I started 2012 by taking in four exhibits in the Los Angeles area; Art Along the Hyphen: The Mexican-American Generation and The Colt Revolver in the American West at the Autry National Center, as well as Places of Validation, Art & Progression and The African Diaspora in the Art of Miguel Covarrubias: Driven by color, shaped by Cultures at the California African American Museum.

What unites these seemingly unrelated exhibits are the deep insights they provide into the American experience. This review is to encourage those in the Southern California region to see the shows for themselves if possible, and barring that, to do further research on the artists mentioned.

Art Along the Hyphen: The Mexican-American Generation

Starting with the Autry National Center, the Art Along the Hyphen exhibit (which ended Jan. 8, 2012), presented the work of six Mexican-American artists who created art in Los Angeles in the post-WWII era of the 1950s and early 1960s; Alberto Valdés, Domingo Ulloa, Roberto Chavez, Dora de Larios, Eduardo Carrillo, and Hernando G. Villa. That these artists are still unknown, even to aficionados of Chicano art, is a testament to the influence of art establishment gatekeepers. It was not just elite art world racism that kept these and other Mexican-American artists out of the museum and gallery systems, it was also the totalitarian supremacy of abstract expressionism that held them in check. The artists in the Art Along the Hyphen show were committed to narrative figurative realism, and that put them squarely at odds with an art establishment obsessed with abstraction.

"Braceros" - Domingo Ulloa, 1960. Oil on masonite. Image courtesy of the Autry.

The paintings and prints of Domingo Ulloa (1919-1997) were the most politically charged in the Autry exhibit.

The artist was unquestionably influenced by the 1930s school of Mexican Muralism and social realism; Ulloa in fact studied at the Antigua Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City, the same art academy attended by Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Born in Pomona, California, Ulloa was the son of migrant workers, and after serving in World War II he came under the influence of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP - Popular Graphic Arts Workshop), the famous Mexican political print collective. Every bit as didactic and radical as his contemporaries in the TGP, Ulloa’s art focused on the social ills of American society; racism and social inequality, police brutality and imperialist war.

In 1963 Norman Rockwell painted a canvas he titled, The Problem We All Live With. It was a depiction of a 6-year-old African-American girl named Ruby Bridges being escorted through a racist mob by U.S. Federal marshals to the just desegregated William Franz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The real life incident occurred on Nov. 15, 1960, when a large crowd of white racists gathered in front of the school to protest against integration. Armed Federal marshals had to guard the tiny black girl against the angry throng as it chanted “Two, Four, Six, Eight, we don’t want to integrate!” Rockwell’s painting appeared as a double page spread in Look Magazine in 1964, it was a controversial image that would capture the attention of Americans, but Domingo Ulloa had painted a similar canvas six years prior to Rockwell’s original painting.

"Racism/Incident at Little Rock" - Domingo Ulloa, 1957. Acrylic on canvas. Image courtesy of the Autry.

In 1957 Ulloa painted Racism/Incident at Little Rock, which was based upon real life events that took place that same year in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 1957 a federal court ordered the State of Arkansas to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which outlawed racial segregation in America’s public schools. Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas and a Dixiecrat (a right-wing racist Southern Democrat) resisted the court decision by calling in Arkansas National Guard soldiers to prevent African-American students from entering “white” schools. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower pressured Faubus to uphold federal law and use the Guard to protect black students, but Faubus instead withdrew the troops entirely, leaving black students exposed to attacks by white racist lynch mobs.

When nine black students attempted to enter Little Rock High School on September 23, 1957, thousands of enraged whites assaulted them with stones and fisticuffs. This clip from the 1986 PBS documentary series Eyes on the Prize details the incident. At 7.55 minutes into the video you will see footage that I viewed on national television in 1957 at the tender young age of four; the indelible imagery changed my life forever. Although only a four-year-old, I wanted to rush to the victim’s defense. Ulloa attempted to capture all the horror of that ugly affair on his canvas.

Ulloa’s painting is dramatically different from Rockwell’s, and it goes without saying that Ulloa’s vision did not appear in Look Magazine. In Racism/Incident at Little Rock there are no government agents deployed to rescue black school children, there are only six youthful black students surrounded by a howling pack of phantasmagorical monsters. The adolescent African-Americans in the picture huddle together, the oldest of them looking stoic; they have no one but themselves to rely upon. Ulloa’s canvas was inspired by The Masses, a 1935 lithograph by José Clemente Orozco; one could say that Ulloa perhaps borrowed a bit too much from Orozco, or he was simply paying homage to the master. Ulloa’s paintings at the Autry showed that he had not entirely escaped the orbit of the Mexican Muralists; his heavily textured brushstrokes and color palette bearing a striking similarity to that of Siqueiros.

"Don Pela Gallos" - Alberto Valdes, 1980. Acrylic on canvas. Image courtesy of the Autry.

The works of Alberto Valdés (1918-1998) caught my eye. His delicate semi-abstract paintings were filled with vivid color and Pre-Columbian iconography; dreamlike apparitions, mythic creatures, indigenous warriors, and fantastic landscapes.

A small portrait of a fierce imaginary Aztec warrior held me spellbound; painted in muted hues of red and yellow, the face filled the entire diminutive picture plane.

Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991) was an obvious inspiration to Valdés. A handful of Valdés’ paintings achieved a mystical quality where reality melted into intricate webs of translucent primary colors. However, I think Valdés for the most part agreed with Tamayo that a “non-descriptive realism” would counter the “bourgeois” escapism of abstraction. The enigmatic Don Pela Gallos is indicative of Valdés’ opulently painted visions.

The Colt Revolver in the American West

While at the Autry to see Art Along the Hyphen, I decided to visit the museum’s newly opened Greg Martin Colt Gallery, were the exhibit The Colt Revolver in the American West can be found; I knew a rare poster by artist George Catlin (1796-1872) was part of the exhibit. Starting in 1830 Catlin was the first American artist to travel beyond the Missouri River to visit and document indigenous people; over a six-year period he ended up painting more than 325 portraits of individuals from eighteen tribes, some of which had never seen a white man before.

Colt Single Action Army revolver. This engraved .45 cal pistol belonged to Captain Manuel Gonzaullas of the Texas Rangers in 1929. Gonzaullas was the first Latino to become a high ranking officer in the Texas Rangers. First introduced in 1873, the Colt 45 became known as "the handgun that won the West." Photo by Mark Vallen ©.

In 2004 the Autry hosted an unforgettable exhibition titled George Catlin And His Indian Gallery that showcased 120 paintings by the artist. The exhibit was originally organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which houses the greater part of Catlin’s works in its permanent collection. Ever since first learning of Catlin when I was a teenager, I have maintained a keen interest in his works, and so was eager to see his poster in the Colt exhibit.

Detail of historic poster designed by George Catlin for Colt firearms. Circa 1851. Photo by Mark Vallen ©.

Samuel Colt constructed the very first rotating cylinder fed handgun in 1831 at the age of sixteen, a prototype of which is on display in the Autry exhibit. He patented his invention in 1835, and his innovative revolver grew increasingly popular with hunters, frontiersmen, and settlers. Around 1851 Samuel Colt commissioned Catlin to do a series of paintings showing the artist using Colt rifles and pistols during his travels. Catlin’s paintings were reproduced as lithographs, a common practice at the time, and distributed to promote the Colt line of firearms. A total of six different lithographic posters were produced, but only Catlin the Artist Shooting Buffalo with Colt’s Revolving Pistol, is on display at the Autry. Apparently Catlin was one of the very first American artists to promote a commercial product.

While the Autry asserts Catlin’s poster depicts the artist firing a “Dragoon revolver”, I think otherwise. The Colt Dragoon was first produced in 1848, years after Catlin made his 1830-1836 excursions through territory inhabited by the original Americans. The handgun Catlin depicted himself using in the poster looks very much like the model No. 5 Colt “Paterson” Revolver manufactured by Samuel Colt in Paterson, N.J. in the year 1836, a year that fits the time frame of Catlin’s actual travels. In 2011 a rare 1836 Colt “Paterson” sold at auction for $977,500, a world record price for a single historic firearm sold at auction.

Places of Validation, Art & Progression

The California African American Museum (CAAM) offers Places of Validation, Art & Progression, an exhibit tracing the development of artistic expression in the Los Angeles African-American community from 1940 to 1980. On view until Feb. 26, 2012, this large and somewhat unwieldy exhibit covers an important period for L.A. and the United States. The post-war struggle to achieve full human and civil rights for African-Americans, and the social engagement in the arts that accompanied that effort, is a central focus for much of the work in the exhibit.

Concomitant with political shifts in the U.S., Black artists in the 1960s began to explore Africa as an aesthetic wellspring, in addition to taking on a critical examination of Black life and history in America. A good portion of the art on display is in the figurative realist tradition, but the CAAM exhibit also demonstrates how Black artists in the avant-garde used conceptual and installation art in a decidedly political way; here, Betye Saar’s Sambo’s Banjo comes to mind.

The work is a mixed-media assemblage composed of a banjo carrying case displayed to stand open, the outside of the case painted with a contemptibly stereotyped image of a Black man with huge bulging eyes and enormous blood red lips. An examination of the case interior reveals that in the area where the circular body of the banjo would rest, a diminutive “Little Black Sambo” toy figure dressed in red, white, and blue hangs from a tiny noose. Above, in the thin part of the case were the banjo’s fretted neck would be situated, a small black metal skeleton is arranged next to a historic black and white photograph of an actual lynching. A piece of wood carved and painted to look like a large slice of watermelon sits in front of the tableau formed by the banjo case. Altogether, Saar’s assemblage forms a chilling picture of American racism.

"My Miss America" Ernie Barnes. Oil on canvas. 49 x 37 inches. 1970.

The exhibit contains three works by Charles White (1918-1979), an artist whose works exerted a powerful influence upon me in the early 1970’s.

Three works by White are on display, a small linoleum cut and a larger and quite extraordinary etching, the triad completed by a sizeable oil painting titled Freedom Now. These three works alone give enough reason to visit Places of Validation, but the CAAM exhibit offers many other treasures.

One of my favorite works in the exhibit is by Ernie Barnes (1938-2009), who was born in North Carolina during the brutal years of White supremacy.

In 1956 the eighteen-year old Barnes visited the North Carolina Museum of Art while on a field trip; when he inquired of a docent where he might find the museum’s collection of works by Black artists, he was told “Your people don’t express themselves that way.” Barnes would develop into one of America’s premier Black artists and in 1978 would return to the same museum for a successful solo exhibition of his art.

On display at the CAAM is My Miss America, Barnes’ heroic depiction of Black womanhood. Painted in 1970, the canvas portrays a woman made rough by years of drudgery and sacrifice; dressed in a plain red cotton dress she hauls two heavy brown bags with her coarse hands. It is evident the working woman is part of America’s permanent underclass, yet, she exudes the dignity and nobility that evades those thought to be “above” her. The title Barnes gave to his canvas was not based on the notion of woman as trophy, rather, it is an affirmation of the strength, integrity, and leadership of women. If there is a “Miss America”, Barnes showed us where she is to be found.

The African Diaspora in the Art of Miguel Covarrubias: Driven by color, shaped by Cultures

In another wing of the CAAM one can see the works of Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957). It brings together the artist’s paintings, lithographs, drawings, sketches, and illustrations for books and magazines portraying people of African heritage in the United States, Haiti, and Cuba; but the exhibit also includes portraits the artist made of people while traveling through North, East, and West African countries. Gathered under the thematic banner of  The African Diaspora in the Art of Miguel Covarrubias: Driven by color, shaped by Cultures, the exhibit’s primary focus are the works Covarrubias produced in the mid-1920s as an observer of the Harlem Renaissance.

"Rumba" Miguel Covarrubias. Lithograph. 1942. This, and other superlative lithographs by the artist are on view at the CAAM exhibit.

With a grant from the Mexican government, the 19-year old Covarrubias traveled to New York City in 1924 where he  became immersed in African-American culture. He met and befriended Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and other notables from the literary scene, and regularly frequented Harlem’s many Jazz clubs. He produced an endless stream of drawings and other artworks that depicted African-Americans in church, on the street, and going about their everyday lives; to my mind few non-African-American artists up until Covarrubias had ever been given to such a positive examination of Black Americans. By 1927 a number of these works were published in book form under the title of, Negro Drawings, and more than a few of these original works are included in the CAAM exhibit.

A remarkable painter, printmaker, curator, writer, theatrical set and costume designer, anthropologist, and radical humanist, Covarrubias is mostly known in the U.S. as an illustrator and caricaturist whose celebrity caricatures graced the covers and inside pages of publications like Vanity Fair, Fortune, and The New Yorker in the 1920s and 1930s. But when it came to his depictions of African-Americans, he said the following: “I don’t consider my drawings caricatures. A caricature is the exaggerated character of an individual for satirical purpose. These drawings are more from a serious point of view.”

