The crafters and spinners in the Ford Foundation's PR department must be working overtime these days. The task at hand: to reconcile two dramatically different takes by Ford president Darren Walker on the crisis at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, which has been shaken like many other cultural institutions by the new debate over “tainted money.”
Walker, Take #1, came immediately after longtime Whitney supporter Warren Kanders stepped down (or more accurately, was driven) from the museum's board. As The Giving Review recently noted, Kanders owns Safariland, a manufacturer of police and military gear, among which is the tear gas used to disperse unruly crowds around the world. His resignation followed months of protest organized by Decolonize This Place, an “action-oriented movement” mobilizing behind causes well beyond defenestrating unsavory museum board members, including closing down all prisons, de-gentrifying the outer boroughs of New York, and reestablishing Palestinian hegemony “from the river to the sea.”
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