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Tobi Haslett is an American critic and writer. [1] He has written about art, film, and literature for n+1, The New Yorker, Artforum, The Village Voice, and other publications. [2] He lives and works in New York City. [3]
Haslett has written reviews, catalog essays, and introductions to novels. He has written reviews of The Collected Essaysof Elizabeth Hardwick, Norman Podhoretz's Making It, and The Image Book, directed by Jean-Luc Godard. [4] [5] [6] For Artforum 's special issue titled The Year in Monsters, Haslett wrote about Omarosa Manigault Newman's third book, Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House. [7]
In 2019, Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Haslett released a statement in Artforum titled The Tear Gas Biennial, decrying the involvement of Warren Kanders, co-chair of the board of the Whitney Museum, and his "toxic philanthropy." [8] Although Kanders has donated an estimated $10 million to the museum, the source of his fortune is derived from Safariland LLC, a company that manufactures riot gear, tear gas, and other chemical weapons used by the police and the military to enforce violent order. [9] As of 1925, the Geneva Convention has outlawed the use of tear gas in all international military conflict, however, the tear gas fired at peaceful protesters and civilians by the police and military during the George Floyd protests as well as migrants on the US-Mexico border is the same brand of tear gas manufactured by Defense Technology, a subsidy of Safariland. A wave of artists from the Biennial, including Korakrit Arunanondchai, Meriem Bennani, Nicole Eisenman and Nicholas Galanin, demanded immediate removal of their work from the Biennial within hours after the essay was published. After mounting pressure from additional artists, critics, and patrons urging the public to boycott the show, Kanders stepped down from his leadership position at the museum. The essay was instrumental in Kanders resignation as well as the museum cutting ties with Kanders financial endowments that are directly connected to the promotion and use of military weaponry and violence during peaceful social unrest.
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a modern and contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. The institution was originally founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), a prominent American socialite, sculptor, and art patron after whom it is named.
Black Diamond Equipment is a manufacturer of equipment for climbing, skiing, and mountain sports, based in Utah, United States. The company also has a global office in Innsbruck, Austria. The company is owned by Clarus Corporation, which also owns Pieps, ClimbOn! Skincare, and Sierra Bullets.
The Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition of contemporary American art organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, United States. The event began as an annual exhibition in 1932; the first biennial was in 1973. It is considered the longest-running and most important survey of contemporary art in the United States. The Biennial helped bring artists like Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, and Jeff Koons, among others, to prominence.
Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art. The magazine is distinguished from other magazines by its unique 10½ × 10½ inch square format, with each cover often devoted to the work of an artist. Notably, the Artforum logo is a bold and condensed iteration of the Akzidenz-Grotesk font, a feat for an American publication to have considering how challenging it was to obtain fonts favored by the Swiss school via local European foundries in the 1960s. Artforum is published by Artforum Media, LLC, a subsidiary of Penske Media Corporation.
Safariland, LLC is a United States-based manufacturer of personal, and other equipment focused on the law enforcement, public safety, military, and recreational markets. It was formerly a division of the United Kingdom-based defense and aerospace company BAE Systems PLC. Safariland has said that their body armor has protected at least 2,040 police officers who were shot in the line of duty.
Adam D. Weinberg is an art museum curator. He was the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art for 20 years, from October 1, 2003 to October 31, 2023.
Nicholas Galanin is a Sitka Tribe of Alaska multi-disciplinary artist and musician of Tlingit and Unangax̂ descent. His work often explores a dialogue of change and identity between Native and non-Native communities.
Hannah Black is a British visual artist, critic, and writer. Her work spans video, text and performance.
Forensic Architecture is a multidisciplinary research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London that uses architectural techniques and technologies to investigate cases of state violence and violations of human rights around the world. The group is led by architect Eyal Weizman. He received a Peabody Award in 2021 for his work with Forensic Architecture.
Decolonize This Place is an art collective based in New York City that organizes around Indigenous rights, black liberation, Palestinian nationalism, de-gentrification, and economic inequality. Their actions often take place at museums and cultural institutions and focus on claimed colonialist tendencies within the art world.
Christopher Y. Lew is an American art curator and writer based in New York City. Lew is currently the Nancy and Fred Poses Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Henriette Huldisch is a German-born American curator of contemporary art. She is currently the Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Prior to that, she was the Director of Exhibitions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Boston, Massachusetts.
Agustina Woodgate is an Argentinian artist who lives and works between Amsterdam and Buenos Aires.
Darius Clark Monroe is a writer, producer, and director, living and working in Brooklyn, New York.
Shellyne Rodriguez is an American visual artist, organizer, and professor.
TJ Cuthand, also credited as Theo Cuthand and Thirza Cuthand, is a filmmaker and performance artist, writer and curator of Plains Cree as well as Scottish and Irish descent. He is credited with coining the term Indigiqueer, for modern Indigenous LGBTQ people. In May 2022, he changed his name to TJ Cuthand and came out as a trans man.
Strike MoMA is a movement to strike the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, targeting what its organizers describe as the "toxic philanthropy" of the museum's leadership. It has consisted of a series of 10 demonstrations organized over ten weeks, from April 9, 2021, through June 11.
David Velasco is an American editor. He was the editor-in-chief of the art magazine Artforum from 2017 to 2023. He is the editor of Modern Dance, a 2017 series of books on contemporary choreographers published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has written texts on a number of artists, including Sarah Michelson, Adrian Piper, and David Wojnarowicz. In 2017, he assisted photographer and activist Nan Goldin establish the activist group P.A.I.N., chronicled in Laura Poitras’s Academy Award–nominated documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022).
Warren Beatty Kanders is an American entrepreneur and investor. From 1996 until 2007, he was chairman of Armor Holdings, a company involved in the defense and law enforcement industries. He has been chairman and CEO of Cadre Holdings since 2012.