"Black Woman with Blue Dress" Miguel Covarrubias. Oil on masonite. 1926. Collection of the Library of Congress.

One especially striking painting in the exhibit is Covarrubias’ Black Woman with Blue Dress, an oil on masonite study of a fashionable young woman. One must assume she was a denizen of one of the Jazz clubs the artist haunted, her cool gaze and “Flapper” attire the mark of an urban sophisticate.

The reproduction of the painting shown here does not begin to do the original justice; Covarrubias made full use of the transparent characteristics of oil paint, his vibrant portrait looking ever so much like a backlit panel of stained glass. Next to this painting, another similarly sized and composed oil portrait stood out conspicuously, a masterful interpretation of a young woman in a deep red dress.

The portrait of the Black woman in the red dress continues to enthrall me, though I did not get the title or date of the painting. The woman wearing a bobbed Flapper hairdo so angular it seemed architectural, was portrayed in silhouette against a background the color of ripe lemons. Thrown into shadow and her beautiful ebony skin painted in the darkest of hues, her features appear hidden, until a closer look reveals that her eyes are staring back at you. Covarrubias’ close-up portraits of North African women are similarly eye-catching and arresting studies that will have me visiting the exhibition a second time before its closing.

I cannot speak highly enough of  The African Diaspora in the Art of Miguel Covarrubias, it is one of the best exhibitions I have ever seen in Los Angeles, if only for the fact that the artist’s fine art prints and oil paintings are so little known in the United States. Regrettably the museum offers no printed catalog of this important show, not even an informative pamphlet. The superb exhibition runs until Feb. 26, 2012.

Placards at Foley Square, New York City, Nov. 15, 2011. - Anonymous artist. Photo from www.occupywallst.org

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement describes contemporary U.S. society as being under the domination of the “one percent”, those super-wealthy individuals and corporations that control everything from the media to the halls of Congress.

While the primary focus of OWS has been aimed at the home foreclosures, unemployment, and social inequality fostered by the greed of rapacious banks and corporations, some critical assessment of the impact corporate titans have exercised over culture is also in order.

For those inured to the art world having been commandeered by high finance, now is the time of reckoning. In view of the Occupy movement’s fight against plutocracy, the arts community should scrutinize the role financial institutions have played, and continue to play, in the collapse of the economy. Those same corporations maintain a benevolent public image through funding the arts; I will mention a handful of these oligarchic “arts supporters” in this article.

Mat Gleason, art critic and founder of the Los Angeles arts periodical Coagula Art Journal, wrote an essay for the AOL owned Huffington Post titled, Is Pacific Standard Time Too Big to Fail? While Gleason’s article was certainly a jab at the Getty Foundation’s much heralded Pacific Standard Time extravaganza of some forty exhibits across Southern California, his commentary also raised the issue of corporate sponsorship of the arts. He specifically targeted Bank of America as the financial backer behind Pacific Standard Time. In his article, Gleason wrote:

Bank of America ATM receipt - Original illustration for Mat Gleason's article, "Is Pacific Standard Time Too Big to Fail?"

“A friend sent me her Bank of America ATM receipt with its upbeat encouragement to explore the Pacific Standard Time (PST) website. Could there be a crueler indictment of an art world that is convinced of its moral superiority to mainstream culture than to be subsidized by one of the criminal financial forces that has brought our culture to its very knees?

I was seriously considering a boycott of the entire Pacific Standard Time when I saw an entity sponsoring a cultural event after basically destroying the culture via the economy. For BofA to celebrate the very pulse that it now has contributed to killing is disgusting. But the era of the boycott seems to have vanished - instead of the boycott’s zero attention, the ‘occupy’ era challenges power by giving perpetrators 100 percent attention. While there is a call for people to remove their money from large financial institutions on November 5 and open accounts at a local credit union, how do we as a region remove the art that defines our city and our times from the large art institutions?

I suppose you don’t need an answer to begin your occupation of the art institution of your choice. And if you cannot choose one, don’t forget that the big banks collaborate with art educational institutions to profit mightily off of student loan debt. Curricula in the hallowed halls of these capitalist MFA casinos mimic the self-impressed non-engagement aesthetic as much or more than most PST exhibits. The anxiety is erased into the conceptual ether. Prozac is to art creation what the Getty is to art curation.”

"Make Wall Street Pay" - Anonymous artist. Based on a photo of "For the Love of God", a sculpture by British artist Damien Hirst. The work, a human skull cast in platinum and covered with 8,601 flawless diamonds, is alleged to have sold for £50 million ($79 million). Poster available for download at www.adbusters.org

While I do not agree with Gleason’s assessment of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time exhibitions, his swipe at Bank of America broaches the wider issue of corporate backing of the arts.

The prickly question is, how do artists circumvent the hegemony of the privileged few to establish and sustain truly autonomous art?

In January 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws banning corporations from using their vast wealth to support or oppose candidates for political office. Millions of Americans were aghast at the decision, which allows corporations to pump unlimited funds into the coffers of political candidates; a distortion of democracy that gives powerful companies the ability to purchase candidates as well as the legislative process. But if it is injurious to the nation to hand over government to monied interests, then is it not also ruinous to give those same monied elites control over the nation’s artistic and cultural life?

The economic meltdown that began in 2008 was in part a result of corrupt dealings by giant banking and loan companies, particularly in the housing market. As that market collapsed, firms like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase loaded portfolios with “toxic” mortgage investments, then sold them to unsuspecting clients while betting the investments would fall in value. The scamming was a factor in the economic crisis, yet, as journalist Robert Scheer pointed out, not a single banker faces criminal charges “since the Justice Department has refused to act in these cases, and the Security and Exchange Commission is bringing only civil charges, which the banks find quite tolerable.” By contrast, 4,542 activists have been arrested in protests against the financial elite since the Occupy Wall Street movement began on Sept. 17, 2011.

"Money Talks Too Much, Occupy!" - Josh MacPhee. 2011. JustSeed Artist's Cooperative. Silkscreen.

Throughout the 2004-2008 housing bubble, the banking practices of Bank of America abetted the ‘08 crash of the global economy.

In the aftermath of the collapse, BofA received $15 billion in taxpayer’s bailout money from the U.S. government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), along with an additional sum of $10 billion so that BofA could purchase the failing bank, Merrill Lynch. In January 2009 BofA received another $20 billion from TARP; unbelievably, 75% of the $20 billion went to pay Merrill Lynch executives massive bonus packages!

Needless to say, the roughly 9 million Americans who lost their jobs as a result of the Wall Street crash have still not received a bailout.

On Sept. 2, 2011, the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), announced a lawsuit against more than a dozen major banks, including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase. The feds charged the banks with having sold some $200 billion in fraudulent mortgage investments to housing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, leading to huge losses during the financial crisis. On Sept. 13, 2011, CNBC reported that BofA was “ramping up its foreclosure processing, sending out far more notices of default to borrowers in August than in previous months, well over 200 percent more month-to-month.” Around 1.2 million BofA customers in California alone are delinquent in their mortgage payments and could face foreclosure on their homes. When BofA subsidizes a museum or cultural event, one should think of the hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens the bank has made homeless.

"Take The Bull By The Horns" - Jesse Goldstein. 2011. Silkscreen print.

On Nov. 8, 2011, a class-action suit against Bank of America ended with the company being required to pay a $410 million settlement.

The lawsuit affected some 13 million BofA customers who were wrongly charged overdraft fees on their debit cards, charges that were typically $35 per occurrence.

According to the Associated Press, an attorney involved in the lawsuit, “calculated that the bank actually raked in $4.5 billion through the overdraft fees and was repaying less than 10 percent. He said the average customer in the case had $300 in overdraft fees, making them eligible for a $27 award - less than one overdraft charge - from the lawsuit.” With BofA making off with that kind of plunder, no wonder they can afford to underwrite the arts.

Despite being the largest bank in the U.S., BofA paid no income taxes in fiscal years 2009 and 2010. In fact the bank received a tax “benefit” of nearly $1 billion for 2010. The bank’s new CEO, Brian T. Moynihan, received $10 million in 2010 as compensation for his first year as Chief Executive Officer.

"The Brains" - Thomas Nast. Wood engraving. 1871. Originally published in Harper's Weekly as an attack against the corrupt Democratic Party political machine that ruled New York City in the 19th century. Specifically Nast portrayed oligarchy as "the brains" behind the crooked politician "Boss Tweed", but Nast's acerbic cartoon was also a general condemnation of oligarchy as the corruptor of democracy. In essence Nast's cartoon epitomizes the political philosophy of today's Occupy Movement, i.e., financial oligarchy is strangling democracy and impoverishing the majority.

With some $2.1 trillion in assets, JPMorgan Chase is the second largest bank after BofA, but it is second to none when it comes to financial crimes - one hardly knows where to begin. As the housing market crashed JPMorgan Chase sold mortgage securities to investors but failed to tell buyers it used a hedge fund to select the assets in the portfolio, and that the hedge fund stood to profit if the investments lost value, which of course they did. More than a dozen investors lost huge sums of money in the crooked deals. JPMorgan Chase paid $153.6 million to settle U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charges that it had mislead investors.

JPMorgan Chase sponsored The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire, an exhibit that ran from March to July, 2010 at the Getty Villa in Malibu, California. A merger between J.P. Morgan & Co. and Chase Manhattan Bank in 2000 created JPMorgan Chase, but Chase Manhattan Bank has an unsavory history in Latin America. Long associated with the Rockefeller family, Chase was once known for its close ties to Standard Oil (itself founded by John D. Rockefeller), which rapaciously exploited Mexican oil starting in 1910. It is indeed ironic that Chase would be the sponsor of Mexico’s great Aztec art treasures. Chase Manhattan Bank played a key role in the military coup that overthrew Chile’s democratically elected government on September 11, 1973. Christopher Hitchins detailed some of this in his book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger.

The New York Times reported that Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, was paid a total of $20,816,289 in 2010, and for the first quarter of 2010 the bank made $3.3 billion in profits. On Nov. 2, 2011, several hundred protestors from the Occupy Seattle movement protested against Dimon when he appeared at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Seattle, Washington, as a keynote speaker for the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. Chanting “Banks got bailed out; we got sold out!” the protesters disparaged Dimon for his exorbitant salary, and condemned JPMorgan Chase for getting $25 billion in bailout loans in 2008 while tens of thousands of homeowners lost their homes to foreclosures.

"Shut Down The Wall Street Casino" - G. Brockman. 2011. Poster announcing the first day of action at New York's financial district. Poster available for download at www.adbusters.org

Levi Strauss & Co. (Levi’s®.) and Nike SB (the skateboard division of Nike Inc.) provided financial backing to Art In The Streets, the “blockbuster” exhibit mounted by the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), in Los Angeles. Getting uncommon press attention and running from April to August, 2011, the show was the first U.S. museum exhibit to present the history of graffiti and street art.

The exhibit was promoted and generally received as groundbreaking; but consider the following - Levi’s pays Haitian workers slave wages in the sweatshop manufacturing plants the company’s “contractors” operate in Haiti, and Nike does the same in Taiwan where workers are paid 50 cents per hour.

U.S. State Department diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks and published in the Haitian newspaper Haïti Liberté and the monthly Nation magazine, revealed that the Obama White House in 2009 fought to keep the minimum wage in Haiti to just 31 cents an hour so U.S. companies like Levi Strauss could continue to reap vast profits from Haitian workers. The cables reveal that deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, David E. Lindwall, argued that attempts to raise wages “did not take economic reality into account” but were gambits aimed at appealing to “the unemployed and underpaid masses.”

Haiti is the least-developed and poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and while its workers make pennies a day, Levi Strauss & Co. reported its 2010 net revenues at $4.4 billion. According to documents submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Levi’s CEO Charles “Chip” V. Bergh received compensation of $9,150,000 for fiscal year 2011.

"OCCUPY" - Matt W. Downloadable street poster. Digital media. 2011. Download this 8 1/2 x 11 graphic at: www.occupytogether.org/posters/Matt-W-bw.pdf

On July 13, 2011, the Associated Press published an exposé on the abysmal conditions workers suffer in Nike’s Asian manufacturing plants, where most of the company’s 1,000 “contractor” run factories are located. The AP noted that 10,000 female workers at the Nike plant in Taiwan make roughly 50 cents per hour, and complain of being physically abused by plant supervisors (enduring kicks, scratches, and slaps), or of being fired for registering complaints. Workers in Nike’s Indonesian plants also spoke of verbal and physical abuse, low wages and arbitrary firings.

