employees have since called for a boycott of the institution, and for the removal of its “Zionist Board members and funders.”
The interim CEO Fesnke Barat decided she’d had enough.
“The vitriolic and antisemitic backlash directed at me personally since that night nearly three weeks ago has made being here intolerable,” Fenske Bahat said in a statement to the Chronicle. “I no longer feel safe in our own space, including due to the actions of some of our own employees.”
But that may not end all of this. KQED adds that Supervisor Hillary Ronen is calling for a hearing into the galleries’ shutdown. “Instead of making room for perspectives of these artists, YBCA, which promoted the exhibit as showcasing diverse voices, responded alarmingly by shutting down the exhibit,” Ronen said at last week’s Board of Supervisors meeting. “These actions translate into no field trips for our high school students and canceled film, dance, and art performances for the public at large. It is also concerning to me that all the censored artists are people of color.”
A legislative aide to Ronen tells KQED that the hearings would likely happen in April. Meanwhile, the Yerba Buena Center’s galleries remain closed.
Image: Ann S. via Yelp