After the AP released its findings, Nike promised “immediate and decisive action” to end the abuses, but it made the same claims in decades past when caught using child labor in Indonesia and Cambodia (involving girls as young as twelve who worked for 22 cents an hour, seven days a week, for sixteen hours a day). It should be noted that while Nike’s contract workers in Asia today are paid around 50 cents an hour, the company earned $1.91 billion in fiscal year 2010, and its CEO, Mark Parker, received $13.1 million in compensation. If the aforementioned facts about the sponsors of Art In The Streets had been known, visitors to the exhibit might have been offended; but corporate sponsorship of the arts, at least from the perspective of corporations, is an effective way to conjure up a benevolent public image where otherwise one does not exist.

Target subsidizes free admission days at more than 30 U.S. museums and theaters, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. But the mega-box store is not without its controversies, from telling its pharmacists they can refuse dispensing emergency contraception to customers, to contributing money to anti-gay groups and politicians. Those enjoying their free museum admission days might be surprised to learn that Target was the number one contributor to Republican Congresswoman and Tea Party favorite, Michele Bachmann, donating $19,950 to the candidate’s 2009-2010 campaign.

In fiscal year 2010 Target made over $67 billion and Gregg Steinhafel, Chairman, President and CEO of Target Stores Inc., received compensation of $24 million. Yet, Target’s mostly part-time workers earn “too little to support a family or afford health insurance, forcing some to rely on food stamps and Medicaid for their children”, according to a New York Times report.

Target’s workers are entirely non-unionized. New hires are required to watch an anti-union propaganda video that is positively Orwellian. A campaign to unionize the Valley Stream, New York Target store faced intimidation and harassment.

The union lost the June 2011 election, but the National Labor Relations Board found evidence that Target threatened workers with the store’s closure if they voted union, a violation of labor laws that may lead to nullification of the election results.

I have been writing about the relationship between BP (British Petroleum, one of the world’s biggest polluters), and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) since March of 2007. In fact this web log was the first to offer a critique of LACMA’s association with BP. My archive of articles pertaining to the BP-LACMA arrangement makes for interesting reading, though there is always something new to report, such as the following.

On Nov. 5, 2011, the Guardian reported that court documents revealed BP’s business dealings with the Russian government and oil consortiums caused BP to describe their Russian contacts as “crooks and thugs.” Whether or not the Russians BP deals with are criminal types is beside the point; that BP perceives them to be gangsters and yet continues to partner with them tells everything there is to know about the business ethos of BP. A review of BP’s multi-billion dollar dealings with Libya’s former strongman Muammar Gaddafi only sharpens the point.

Project Censored released a report in 2011 claiming the U.S. Department of Defense is the worst polluter on the planet. Whether or not readers accept those allegations, BP selling huge amounts of aviation fuel and petroleum products to the Pentagon cannot be disputed. The Washington Post reported that BP “was the Pentagon’s largest single supplier of fuel” in 2009, and that “contracts amount to roughly the same percentage” for 2010. Sales continued even as BP’s pipeline gushed tens of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The paper quoted a former EPA lawyer familiar with the contract between BP and the Pentagon: “BP was supplying approximately 80 percent of the fuel being used to move U.S. forces” in the Middle East.

We have entered the age of austerity, and everywhere the 99% are being made to pay for the financial crimes of the 1%. Those who say corporate backing of the arts is necessary, that museums and other cultural venues could not survive without it, especially with austerity budgets and deep cuts in arts funding being enacted by governments, are missing an essential fact. The resources exist, they are simply monopolized by a minority out of greed and self-interest. The Congressional Budget Office reported that from 1979 to 2007 the after-tax income of America’s top 1 percent soared 275 percent. More importantly, Citizens for Tax Justice released a report showing that 280 of the most profitable U.S. corporations have sheltered half their profits from taxes, and thirty U.S. corporations paid no federal income tax whatsoever from 2008 to 2010. In addition, the report found that “the top ten defense contractors saw their combined tax rate decline from 19.3 percent in 2008 to a mere 10.6 percent in 2010″.

Some arts professionals have told me that corporate sponsorship of the arts is no different than the kings of yesteryear lavishing gold upon artists to create grandiose works in praise of nobility and kingly realms; after all, some of the world’s greatest artworks were created due to the largesse of “royal sovereigns”. But we are no longer serfs living in medieval times, or so I like to tell myself. Just because a gaggle of multi-billionaires like to imagine themselves as the Medici’s of the 21st century does not mean we have to entertain their delusions. People today aspire to democratic governance where potentates do not determine the course of society. If democracy is preferable to aristocracy in political affairs, then why should art and cultural policy be determined by a new financial aristocracy?

I am pleased to announce that a number of my early graphic works have been included in the museum exhibition, Peace Press Graphics 1967-1987: Art in the Pursuit of Social Change, organized by the University Art Museum at California State University Long Beach (CSULB). The exhibit is part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945 - 1980, the largest collaborative art project in Southern California history. I have six artworks in the exhibition, and four additional graphic works in the exhibit catalog, but in this article I am going to highlight a Peace Press published work of mine  not included in the show. In weeks to come I will upload more of my Peace Press images and bring their histories to light in a detailed essay.

Peace Press Graphics is an important showing of over 100 historic posters and flyers published by Peace Press, a now defunct Los Angeles collective that ran a professional print shop serving the local and national needs of radical and progressive political groups and organizations. The published works on display, culled from the archives of Peace Press as well as from the collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG), address a wide range of topics - civil liberties and human rights, worker’s issues, feminism, environmental concerns, anti-nuclear and anti-war protests, and much more.

A number of posters in the show epitomize the psychedelic aesthetics of the late 1960s, works from the likes of Robert Crumb and Skip Williamson, exemplars of the 60s hippie counter-culture. Other posters embody the political militancy of the day, like Chicano artist Rupert Garcia’s Save Our Sister, a poster commissioned in 1972 by the Los Angeles Committee to Free Angela Davis. Taken as a whole the assortment of works on display form an accurate visual record of dissident cultural and political forces working within the U.S. from 1967 to 1987.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s I created a number of drawings and flyers as a direct result of my involvement in the early punk rock movement of Los Angeles. In true punk spirit my flyers were meant to provoke, and I generally produced and distributed them anonymously. One such example is the flyer I designed for the L.A. chapter of Rock Against Racism (RAR) in 1980, a rare leaflet that was published by Peace Press.

Concert flyer designed by Mark Vallen in 1980 for a Los Angeles Rock Against Racism concert featuring punk bands D.O.A., Silencers, and the Gears.

My Rock Against Racism flyer announced a free concert in L.A.’s MacArthur Park, held October 27, 1980 at the band shell area of the commons. The leaflet touted the appearance of the rough and tumble Canadian punk band, D.O.A., who were quite big at the time and remain one of my favorite punk bands. In the context of the museum exhibit the significance of this particular flyer is twofold. While Peace Press printed a number of posters and flyers for the likes of Jackson Browne, Joan Baez, and others associated with the counter-culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, my RAR flyer is most likely the only punk graphic ever to be printed by Peace Press; the flyer also gives evidence of the progressive political side to L.A. punk. I invite readers to download and print a free copy of the historic flyer (.pdf format).

My flyer was created before computers were used to generate graphic art. Utilizing the dread inducing “ransom note” visual language, the text, replete with intentional misspellings, was mostly produced by cutting letters out of magazines and newspapers with a razor blade, then gluing them down to a sheet of paper. The rest of the copy was created using the now archaic “transfer type” once so prevalent in the advertising industry of the day. News photographs were interspersed with the irregular lettering to construct an incendiary narrative. The photo at the bottom edge of the flyer shows American Nazis wearing crash helmets, waving a U.S. flag, and carrying a banner that brazenly praises Hitler; the timely photo being ripped from a then current newspaper report on a neo-Nazi rally in a U.S. city. Soaring above the scene, two RAR fighter jets unleash bombs and automatic cannon fire upon the gaggle of jackbooted fascists.

Founded in London, England in 1976, the launching of Rock Against Racism was concurrent to the emergence of punk rock in Britain, a movement that would explode upon the world scene in 1977 with the outrages of the Sex Pistols, the Damned, and the Clash. In the mid to late 70s social conditions deteriorated in the U.K., giving rise to openly fascist political organizations like the National Front; during this period neo-Nazi skinhead gangs unleashed hundreds of violent attacks against South Asian and Black immigrants across England.

As the National Front and neo-Nazi skinheads sowed mayhem throughout England, famed guitarist Eric Clapton added fuel to the fire at a U.K. performance in Birmingham held on Aug. 5, 1976. Clapton launched a harangue from the stage on the dangers of the U.K. becoming a “black colony.” He ranted in part; “This is England, this is a white country, we don’t want any black wogs and coons living here. We need to make clear to them they are not welcome. England is for white people, man. We are a white country. I don’t want f*****g wogs living next to me with their standards (….) Throw the wogs out! Keep Britain white!” Needless to say the celebrated guitarist lost a substantial amount of his fan base over his racist diatribe. A month before Clapton’s concert a Sikh teenager named Gurdip Singh Chaggar had been murdered by a mob of white racists, the chairman of the National Front, John Kingsley Read, responded to the killing during a National Front meeting with the words, “One down, a million to go.”

Immediately after Clapton’s repugnant concert shenanigans, photographer Red Saunders and designer Roger Huddle wrote a seething criticism that was published in the New Musical Express, an article I recall reading when it was first published. The irate Saunders and Huddle berated Clapton, “Half of your music is black. You’re a good musician, but where would you be without the blues and R’n'B?” They went on to proclaim, “We want to organize a rank-and-file movement against the racist poison in music. We urge support for Rock Against Racism.” Soon after the letter’s publication in August 1976, Rock Against Racism (RAR) was founded in the U.K. as an actual political/cultural organization that staged concert events. Tellingly, it was not rock’s superstars and corporate mainstream acts that collaborated with RAR, but rather the rebellious and lesser known ska, reggae, and punk groups that had nothing to lose.

On April 30, 1978, Rock Against Racism staged its Carnival Against The Nazis, a gigantic music festival presented in London’s Victoria Park. The performers included the Clash (click here to see some amazing footage of the band at the RAR concert), X-Ray Spex, the Tom Robinson Band (the world’s first openly Gay rock band), Steel Pulse, and Aswad . The groups played before an enthusiastic multiracial crowd of some 100,000 people. The program for the event proclaimed; “We want rebel music, street music. Music that breaks down people’s fear of one another. Crisis music. Now music. Music that knows who the real enemy is - Rock against racism.” Soon after the Carnival Against The Nazis, RAR chapters began to proliferate.

To my knowledge, the Los Angeles chapter of Rock Against Racism did not operate for very long, but the group’s efforts undoubtedly contributed to the city’s history, as well as to the cultural and political activism carried out in the U.S. during the ultra-conservative Reagan years. I am pleased to take credit for this once anonymous flyer, an artifact from a bygone rebel social movement, and happy to reveal that it was published by Peace Press. With a bit of luck, it will help inspire future troublemaking. One can only hope.

Peace Press Graphics 1967-1987: Art in the Pursuit of Social Change, runs from September 10 to December 11, 2011 at the University Art Museum, California State University Long Beach. Visit the museum website to learn more about the exhibition.

I will be premiering two new oil paintings at ¡ADELANTE! Mexican American Artists: 1960s and Beyond, the latest museum exhibition to explore the world of Chicano art. Presented by the Forest Lawn Museum in Glendale, California, the exhibit runs from September 9, 2011 through January 1, 2012, and offers the paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and photographs of some forty artists. Included are artworks from “veteranos” of the 1960s Chicano Arts Movement, as well as from a whole new generation of artists involved in creating Chicanarte (Chicano art).

Those influential artists participating in the exhibit include the likes of Judith F. Baca; David Rivas Botello; Barbara Carrasco; Margaret García; Ignacio Gomez; Wayne Healy; Leo Limón; Frank Romero; Patssi Valdez, and a host of others. A few of the works on view are from the Cheech Marin Collection, one of the most important private collections of Chicano art in the United States. Adelante is Spanish for “advance” or “forward”, making the perfect title for an exhibit that surveys Chicano art as it moves into the second decade of the 21st century.

"La Causa" (The Cause) Mark Vallen. Oil on canvas. 40" x 36" inches. 2011. On exhibit at the Forest Lawn Museum, Sept. 9, 2011 through Jan. 1, 2012.

When Joan Adan, curator and exhibit designer for the Forest Lawn Museum, requested my participation in the Adelante show, I made a commitment to create a pair of new oil paintings especially for the occasion. I would have barely four months to complete the works. I had been conceptualizing a number of large canvasses based upon observed life in the city of Los Angeles, so when Ms. Adan offered inclusion in Adelante - my ideas became concrete. I was determined to paint narratives that typically get little attention in Chicanarte exhibits. I chose to create paintings inspired by a major event in Mexican-American history, the National Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War, telling the story of how that event continues to resonate in the present.

The Chicano Moratorium march took place in East Los Angeles on August 29, 1970, and was partly organized by the Brown Berets, a militant Chicano group that fought for the civil and human rights of Mexican-Americans. The Brown Berets were originally organized in East L.A. in 1967 as an outgrowth of the burgeoning Chicano civil rights movement. In 1968 the group organized the first student walkouts to protest racism and substandard schools in East L.A., electrifying an entire generation. Soon Brown Beret chapters sprang up throughout California, Arizona, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, and beyond - but it all started in the city of Los Angeles.

Some 30,000 people took part in the 1970 moratorium march, which culminated in a rally at Laguna Park; dozens of Brown Berets acted as marshals, providing security for the protest. The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department attacked the gathering, initiating a riot. Ultimately police killed four citizens that day, Lyn Ward, José Diaz (both Brown Berets), Gustav Montag, and L.A. Times reporter Rubén Salazar. Salazar was slain as he sat in the Silver Dollar Café; a deputy sheriff fired a tear gas projectile into the cafe, striking Salazar in the head and killing him instantly.

To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium, on August 27, 2010 I joined 5,000 others in walking the original march route along Whittier Blvd. Instead of the Vietnam War, we protested the current U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A new generation of Brown Berets provided security for the march - as well as inspiration for my painting, La Causa. The Brown Berets disbanded in 1972, but were re-activated in 1993 under the group’s original charter and mission statement; the organization currently seems to be flourishing. As the multitudes passed where the Silver Dollar Café once stood, piles of flowers were placed on the spot where Rubén Salazar was killed. We rallied at Rubén Salazar Park (formerly known as Laguna Park), where forty-years ago the police provoked the riot now recorded by history.

"La Causa" (Detail) Mark Vallen. Oil on canvas.

My oil painting, La Causa (The Cause), is a depiction of two of the female Brown Beret cadre I caught a glimpse of at the 40th anniversary protest march. The title of my canvas is taken from the words that appear on the emblematic patch worn on the berets of the organization’s members, the “cause” being the liberation of the people.

I felt it important to portray these young Chicana activists as a counter-balance to the stereotypical images of Latinas. Despite their legendary public image, at least as it is known in the greater South West of the U.S., I think mine might be the first serious painting of Brown Beret members. My canvas is not a wholesale endorsement of the group’s cultural nationalist political philosophy, but rather an acknowledgement of the role the organization has played in the history and collective consciousness of Mexican-Americans.

It is ironic that while working on my La Causa painting, I received word that the FBI and the SWAT Team of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department raided the home of Carlos Montes on May 17, 2011. Montes, a co-founder of the Brown Berets and a leader of the historic student walkouts in East L.A., had his cell phones, computer, notes, and other personal affects seized by the authorities. Apparently the Obama administration has targeted Montes for his antiwar activities, part of an underreported repressive sweep the Obama Justice Department has initiated against antiwar activists as reported in the Washington Post. As of this writing, the government’s case against Carlos Montes is still pending.

What initially attracted me to the Chicano Arts Movement in the early 1970s was its innovative merging of aesthetics and political concerns; it was a populist, anti-elitist school of art that sprang from a people’s struggle for equality, democratic rights, and self-determination. Chicanarte took inspiration from the Mexican Muralist School of social activist art, but it succeeded in creating its own unique visual language that reflected the distinctive Mexican-American experience. While the elite art world discarded painting altogether in favor of postmodern conceptualism and its rejection of “grand narratives”, Chicanarte never abandoned figurative realism in paintings, drawings, prints, or sculpture; a fact that largely remains so today.

Chicano artists continue to address the dreams, aspirations, history, and lived experience of la gente (the people), which is the genre’s one consistent and unbreakable grand narrative. The Chicano Arts Movement has certainly expanded since the early 1970s, nowadays incorporating performance, installation, abstraction, and other disciplines, but for the most part it still retains the activist spark of its founding years. The state of U.S. society today, with its austerity budgets, numerous wars, economic decay, and xenophobic anti-immigrant stance, gives impetus for the social realist activist component of Chicanarte to once again move front and center.

¡ADELANTE! runs from September 9, 2011 through January 1, 2012. The Forest Lawn Museum is located at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, 1712 South Glendale Avenue, Glendale, California. 91205. The museum is open every day except Monday, from 10 am to 5 pm. Admission and parking is free. Phone: 1-800-204-3131. Website: www.forestlawn.com. A larger reproduction of La Causa can be viewed here.

On July 17, 2011, the world’s best known Egyptologist, Zahi Hawass, was fired from his position as Egypt’s Minister of Antiquities. The first news I received of Hawass being discharged came from Max Fisher’s article, Egyptians Celebrate Firing of the ‘Mubarak of Antiquities’, published in the Atlantic on July 18, 2001. Hawass was sacked by the country’s ruling army council, which reshuffled the government cabinet to purge it of Mubarak henchmen, a move widely seen as an attempt to placate the millions of Egyptians involved in the nation’s revolutionary upsurge.

In February of 2011 I wrote The Museum at the Center of Egypt’s Revolution, an article about Mr. Hawass that detailed his record as an ardent supporter of the former dictator Hosni Mubarak (who is scheduled to go on trial Aug. 3 over charges of corruption and having given the orders to murder dozens if not hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators). Since publishing my article I have been waiting for news that Hawass was either resigning or being arrested, so Fisher’s announcement in the Atlantic came as no surprise.

Typical of Western press coverage of Mr. Hawass’ downfall, the New York Times simply mentioned on July 22, that Hawass had drawn criticism from critics “for his ties to the Mubaraks, his role in sending artifacts abroad on traveling exhibitions and his relationship with National Geographic, which paid him up to $200,000 a year as an explorer-in-residence.” There is much more to say about why Hawass has been such a controversial figure for Egyptians.

My abovementioned article not only addressed how Egyptian archaeologists and state museum workers viewed Hawass as running the nation’s archaeology institutions for his own personal profit, it focused on another very disturbing possibility; as Egypt’s chief archaeologist, the Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, and the Minister of Antiquities (a newly created cabinet post given to him by Mubarak just prior to the dictator’s demise), Hawass certainly had to be aware that the Egyptian Museum was being used by Mubarak’s army as a detention center where prisoners were brutally interrogated and tortured.

Zahi Hawass in the Egyptian Museum with army commandos. Pulled from Hawass' official website, this undated photo was most likely taken in late January, 2011, when Mubarak's soldiers were first deployed to occupy the museum for its "protection." Photographer unknown.

On February 9, 2011 the Guardian published the hair-raising Egypt’s army ‘involved in detentions and torture, a story that brought to light allegations made by Human Rights organizations that Mubarak’s soldiers had “secretly detained hundreds and possibly thousands of suspected government opponents since mass protests against President Hosni Mubarak began, and at least some of these detainees have been tortured.” The article reported that “some of the detainees have been held inside the renowned Museum of Egyptian Antiquities”. While the article published the testimonies of those who claimed to have been mistreated while held inside the museum, the report did not mention Hawass - who nevertheless was in charge of the museum.

Even after the fall and arrest of President Mubarak, reports about the Egyptian Museum being used as a detention center continued to emerge. On March 17, 2011, the Egyptian Al-Masry Al-Youm, published the testimonies of those who had been arrested by Egyptian soldiers during a peaceful sit-in at Tahrir Square on March 9. Dozens of detainees held a press conference where they said that on March 9 they had been “dragged into the Egyptian Museum where they endured six hours of torture and mistreatment.” Egypt’s largest news organization, Al-Ahram, also published these accounts, reporting that “According to eyewitnesses, thousands are still being held in the military camps with detainees packed inside the Egyptian Museum, which has been turned into a torture chamber by the army.”

A mass of welts, cuts, and burns. Screenshot from amateur video showing Ramy Essam's back after being tortured in the Egyptian Museum by the army on March 9, 2011.

On March 18, 2011, CNN published a detailed account concerning 23-year-old student, Ramy Essam, who had also been arrested at Tahrir Square on March 9. Essam was a singer who put the revolution’s demands to music, and his wildly popular songs were sung by tens of thousands of people at mass rallies against the Mubarak dictatorship.

Soldiers arrested Essam and “hauled him to the nearby Egyptian museum where uniformed soldiers tortured him for four hours and cut off his shoulder-length hair.” Essam insists the authorities tortured him with electric shocks, “They took off my clothes. They used sticks, metal rods, wires, whips.” In this amateur video Essam is interviewed right after his torture, the film showing his slashed, bruised, burned, and scarred back. NPR published an account of his ordeal at the Egyptian Museum, which includes a video of Essam singing before a massive crowd at Tahrir Square before Mubarak was ousted. One has to ask, where was Zahi Hawass when the museum he ultimately had supreme oversight over was transformed into a torture center by Mubarak’s security forces?

On April 9, 2011, well over 100,000 Egyptians gathered at Tahrir Square to demand that the army put former President Hosni Mubarak on trial. The next day hundreds of protestors who had re-occupied Tahrir were attacked by troops of Egypt’s new military council, demonstrators were sent fleeing by soldiers armed with batons, tasers, and firing live ammunition; dozens were arrested. Quoting Al Jazeera’s report on the army attack, “Other central security and army forces had been stationed to the north of Tahrir Square next to the Egyptian Museum, which military police have turned into a makeshift detention centre.”

On April 11, 2011, the New York Times reported that an Egyptian blogger by the name of Maikel Nabil was sentenced to 3 years in prison by the county’s military council. His lawyer referred to him as “the first prisoner of conscience in Egypt after the revolution.” His crime? Mr. Nabil was charged with spreading information previously published by Amnesty International regarding “the torture of those detained inside the Egyptian Museum.”

When Zahi Hawass was unceremoniously dismissed on July 17, archeologists, museum staffers, and others were there to met him with angry chants as he left his office at the Supreme Council of Antiquities and hurriedly got into a cab. Hundreds of protesters surrounded the cab and blocked it from moving as they unleashed a torrent of insults at Hawass. The entire event was captured on an amateur video, which surely documents how Hawass is actually regarded by many Egyptians.

Of course not everyone is a critic of Mr. Hawass. For instance, the organizers of the coveted Freedom to Create Prize picked Hawass to hand out awards at their 2010 Freedom to Create awards ceremony held in Cairo, Egypt. The organization annually presents cash prizes to international artists and arts groups that “promote social justice and inspire the human spirit.” On the Freedom to Create website, the organization wrote:

“Supporting the Freedom to Create Prize, the Secretary General of Supreme Council of Antiquities and renowned Egyptologist, Dr. Zahi Hawass said, ‘Providing the opportunity for creativity can inspire and unite individuals, breaking down social barriers and fostering a greater sense of peace and unity within nations. The 2010 Freedom to Create Prize entrants are a testament to the human spirit and should be an example to us all.’”

Perhaps in 2011 the Freedom to Create organizers will do a better job of vetting their award presenters. That, and giving their top cash prize to tortured Egyptian singer, Ramy Essam, would go a long way towards reversing their error of associating with Hawass. Such a gesture would provide a small modicum of justice to those who were tortured and abused at the Egyptian Museum.

Zahi Hawass recently told the New York Times that “I am retiring to focus on my own work, as a scholar and a writer,” adding that he looks forward to “living quietly as a private person, away from politics.” That is all well and good for Hawass, who one must presume is still being paid $200,000 a year by National Geographic - which lists Hawass as its “Explorer-in-Residence Emeritus“. However, blogger Maikel Nabil is at this moment serving his 3 year sentence for the crime of writing that the army tortured and abused prisoners at the Egyptian Museum. While Mr. Hawass’ speaking engagements bring him $15,000 each, there are dozens of Egyptians who are demanding justice over their being detained and tortured at the Egyptian Museum.

The Egyptian Museum became an improbable backdrop to Egypt’s ongoing revolution when on Jan. 25, 2011, pro-democracy protestors first occupied Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo, where the Victorian-era museum happens to be located. As the rebellion unfolded the rose-colored walls of the museum were seen on television and computer screens all across the globe; it was quite possibly the first time many non-Egyptians had ever heard of the museum, which holds the largest collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts in the world. An examination of the intrigues swirling around the museum, and by extension, taking a closer look at Zahi Hawass (Egypt’s Minister of Antiquities), reveals much about the current situation.

After the Egyptian Museum was broken into by looters on Jan. 28, I wrote an article refuting claims made in the mainstream press that attributed the looting to pro-democracy protestors. By now everyone knows about the ransacking of the museum, but few have paid attention to another distressing report; the Egyptian Museum has been used as a detention center where the army held, abused, and at times tortured protestors it arrested during the uprising. More on that later, but first let us reappraise Mr. Hawass, perhaps best known to Americans for appearing on the U.S.-based History Channel special called “Chasing Mummies.”

As his country’s chief archaeologist, Mr. Hawass has served as the Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), and more recently was appointed Minister of Antiquities. There is no doubt Hawass has made major contributions to Egyptology, and I do not mean to denigrate his accomplishments. Nonetheless, it is impossible to overlook his ignoble side; Hawass is a loyal supporter of the ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak.

On Jan. 28, Mubarak ordered the ferocious police repression that resulted in crowds of infuriated protestors burning down the headquarters of his despised National Democratic Party (NDP). With the people taking to the streets to topple the Mubarak regime, Hawass went on state-controlled television to call on Egyptians not to believe the “lies and fabrications” broadcast about Mubarak on Al Jazeera. On Jan. 31, Mubarak appointed Hawass to the cabinet post of “Minister of Antiquities,” a special position the dictator created for Hawass. On Feb. 1, even as Mubarak’s hated secret police and hired goon squads were beating, torturing, and killing pro-democracy demonstrators, Hawass told the New York Times that protestors “should give us the opportunity to change things, and if nothing happens they can march again. But you can’t bring in a new president now, in this time. We need Mubarak to stay and make the transition.” On Feb. 6, 2011, Hawass appeared on the BBC to exclaim:

“The president would like to stay, he and all of us would like him to stay, not all of us as a government, but all of us as the majority of the Egyptian people, because we need President Mubarak to make the smooth transition of the government, he’s the only one who can do that. All of us of course agree with the people who did the marches, who asked for freedom and democracy, all of us would like that, but the only one who can continue and make the stability in Egypt is only one person - President Mubarak (….) He made the whole world respect Egypt, and he was a kind man and a good man, and I myself always respected this man, and I would like this man to stay.”

Also on February 6, Hawass posted the following proclamation on his official website:

“In these very critical moments of Egypt’s history, I believe that President Mubarak is capable of insuring a peaceful and democratic transition of power; especially since he has announced that he would not seek re-election. I also would like to remind everybody that Mubarak is a decorated war hero, and should be allowed to leave his office in dignity. I say that as an Egyptian who honors the war heroes of this country, but not as a cabinet member.”

Screenshot of Zahi Hawass (left) giving NBC's Richard Engel a tour of the Egyptian Museum, Feb. 9, 2011.

On Feb. 9, Richard Engel of the NBC Today show was given a tour of the Egyptian Museum by Zahi Hawass, who confirmed that artifacts damaged by looters were being restored.

NBC failed to describe Hawass as a Mubarak supporter, or as having accepted a high position in the dictator’s thoroughly discredited regime while the majority of Egyptians were calling for its abolishment. As a corporate news outlet NBC is not alone in rushing to conduct uncritical interviews with Hawass, which should give one pause over the state of U.S. journalism.

It has come to light that a dozen or more priceless artifacts were stolen from the Egyptian Museum on the night of Jan. 28. Hawass had previously told the press that objects at the museum had only been damaged, but after museum staff conducted an inventory it was found that a number of items were missing. This led Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor to write that Hawass “appeared to have hid the extent of the damage done at the famed Egyptian museum.” Murphy quoted an unnamed acquaintance of Hawass, who said “I think he held the information back because he understood it would be catastrophic for the regime’s legitimacy.”

Al-Ahram (Arabic for “the Pyramids”) is the most widely read Arabic language newspaper in Egypt and it also runs a weekly English language website. Owned by the government, it has been a dubious source for news; its editors having been handpicked by the Mubarak regime, at least up until the present. The Feb. 10 weekly edition of Al-Ahram published “Not getting away with it,” an article about the looting of the Egyptian Museum. It reported that Irina Bokova, Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), had contacted Hawass over the condition of museums and archaeological sites during the violence. According to Al-Ahram, Hawass told UNESCO the museums and archaeological sites were “safe and sound” under his hand!

In addition, Al-Ahram reported the International Committee of Museums (ICOM) had decided to establish a committee to protect and monitor the Egyptian Museum; Hawass rejected this, saying “We don’t need any international supervision.” Sounding every bit as pompous as his despotic boss, Hawass said, “I want everyone to relax and to know that I am here and we are all watching with open eyes. I want people to know that after days of protest, the monuments are safe.” Yet on Feb. 17, Hawass would write on his official website that multiple archeological sites had been broken into and pillaged.

State museum workers protest for higher wages in front of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Feb. 9, 2011. Some of their signs read, "No to corruption, no to oppression," and "Increase Pay." AP Photo/Ben Curtis.

Enjoying the status of being Mubarak’s hand-picked Minister of Antiquities, Hawass is now in the position of having to contain labor unrest, as thousands of workers emboldened by the dictator’s departure go on strike for better working conditions and higher wages.

On Feb. 9 dozens of state museum workers and staff held a lively protest in front of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), where Hawass has his office. Rallying for higher wages, Hawass came out of the building to argue with the workers, telling them that their wages could only be increased after things returned to “normal.” Hawass appears unable to grasp the significance of what has happened in Egypt; a return to normal is untenable for the Egyptian people.

Minister of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, argues with state museum workers as they protest outside of the Supreme Council of Antiquities on Feb. 9, 2011. AP Photo/Ben Curtis.

On Feb. 14, the protests in front of the Supreme Council of Antiquities were aimed directly at Zahi Hawass himself.

Chanting “Get out!” nearly 200 graduates of Egyptian archaeology schools called for his resignation, denouncing him for corruption and for being a stooge of the Mubarak regime.

What particularly angers the archaeologists is that they are impoverished despite the fact that Egypt’s tourism industry, centered around the legacy of ancient Egypt and the pharaohs, generates billions of dollars. They are undoubtedly correct in believing the old regime and its many cronies simply made off with that money, and they suspect Hawass has been part of that wrongdoing.

"Get Out!" Nearly 200 demonstrators chant a message to Hawass in front of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Feb. 14, 2011. AP Photo/Ben Curtis.

Robert Mackey of the New York Times The Lede blog, interviewed archeologist Nora Shalaby, who helped organize the protest against Zahi Hawass.

Ms. Shalaby chided Hawass for referring to the revolution as “a black week” in Egypt’s history and for his close relationship with Mubarak’s wife, the “First Lady” Suzanne Mubarak, but Shalaby also lambasted Hawass for being “surrounded by a bunch of corrupt officials who have been sucking most of the SCA money.” At the protest, archaeologists complained about the salary the antiquities ministry pays them (an equivalent of $75 per month), and raised objections to “wasta”, or the arrangement of connections, pay-offs, and influence that secures a job.

Protestors in front of the Supreme Council of Antiquities accuse Hawass of corruption and denounce him for being an underling of Mubarak, Feb. 14, 2011. AP Photo/Khalil Hamra.

When an army tank arrived at the front door of the SCA building, Hawass snuck out a side door to avoid the protestors. Though he managed to duck this militant demonstration, it certainly will not be the last of its kind.

The protest against Hawass by archaeologists was not the first time he has came under fire for abusing workers in his field. In Oct. 2009 the pan-Arab human rights organization, the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), condemned Hawass for waging a campaign of intimidation against fellow Egyptologist and researcher, Ahmed Saleh. Mr. Saleh, who holds a Master’s degree from Manchester University in England, expressed different views from Hawass on the way Egyptian antiquities should be handled, which led Hawass to publicly mock Saleh in the state-run press.

Subsequently the Supreme Council of Antiquities, under Hawass’ leadership, launched no less than 42 investigations against Saleh. ANHRI “decided to adopt Saleh’s case and support him in the face of this injustice.” At last word in ‘09, the Egyptian court system was reviewing Saleh’s case against Hawass and the Supreme Council of Antiquities, but with the intervening revolution, the status of the case is unknown to this writer.

A soldier cradling an AK-47 automatic rifle with a fixed bayonet, stands behind the locked gates of the Egyptian Museum. AP Photo.

All of the aforementioned pales in comparison to the report published by the Guardian on Feb. 9, detailing how the army used the Egyptian Museum as a detention center for pro-democracy demonstrators it had seized during the uprising.

Within its grounds, a number of captives were tortured, and some detainees remain unaccounted for. The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information has stated the army still holds “hundreds” of people arrested during the uprising, “but information on their numbers is still not complete.” The Guardian report raised serious questions about the army as a “neutral force” in Egyptian politics, but it also produced doubts about Mr. Hawass. As a Mubarak loyalist, the former Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, and now the Minister of Antiquities, he is the ultimate steward of the Egyptian Museum.

The Guardian reported “the Egyptian military has secretly detained hundreds and possibly thousands of suspected government opponents since mass protests against President Hosni Mubarak began, and at least some of these detainees have been tortured.” The paper went on to report that “some of the detainees have been held inside the renowned Museum of Egyptian Antiquities on the edge of Tahrir Square. Those released have given graphic accounts of physical abuse by soldiers who accused them of acting for foreign powers.”

One account of abuse came from a 23-year-old man who was seized and beaten by the army while delivering medical supplies to the free clinics protestors operated in Tahrir Square. He said soldiers tied his hands behind his back and beat him before moving him to a makeshift army post located at the back of the Egyptian Museum. He said soldiers “got a bayonet and threatened to rape me with it. Then they waved it between my legs. They said I could die there or I could disappear into prison and no one would ever know.” After 18 hours of imprisonment the young man was released but warned not to return to Tahrir Square.

On Feb. 13, 2011, the army cleared the remaining demonstrators from Tahrir Square, resorting to force when protestors resisted. The Guardian reported that “demonstrators said about 30 were arrested and taken to a military compound at the nearby Egyptian museum where detained protesters have previously been beaten and interrogated.”

Reports of the army using the Egyptian Museum as a detention center have been confirmed by Amnesty International (AI). On Feb. 17, 2011, AI released a report detailing the torture inflicted upon protestors by the army just prior to the fall of Mubarak, abuses that included whippings, beatings, electric shock, simulated drowning, along with threats of rape. An 18-year-old student from Cairo told AI that he and a friend were arrested by the army and taken to an “area of the museum which is controlled by the army and held us there in an outdoor area.” The two were beaten by soldiers before being transferred to another location where they were tortured with electric shock. In another case a 29-year-old detainee was arrested by the army and taken to an annex next to the Egyptian Museum, where soldiers beat him with a whip and a chair until he was unconscious. One must ask, has Zahi Hawass been unaware of the army using the campus of the Egyptian Museum in this way?

In a Feb. 16 post to Hawass’ official website concerning the search for missing antiquities inadvertently dropped on the museum campus by looters, it was stated that a meticulous search had just been conducted, and that a “full and thorough search of the museum and its grounds” continues. In all of this rummaging around no one has noticed any evidence of a temporary military compound on museum property? The web post on Hawass’ blog rather ominously states that, “museum staff is not yet able to move freely within the museum, and has, until now, had to walk in groups of 10-15 people, accompanied by soldiers. Unfortunately, this has slowed down the search, and made it very difficult to carry out a final inventory. The army is allowing very few people into the museum, and the first time the museum’s office staff was allowed in was on 6 February 2011.”

Zahi Hawass might be one of the more innocuous members of the Mubarak cabal, but he is nevertheless part of the old regime. With Mubarak’s departure the components of that old order - the corrupt judiciary, state-controlled media, security forces, government ministers, crony capitalists, and above all the army - remain intact and in control; it is Mubarakism without Mubarak. An authentically democratic Egypt can only be achieved if there is massive and constant pressure from below applied to the upper echelons of power. That process, now fully underway, must eventually erode and completely dismantle Mubarakism for democratic governance to be successful. It is for that reason that Zahi Hawass must resign from his position as Mubarak’s Minister of Antiquities - sooner rather than later.

In this screen shot from AlJazeera news, a soldier surveys the damage at the Egyptian Museum.

Readers of this web log are no doubt aware of events in Egypt, where the people are in open revolt against the U.S.-backed dictator, Hosni Mubarak. The people have but one clear demand, the ousting of Mubarak and the sweeping away of his entire government.

Apart from a few comments, I will mostly leave the political philosophizing and theoretical analysis regarding the situation to others, except to say that I fully support the struggle for democracy currently being waged by the Egyptian people. I salute them for their bravery and their determination to transform their society. U.S. media has generally referred to events in Egypt as a “crisis,” which is far from the truth. What is unfolding is a popular democratic revolution carried out by the Egyptian people. It is only Mubarak and his backers in the White House who face a “crisis”.

Looted display case at the Egyptian Museum. Screenshot from AlJazeera.

As the 30-year old tyrannical regime of Mubarak begins to crumble under popular pressure, chaos reigns on the streets. During the massive protests and fierce police repression of January 28, the downtown Cairo headquarters of Mubarak’s hated political party was torched by furious demonstrators. The neighboring Egyptian Museum seemed in danger from the flames, but more importantly, people wisely thought it might come under attack by opportunistic bandits - and so rushed to defend the institution which houses the treasures of King Tutankhamen as well as the nation’s largest collection of Pharaonic artifacts. As it turned out, nine men did succeed in breaking into the museum by entering through the rooftop. They shattered museum display cases, threw the contents to the ground, and ripped the heads off of two mummies (Correction: the report of beheaded mummies was revealed to be an ugly rumor since proven wholly inaccurate. It turned out to be one of those “sensationalist lies” mentioned in the next paragraph).

Pro-Democracy demonstrators rushed to protect the Egyptian Museum; they are pictured here guarding the museum entry gate in a still from a video by Euronews.

The mainstream press has published sensationalist and outlandish lies concerning the looting of the Egyptian Museum. News headlines like “Egyptian protestors ransack Cairo museum,” “Protestors Loot Museum In Cairo,” and “Protestors Destroy Priceless Mummies at Egypt Museum,” are but a few examples of the types of fabrications found in newspapers hostile to the Egyptian people’s fight for democracy. Protestors had nothing to do with the attempted pillaging of the museum; in fact opponents of the Mubarak regime - students, workers, artists, and residents of the neighborhood in which the museum is located, came together to surround the museum with a protective human shield.

The Euronews website posted video footage showing people gathered at the museum gates with the intention of safeguarding the institution from looters. Individual members of the human shield pledged before news reporters that they would not cease guarding the museum until the army came to secure the grounds. The mass of people shown protecting the Egyptian Museum in the video are clearly anti-Mubarak demonstrators; they are chanting slogans and waving the Egyptian flag, one even shows off a police riot shield undoubtedly obtained earlier in the day while clashing with the dreaded security forces.

MSNBC science editor Alan Boyle confirmed that anti-Mubarak demonstrators protected the museum from looters in his MSNBC article, Were Tut’s treasures damaged? Boyle wrote; “(….) young men, some armed with truncheons taken from the police, formed a protective human chain outside the museum’s main gates. ‘I’m standing here to defend and to protect our national treasure,’ one of the men, a 40-year-old engineer named Farid Saad, told AP. AP quoted 26-year-old Ahmed Ibrahim as saying that it was important to guard the museum because it has ‘5,000 years of our history. If they steal it, we’ll never find it again.’”

Protecting the Egyptian Museum. Photo courtesy of AFP

As the vandals who broke into the museum attempted to exit the building with their loot, they were apprehended by the protestors involved in the human shield as well as by members of the tourism police - a special branch of the police that guard buildings and areas frequented by foreign tourists. The thieves were turned over to the armed forces.

Zahi Hawass, who is recognizable to Westerners because of his role as Egypt’s top archaeologist and the Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, has filed an interesting report with National Geographic concerning the looting of the Egyptian Museum. Because the criminal Mubarak regime has cut off the internet, making e-mail communications impossible, Mr. Hawass had to file his report by fax to colleagues in Italy, who then uploaded the statement to Hawass’s London website. Hawass acknowledged that young Egyptians protected the museum and helped to apprehend the bandits, he wrote in part:

“What is really beautiful is that not all Egyptians were involved in the looting of the museum. A very small number of people tried to break, steal and rob. Sadly, one criminal voice is louder than one hundred voices of peace. The Egyptian people are calling for freedom, not destruction. When I left the museum on Saturday, I was met outside by many Egyptians, who asked if the museum was safe and what they could do to help (….) Many young Egyptians are in the streets trying to stop the criminals. Due to the circumstances, this behavior is not surprising; criminals and people without a conscience will rob their own country. If the lights went off in New York City, or London, even if only for an hour, criminal behavior will occur. I am very proud that Egyptians want to stop these criminals to protect Egypt and its heritage.”

But who exactly were the men who broke into the Egyptian Museum? They were certainly not anti-Mubarak demonstrators. Perhaps the British journalist Robert Fisk can provide some insight into their true identity, he is currently reporting from Cairo. In his Jan. 29 report for The Independent, A people defies its dictator, and a nation’s future is in the balance, he wrote about the “battagi,” Mubarak’s vicious plainclothes police force. Battagi means “thug” in Arabic, and Fisk observed swarms of battagi at protests “who beat, bashed, and assaulted demonstrators while the cops watched and did nothing.” Fisk witnessed battagi - armed with steel rods, sharpened sticks, and police truncheons - collaborating with Mubarak’s uniformed security forces.

Fisk characterized the battagi as corrupt hooligans, “these men, many of them ex-policemen who are drug addicts, were last night the front line of the Egyptian state - the true representatives of Hosni Mubarak, as uniformed cops showered gas on to the crowds.” In his Jan. 30 report for The Independent, Egypt: Death throes of a dictatorship, Fisk wrote: “there are growing suspicions that much of the looting and arson was carried out by plainclothes cops – including the murder of 11 men in a rural village in the past 24 hours – in an attempt to destroy the integrity of the protesters campaigning to throw Mubarak out of power.” Fisk went on to mention the vandalism at the Egyptian Museum, “Again, it must be added that there were rumours before the discovery that police caused this vandalism before they fled the museum on Friday night.” The Hindu newspaper also reported that “officers from the much despised police force” were held responsible by many Egyptians for the looting of the museum and other buildings.

In addition, National Geographic published an open letter from Ismail Serageldin, the director of the magnificent Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a leading Egyptian library and cultural center located on the Mediterranean coastal city of Alexandria. In that letter titled “To our friends around the world: The Events in Egypt, Mr. Serageldin noted that “lawless bands of thugs, and maybe agents provocateurs,” where responsible for looting, while Egypt’s pro-democracy demonstrators helped to protect the nation’s important cultural institutions. Serageldin’s message was published on the home page of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina website, and I am reprinting his dispatch in full:

To our friends around the world: The Events in Egypt
30 Jan 2011

The world has witnessed an unprecedented popular action in the streets of Egypt. Led by Egypt’s youth, with their justified demands for more freedom, more democracy, lower prices for necessities and more employment opportunities. These youths demanded immediate and far-reaching changes. This was met by violent conflicts with the police, who were routed. The army was called in and was welcomed by the demonstrators, but initially their presence was more symbolic than active. Events deteriorated as lawless bands of thugs, and maybe agents provocateurs, appeared and looting began. The young people organized themselves into groups that directed traffic, protected neighborhoods and guarded public buildings of value such as the Egyptian Museum and the Library of Alexandria. They are collaborating with the army. This makeshift arrangement is in place until full public order returns.

The library is safe thanks to Egypt’s youth, whether they be the staff of the Library or the representatives of the demonstrators, who are joining us in guarding the building from potential vandals and looters. I am there daily within the bounds of the curfew hours. However, the Library will be closed to the public for the next few days until the curfew is lifted and events unfold towards an end to the lawlessness and a move towards the resolution of the political issues that triggered the demonstrations.

Ismail Serageldin
Librarian of Alexandria
Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina

U.S. Vice President, Joe Biden, was interviewed on the PBS NewsHour on January 27, 2011, where he gave the clearest indication yet of the Obama administration’s view of the uprising against the Mubarak regime. Biden questioned the legitimacy of the uprising while emphasizing Mubarak was not a dictator and should not be forced to resign. Biden urged protesters and government forces to remain non-violent, an absurd appeal since the Obama administration supplies the Mubarak regime with $1.5 billion in military aid a year; machine guns, armored personnel carriers, tanks, helicopters, and fighter jets, much of which are now being deployed against the pro-democracy movement.

Anti-Mubarak demonstrators in the streets of Cairo display empty tear-gas canisters clearly labeled, "Made in the U.S.A." Anonymous photo courtesy of imgur.com

On January 28, 2011, WikiLeaks released secret cables sent in 2009 from the U.S. embassy in Cairo to the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C. The communiqués stated that police brutality in Egypt was “routine and pervasive” and that torture was so widespread the authorities no longer denied it.

One cable said, “NGO contacts estimate there are literally hundreds of torture incidents every day in Cairo police stations alone.” Other secret cables sent to Washington in the past two years revealed that Obama wanted to maintain a close political and military relationship with Mubarak. The same day that WikiLeaks released these damning cables, Obama made a statement to the press that his administration recognizes “the people of Egypt have rights that are universal.” Such appalling deceit! This past week pro-democracy demonstrators in the cities of Cairo, Alexandria, and Suez posed for photographers with empty tear-gas canisters that had been fired at them by police, all of the shells plainly marked, “Made in the U.S.A.” How Egyptians must appreciate Obama’s concern for their universal rights!

Egyptian pro-democracy protestor at the Westwood Federal Building in Los Angeles, Jan. 29, 2011. Photograph by Mark Vallen. ©

On January 29, thousands of Americans and Egyptian expatriates living in the U.S., held rallies in New York City, Washington D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and other cities to show solidarity with the uprising in Egypt. Demonstrators called upon the Obama administration to cut off all military aid to Mubarak.

I joined the L.A. protest at the Federal Building in Westwood along with around 500 others, most of which were Egyptian-Americans or Egyptians living in exile. My participation in the demonstration was based on my conviction that the historic uprising represents the promise of an actualized global democracy struggled for and won by the world’s people. The White House tells the U.S. citizenry that it is a time of austerity, that government spending on vital social programs must be cut or eliminated, all the while lavishing billions of dollars upon the potentate Mubarak. Enough is enough.

The Mubarak dictatorship has shut down the Al Jazeera bureau in Egypt while simultaneously deploying extra army troops and equipment into big cities; it appears that a full scale military repression may soon be in the offing. On January 30, the Egyptian air force attempted to intimidate protestors by flying multiple passes of their U.S.-supplied fighter jets and helicopters over Tahrir Square in Cairo where tens of thousands of Egyptians have been gathering in their demonstrations against Mubarak. That same day the White House issued a statement calling for  “an orderly transition to a government that is responsive to the aspirations of the Egyptian people.” What is actually called for is the immediate suspension of all  U.S. military aid to Egypt and a declaration that the despot and his hated cronies resign without delay.

UPDATES - 2/2/1011:

Human Rights Watch emergency director Peter Bouckaert is currently in Egypt. He has reported that several captured looters caught breaking into the Egyptian Museum possessed official police ID cards.

The Egyptian Museum faces further damage. On February 2, thousands of armed pro-Mubarak vigilantes attacked the pro-democracy demonstrators at Tahrir Square, the heart of the Egyptian people’s uprising; the museum sits adjacent to the square. Riding horses and camels the vigilantes assaulted anti-government protestors with whips, iron bars, swords, knives, baseball bats, chains, and other dangerous weapons. At the time of this writing, three demonstrators have been killed and an estimated 1,500 injured. There is little doubt the loyalists are backed and organized by the Mubarak regime, several of the thugs captured by pro-democracy forces were carrying official police ID. Al Jazeera and The Guardian both reported that fighting has intensified around the Egyptian Museum.

The day before the regime’s orchestrated day of violence, Zahi Hawass, the Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, disgraced himself by accepting a position in Mubarak’s government. The New York Times reported that Hawass accepted the post of Minister of Antiquities, a special cabinet position especially created for him by the dictator. Hawass dishonored himself further by saying Mubarak had responded to the people’s demands, and that the people “should give us the opportunity to change things, and if nothing happens they can march again. But you can’t bring in a new president now, in this time. We need Mubarak to stay and make the transition.” Apparently the beginning of that “transition” was made today with the whips, iron bars, and swords of the goons under Mubarak’s control. Shame on Mr. Hawass.

The perfidious behavior of Zahi Hawass was offset by that of Nouraddin Adbulsamad, the Egyptian Minister of Antiquities. Mr. Adbulsamad was interviewed live on Al Jazeera as the attacks on Tahrir Square were underway. Adbulsamad said the army withdrew from guarding the Egyptian Museum, allowing pro-Mubarak thugs onto the grounds, from there the vigilantes threw rocks and firebombs at the pro-democracy demonstrators in Tahrir Square. Mr. Adbulsamad said the hooligans appeared on the rooftop of the museum, but also seized the rooftops of other buildings from where they hurled Molotov Cocktails at anti-Mubarak protestors. At the time of this post two of these firebombs had landed on the grounds of the Egyptian Museum, setting a tree on fire.

Mr. Adbulsamad called for Mubarak to step down immediately, saying, “Why is the international community silent? (….) “The international community must not just say something - they must do something!” (….) “Mubarak must go, he is a liar, nobody believes a liar” (….) Yes, he must step down, he must leave, this is the first and last solution.” In his emotional interview Mr. Adbulsamad equated Mubarak to the Roman Emperor Nero (54-68 A.D.), who infamously watched Rome burn for nine days. Though he probably had the fires started himself, Nero publicly blamed the Christians, who he then savagely persecuted. Mr. Abdulsamad said Mubarak’s attitude is, “if I don’t stay, I’ll burn down all of Egypt.” Though Mr. Adbulsamad is a government minister, he had the bravery to tell the truth about Hosni Mubarak.

Artist's conception of The Broad courtesy of Diller Scofidio+Renfro.

On January 6, 2011, Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad unveiled the architectural plans for his new downtown L.A. art museum - which will of course be named, “The Broad.”

The $130 million, three-story, 114,000-square-foot museum will be located on L.A.’s historic Bunker Hill, across the street from the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), and the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

On its list of the 400 richest Americans Forbes magazine places Eli Broad at number 44, calculating his net worth for 2010 at $5.8 billion. The Broad museum is being constructed to house Mr. Broad’s private collection of postmodern art by the likes of Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and Joseph Beuys. According to Forbes, Broad’s collection is valued at more than $1 billion.

Eli Broad is on the Board of Regents at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and a lifetime trustee for both the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). In December of 2008 he bailed out a financially insolvent MOCA to the tune of $30 million. That same year the “Broad Contemporary Art Museum” (BCAM) opened on the LACMA campus, a building Broad had financed with a $56 million donation; however, the tycoon shocked LACMA by announcing he would not donate his vaunted collection to LACMA, but instead would loan it out to museums around the world through his “Broad Art Foundation.” Broad’s entire collection will now be housed at the forthcoming Broad in downtown L.A. It should not be forgotten that Broad helped arrange the $25 million donation that British Petroleum (BP) made to LACMA, which resulted in that museum constructing its odious “BP Grand Entrance.”

Artinfo reported on the unveiling of the Broad museum architectural plans with the headline, Is L.A.’s Broad Museum Already Losing Its Edge? The mildly critical article bluntly stated that the museum’s design by architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro “has been edited by the museum’s billionaire founder,” while also asking whether the architectural plans for the upcoming museum are “in the process of being lobotomized.” Kevin Ferguson of Southern California Public Radio (89.3 KPCC), made a tongue in cheek critique of the building’s “cutting edge” architecture when he wrote, “I can’t stop thinking of cow innards when I see it.” Indeed, the edifice Mr. Broad intends to build to himself does bear a striking resemblance to a gigantic mound of tripe, and it is amusing to contemplate what The Broad will look like after vast flocks of pigeons take up residence in the museum’s porous honeycomb outer walls. But these are trifling concerns when stacked up against the economic realities behind the new museum.

In August 2010, writer Tim Cavanaugh wrote a piece for Reason Magazine titled, Why Is Eli Broad Renting a Full Block of Downtown L.A. for $6,481.48 a Month? Cavanaugh opened his article with the following bombshell:

“Eli Broad’s new agreement to build a downtown Los Angeles art museum gives the capricious billionaire and medieval patron of the arts what may be the sweetest rental deal of the century: a 99-year lease of a large parcel in downtown L.A. for a mere $7.7 million.

If that figure is accurate, this means one of the 100 richest people on the planet is leasing a full block on Grand Avenue for $6,481.48 a month. The owner of the land (in this case, L.A.’s Community Redevelopment Agency) could have gotten more than that with four rental units.”

Cavanaugh contends that in a conversation with a staffer in the office of L.A. City Councilwoman Jan Perry, he was told that Broad is leasing the entire downtown city block of public land for one dollar a year - the going rate for cultural institutions. Apparently $7.7 million is not the lease price for the property, but what Broad agreed to pay the city for donations towards affordable housing under a 2004 Disposition and Development Agreement. Cavanaugh was able to reach William T. Fujioka, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the County of Los Angeles, who confirmed these details, though Cavanaugh alleges Mr. Fujioka stated the agreed upon $7.7 million price was the result of tough negotiations with the city. Nonetheless, it is difficult to justify a multi-billionaire paying only $7.7 million for an entire city block of downtown L.A. property when individual condo units in that area sell for as high as $4 million. But then, being a venerated member of the ruling class does have its privileges.

The lease price controversy deepened when the Los Angeles Times published Mike Boehm’s article, Some fine print in the Broad museum deal. Boehm’s article details how “The Broad Collection museum eventually would receive millions of public dollars as a kind of rebate on its construction cost.” Boehm’s exposé is the knock-out punch. Contrary to reports that Broad will finance his museum with his own monies, it is L.A.’s tax-payers, already overburdened by the state and national economic crisis, that will end up footing the bill. Well, at least we know where the funds to clean up after all of those reprobate pigeons will come from.

According to figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Dec. 3, 2010, the national unemployment rate in the U.S. is officially up to 9.8%. “Frugal” seems to be the most used word to describe the current Christmas season. Together with rising home foreclosures, increasing poverty, lack of healthcare, and some 14% of Americans relying on food stamps to meet basic needs, millions of Americans are becoming increasingly desperate. That is why the holiday party mounted at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art on December 9, 2010 was such an affront.

The Blackstone Group rented the entire museum for the evening, but it did not invite anyone from the media to attend their 25th annual holiday celebration. However, freelance journalist Kevin Roose managed to get into the event, and his report titled Let Us Eat Cake: Undercover at the Blackstone Holiday Party was published in New York Magazine on Dec. 10, 2010, causing quite a commotion. Roose’s unflattering coverage of the Blackstone soirée told the tale of two Americas, but it also inadvertently brought into question the function and responsibilities of museums; what is their mission, who controls them, and to what end? The Met advertises on its web site that “entertaining at the Metropolitan Museum is a privilege reserved for its Corporate Patrons and eligible non-profit organizations.” That elitist statement is clear enough, but a closer  look at the Blackstone Group and why the Met affords them privileges is instructive.

The Blackstone Group is one of Wall Street’s most formidable private equity companies, with $98.2 billion in assets under its management as of December 2009. Stephen Schwarzman, the Co-founder, CEO, and Chairman of the Blackstone Group, has a net worth of around $8 billion. He arranged the bash at the Met as a celebration of his company having been founded 25 years ago. Schwarzman naturally attended the party, as did Blackstone co-founder Pete Peterson and Blackstone president Hamilton E. James (more on him later). As one of the largest private equity companies in the U.S., Blackstone has played a major role in the current economic crisis.

To prevent the collapse of the capitalist economy the U.S. government under President George W. Bush created TARP, the “Troubled Asset Relief Program,” which began the rescue of mega-corporations that were teetering on financial breakdown. President Obama continued and expanded TARP, which distributed well over $700 billion worth of taxpayer-funded bailouts to banks like Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and many others large and small. TARP money also went to automakers like General Motors and Chrysler. Large insurance companies and “specialty lenders” like American Express, Discover Financial Services, and Citigroup also received massive bailouts from Obama.

The largest insurer to be given TARP money was the American International Group, Inc. (AIG), just one of the corporations Obama deemed “too big to fail.” AIG received a taxpayer-funded bailout of $182.3 billion. When the government announced plans to bailout Wall Street and the banks, Blackstone became one of the financial companies to administer the procedure; in Sept. 2010 Blackstone won the role of financial advisor to AIG, an assignment that has “earned” Blackstone hundreds of millions of dollars in fees. When AIG began selling off tens of billions of its assets in order to raise funds to repay the government, Blackstone took fees for “advising” AIG. In a March 2010 article, Reuters reported that auctions of AIG’s assets have generated “more than half a billion dollars in fees since its near-collapse in Sept. 2008, with every major Wall Street bank getting a piece of the action.”

Here it must be noted that after receiving tens of billions of dollars in the first phase of government bailouts under Bush, AIG continued to dole out major contributions to politicians - including then presidential candidate Barack Obama. Even as the company was imploding during the 2008 presidential campaign, AIG gave candidates more than $630,000, making its second largest contribution to Obama ($130,000). This prompted ABC News to write an article on March 18, 2009, titled, Will Obama, McCain, Dodd Return Contributions from AIG Employees?

The Blackstone Group also benefited from the near failure of Hilton Worldwide. The international chain of luxury hotels recieved a $180 million bailout from the Obama administration, arranged with taxpayer-funded money. Interestingly enough, Hilton Worldwide is owned outright by Blackstone. In Oct. 2010, thousands of hotel workers in three U.S. cities staged a week-long strike against Hilton to protest the company’s increase in work loads and cuts in worker’s benefits, at the very moment Blackstone was walking away with $180 million in federal bailout money. There are other examples of the Blackstone Group profiting from the economic collapse, but they are too numerous to list here.

Aside from it current role in bailing out Wall Street and the banks, Blackstone has been involved in a number of other operations. In 2010 it spent $4,635,875 on lobbying. It maintains close ties with Kissinger Associates, Inc., the “international consulting firm” owned and managed by Henry Kissinger. During the outrageous 2001 Enron corruption scandal, Blackstone was the financial advisor to the corporate giant (at the time worth over $100 billion), helping Enron to “restructure.” In June 2010, Business Insider reported that BP hired the Blackstone Group to help defer a hostile takeover by rival oil companies in the wake of BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.

As if all of the above was not enough to forever sully the reputation of the Blackstone Group, Schwarzman, CEO of the corporation, referred to President Obama’s plans to raise taxes on the private equity industry in the following manner: “It’s war. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” Mr. Schwarzman did not explain how the genocide of 3 million Polish Jews was comparable to large companies having to pay higher taxes. Mr. Schwarzman’s enmity towards Obama should come as no surprise. While Blackstone as a company put its money on candidate Obama - as an individual Schwarzman raised $100,000 for George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential campaign.

I have no idea what Stephen Schwarzman and the Blackstone Group paid for the privilege of holding their bacchanalia at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but you can assume it cost plenty. Considering Blackstone’s track record, the Met should not have accepted a single dime from them, but the controversy does not stop with the Met hosting a party for the billionaire boys club.

On Sept. 14, 2010, it was announced that Hamilton E. James, the president of the Blackstone Group, had been elected to the Board of Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"London Calling." Poster designed by an anonymous artist announcing the December 9, 2010, national day of student action against education cuts in the U.K. Image courtesy of counterfire.org

The May 2010 elections in the United Kingdom brought to power the Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition government of prime minister David Cameron (former head of the Conservative Party), and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrat leader). Theirs is the first coalition government in the U.K. since the Second World War, and by all appearances it is an unmitigated disaster for the British people.

The “Con-Dem” coalition, as it has been justly labeled by critics, is implementing savage cuts to social services that will result in cuts totaling $130 billion by 2015.

The Con-Dem budget cuts are broadly attacking the public sector, from council housing, aid for the elderly, fire and police services, etc., to deep cuts in education and national arts programs.

Public resistance to the cuts is growing, but a militant refusal to accept the government’s austerity measures has so far been best expressed by U.K. students, who have been organizing teach-ins, walk-outs, marches, and other forms of protest. Con-Dem cuts to education have been especially vicious, with up to 80% of the teaching budget to be slashed and student tuition tripled to 9,000 pounds a year (during the election campaign Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg promised his party would vote against any tuition hike). Students are also opposed to the Con-Dem move to eliminate the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA), a subsidy of £30 a week to low-income students that helps with the purchase of books, transportation, computer supplies, and other necessities in higher education.

On Nov. 10th over 52,000 students marched through central London - a protest against education cuts that culminated in the forceful occupation of Tory party headquarters. Days later, on November 24th, around 100,000 students participated in the “Carnival of Resistance” national demonstrations. Afterwards student activists announced “London Calling,” another day of national demonstrations to take place on Thursday, December 9, 2010. This time the students vow to march on the Parliament in London, where the Con-Dem coalition government will be voting on education cuts. Clare Solomon, president of the Student Union at the University of London, hopes the march will be the biggest student protest in history, saying “This is the fight of our lives and we don’t intend to lose it.”

Photograph of the Tate Modern occupied by demonstrators on Dec. 6, 2010, in opposition to cuts in arts funding. Photo courtesy of artsagainstcuts.wordpress.com

The poster announcing the London Calling student protest knowingly refers to London Calling, the apocalyptic song and title for the 1979 double album by the U.K. punk band, The Clash. Designed by the band’s official “war artist” Ray Lowry (1944-2008), the album cover featured a photo of Clash bass player Paul Simonon violently smashing his electric guitar onstage during the band’s 1979 New York performance. Lowry’s graphic design was a combative inversion of the album design for Elvis Presley’s 1956 debut album, which used a black and white photo of the crooning Presley strumming an acoustic guitar.

The song London Calling was released as a single in 1979, and its politically charged lyrics became anthemic to the international punk movement. Apparently those confrontational lyrics have become eternal; a stanza from The Clash song is quoted on the London Calling student poster - “London calling to the faraway towns, now that war is declared and battle come down.” By alluding to the contentious spirit of The Clash, U.K. students are upping the ante in their row with the Con-Dem government… but they are not alone.

Devastating cuts are being made to U.K. arts funding, with the Con-Dem coalition proposing that nearly 30 percent be slashed from the national arts budget, a move sure to ravage galleries, museums, community arts organizations, orchestras, and theaters. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s artistic director, Michael Boyd, has called the cuts “a big blow to theatres.” Actor Sir Patrick Stewart condemned the cuts, saying they will be “challenging if not life-threatening in some areas of live theatre.” Grants to museums are slated to be cut by 15 percent, and money to the Arts Council of England, which distributes funds to hundreds of arts venues - will be slashed by some 30 percent. Arts education in U.K. schools is also targeted for reduction or elimination. Creativity, Culture and Education (CCE), which has provided arts education plans to schools, has had its budget cut in half to £19 million. The aforementioned only begins  to describe the ruinous cuts - but how are U.K. artists resisting the conservative onslaught?

A number of artists have organized the “Arts Against Cuts” (AAC) web log, which is described as “an umbrella space for students, artists and cultural workers to display and align their ideas and actions against the cuts.” AAC has reported that students at Goldsmiths College and Camberwell College of Arts have both seized and occupied buildings in protest against arts cuts. AAC was also involved in a protest at the December 6, 2010 Turner prize awards at the Tate Britain.

The 2010 Turner prize winner was “sound artist” Susan Philipsz, who won for her “aural sculpture” titled Lowlands, a tape recording of Philipsz singing the 16th century Scottish lament “Lowlands Away” while standing beneath three different bridges over the Clyde river in Glasgow, Scotland. The prestigious Turner is Britain’s top arts award, and 1st place winner Philipsz received 25,000 pounds ($39,000). The Turner competition is heavily weighted in favor of postmodern conceptual works, with painters effectively barred as competitors. As usual, the “anti-anti art” Stuckist group held a protest in front of the Tate, goading Turner prize party goers with signs that read; “Abandon Art All Ye Who Enter Here.” Stuckist spokeswoman Jasmine Maddock commented to the press, “It’s not art, it’s music. They don’t give the Mercury Music Prize to a painter, they shouldn’t give the Turner Prize to a singer.”

Flyer designed by an anonymous artist from "Arts Against Cuts," celebrating the Dec. 6 protest at the Tate Modern and announcing the Dec. 9, 2010, national day of student action against education cuts in the U.K. Image courtesy of artsagainstcuts.wordpress.com

But this year the Stuckists were not the lone rabble-rousers at the gala art world affair. The Dec. 6 event was disrupted by up to 400 students and art teachers from London art colleges, who invaded the Tate gallery to protest the arts cuts. The protestors inside the Tate held an hour long teach-in against the cuts and how to resist them, then attempted to enter the Turner prize room with the intention of interrupting the televised proceedings. Tate security personnel prevented the protesters from entering the hall where the award ceremony took place, but the demonstrator’s chants of “Education should be free for all - not a product for purchase,” reverberated throughout the museum and could plainly be heard in the TV broadcast. The chanting nearly made the announcement of the Turner prize winner inaudible. To her credit, when Susan Philipsz accepted her prize she said, “I support Artists Against the Cuts.”

The protestors refused to leave the museum, and instead continued to hold a mass teach-in and life drawing class near the Tate’s entrance. A series of speakers addressed the crowd regarding the arts cuts, and others handed out flyers about the Con-Dem plan to cut arts funding. In the aftermath of the Tate debacle, Artists Against Cuts released a flyer with a headline that read, “We Shut Down the Turner Prize; Now Let’s Shut Down London.” The flyer exhorted readers to participate in the London Calling mass student demonstration, stating;

“this is the most important national day of action before parliament vote on legislation which will treble university fees. we must fight back against this DESTRUCTIVE ATTACK on the arts, humanities, and social services. come and join the arts bloc as we march to protect the intellectual health of our nation. we are not just fighting fees; we are fighting philistinism!”

The British public’s rejection of the Con-Dem cuts, and in particular their disdain for the double-crossing Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats, should be instructive for citizens of the United States. The Tory leader David Cameron ran his election campaign on a platform of “voting for hope, voting for optimism, voting for change.” Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg ran his campaign on promises of a “new politics.” It all has a familiar ring to it. Once in power as a ruling coalition, the “change” promised by the Con-Dem partnership became the most draconian cuts in social services since the 1920s. Now that President Obama has extended the Bush tax cuts to the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans, a betrayal of his campaign promises and a total capitulation to the billionaire class, the nature of his administration stands fully exposed.

Look to the rising masses of the U.K. for an answer, and remember the lyrics to that Clash song - “London Calling to the underworld, come out of the cupboards, you boys and girls.”

UPDATES:

In a forgone conclusion the Parliament voted on Dec. 9th to pass the tuition hikes, despite massive protests across the U.K. The 323-302 vote will raise tuition fees for university students from around $5,200 to $14,200. Students and their supporters are planning further creative protest actions against the Con-Dem austerity regime. On Dec. 10th Counterfire.org reported that “students across the country are meeting to form a National Student Assembly and to plan the next steps in escalating the campaign.”

Protestors occupy the National Gallery in London, Dec. 9, 2010. Some 200 protestors listen to a speaker as he makes a point about Manet's painting, "The Execution of Maximilian." Photo: Slade Occupation.

During the Dec. 9 protests the students behind the occupation of the Slade School of Fine Art (Slade Occupation), Arts Against Cuts, and other art activist groups and their supporters, occupied the National Gallery in London. Approximately 200 students and artists took over room 43 of the National Gallery in order to hold a teach-in regarding the Con-Dem austerity plans. The activists seized that particular room because, as John Jordan of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (one of the groups that participated in the occupation) put it; “We chose room 43 because Manet’s Execution of Maximilian is displayed there and there is a work by Courbet down the corridor. It shows two ways of artists responding to rebellion. Manet’s painting is about political betrayal and Courbet gave up painting and applied his creativity to the Paris Commune.”

Arts Against Cuts released a flyer at the event that read; “We are here because: All our country’s art schools are under immediate threat from this education bill. We must preserve our cultural future as much as our cultural past. We are not just fighting fees and cuts - we are fighting philistinism, culture is invaluable. We act in solidarity with public sector workers and employees of the National Gallery.” Gallery staff did not interfere with the occupation, even after the National Gallery had closed. Participants in the non-violent action wrote a collective manifesto they titled The Nomadic Hive Manifesto before finally ending their protest at around 8 p.m. Slade Occupation has posted photos of the occupation teach-in, and Arts Against Cuts have also posted photos.

Sternchen Productions have uploaded a beautiful video of U.K. citizens engaged in an anti-austerity protest action that took place on Dec. 8.

Hundreds of people gathered on the grounds of the Japanese American National Museum on Sept. 9, 2010, for a candlelight vigil in support of the constitutional rights of Muslim Americans. The banner reads, "In Remembrance… Embrace Life. Justice Not Revenge - Oppose Hate Crimes." Photo by Mark Vallen ©.

I will never forget waking up on September 11, 2001 to the spectacle of the Twin Towers being hit by missile-like planes. That day I turned on morning television only to see those slow motion videos of doom and destruction; I watched with eyes full of tears and heart full of dread.

Nearly 3,000 people perished in the terror attack, but I felt there was something much worse yet to come.

In the immediate aftermath of the horrendous crimes committed on Sept. 11, thousands of racially motivated attacks took place in the U.S. that targeted anyone who “looked Arab.” Mosques were vandalized and firebombed. Arab-Americans, Muslims, and South Asians were harassed, beaten, and killed. As the attacks intensified, I responded by creating an artwork titled, I Am Not The Enemy, which was nothing more than a plea for sanity and religious tolerance. The political atmosphere at the time reminded me of another era, the days after the Japanese Empire attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in 1941, and “patriotic” Americans unleashed their fury upon innocent Japanese-American citizens. President Roosevelt would issue Executive Order 9066, sending 120,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast to what the president himself called “concentration camps.”

Participants in the vigil at the Japanese American National Museum plaza hold copies of my poster, "I Am Not The Enemy." Photo and artworks by Mark Vallen ©.

Nine years after 9/11, 5,697 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan to this date, and President Obama has escalated the Afghan war. Untold numbers of Iraqi and Afghan civilians have perished, and Islamophobia in the U.S. has increased. A proposed Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan has turned into a frenzied national campaign of hate against all things Islamic - and I fear a terrible violence will follow.

Photo and artwork by Mark Vallen ©.

Accordingly, when I was informed that a candlelight vigil against hate crimes would be held at the Japanese American National Museum in downtown Los Angeles, I was eager to attend.

Nikkei for Civil Rights & Redress (NCRR) and the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), worked in cooperation with the Japanese American National Museum to organize the silent candlelight vigil; the objective was to express support for Muslim Americans and their constitutional rights, as well as to condemn religious intolerance.

The vigil took place during the evening of September 9, 2010, and nearly 200 people, mostly Japanese Americans, gathered on the plaza in front of the museum. I distributed a few dozen copies of my I Am Not The Enemy poster to those assembled, and the prints were warmly received.

The public relations director of the Japanese American National Museum, Chris Komai, addressed the crowd, which was incredibly significant in and of itself. Most museums are aloof when it comes to real world issues and community affairs, and one does not ordinarily think of museum personnel taking part - officially or otherwise - in political protests of any kind.

Around 200 people filled the Japanese American National Museum plaza for the silent, candlelight vigil. Photo and artwork by Mark Vallen ©.

I was unfortunately unable to hear Komai’s oration as I was busy taking the pictures you see in this article, however, I would like to point out that the Japanese American National Museum has the following in their mission statement; “We share the story of Japanese Americans because we honor our nation’s diversity. We believe in the importance of remembering our history to better guard against the prejudice that threatens liberty and equality in a democratic society.” By providing space on their grounds for the vigil, the museum more than lived up to their mission statement, and their example should be followed by other museums and arts institutions.

It was heartening to see that a good portion of the vigil was composed of young people. Photo by Mark Vallen ©.

Also addressing the vigil was the Reverend Mark Nakagawa, who talked about his work with the Nikkei Interfaith Council, a grouping of Christian Churches and Buddhist Temples in the Little Tokyo area. He spoke of how the council was engaged in outreach programs with the Islamic community of Los Angeles in these times of crisis, and urged one and all to defend the democratic rights of Muslim Americans.

Rev. Nakagawa outlined his work with the Christian-Muslim Consultative Group of Southern California, which was founded in 2006 for the express purpose of bringing Christians and Muslims together “to enhance mutual understanding, respect, appreciation, and support of the Sacred in each other.”

The Rev. Nakagawa’s impassioned call for religious freedom was followed by a short address from Noriaki Ito of the Higashi Honganji Buddhist Temple. An outstanding member of the Japanese American community in Los Angeles, Ito currently sits on the Board of Directors of the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, and served as the Past Chair of the Little Tokyo Community Council. He is actively involved in the preservation of L.A.’s Little Tokyo district. Mr. Ito came to the vigil wearing a formal black and white “wagesa” (Buddhist robe), and he spoke with the wisdom of a Buddhist Kyoshi (teaching priest), calling for unity between all people of faith, and the defeat of religious intolerance.

Ms. Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, who was forced into the Manzanar "internment" camp at age 17, addresses the vigillers. Photo by Mark Vallen ©.

Ms. Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga gave the most powerful of testimonies during the vigil. A California-born U.S. citizen, Aiko and her family were swept up in the relocation of “enemy aliens” after President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 in 1942. As a 17-year-old she and her family were sent to the Manzanar War Relocation Center, a barracks-like camp in California where she gave birth to her daughter under crude living conditions. Aiko and family were transferred to the bleak Jerome internment camp in Arkansas, where they remained imprisoned until 1944.

As Aiko described her life in the Manzanar and Jerome internment camps, from the same spot where thousands of Japanese Americans had been shipped off to those unwelcoming camps all those years ago, tears came to my eyes.

The same demons of racism, ignorance, and fear that sent Aiko to those wretched camps are once again plaguing U.S. society (did they ever go away), only this time they are pursuing Muslim Americans. The 86-year-old Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, speaking passionately and with great authority, exhorted vigillers from a megaphone to defend the civil liberties of Muslim Americans as they would defend their own.

California State Assemblymember Warren Furutani, also addressed the vigil, and in his eloquent way urged people to stand united with their “Muslim brothers and sisters” in opposing all forms of racism, discrimination, and religious intolerance. Mr. Furutani waxed poetic as he railed against certain sectors of U.S. society, “where hate can be purchased wholesale,” an obvious reference to the right-wing “talk” radio hosts who daily spew out vile and unbearable lies about Islam and Muslim Americans.

Photo and artworks by Mark Vallen ©.

Jan Tokumaru of Nikkei for Civil Rights & Redress, read a statement at the vigil that had been published by the NCRR for the occasion. It read in part;

“Nine years ago - just days after Sept. 11 - Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress (NCRR), along with other organizations including the Japanese American Citizens League, the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, the Japanese American National Museum and the Little Tokyo Service Center, sponsored a candlelight vigil in Little Tokyo to remember the victims of 9/11 and to speak in defense of Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, and South Asians who were being maligned as ‘terrorists,’ physically attacked, and even murdered in places such as Arizona. Since 9/11, attempts to marginalize and target Muslim Americans as a ’suspect’ community sympathetic to terrorist incidents throughout the world continue.

(….) Japanese Americans remember all too well how it feels to be a community singled out with suspicion, marginalized and viciously attacked by the media. Despite many efforts to show their loyalty to this country, Japanese were not trusted as reflected in General DeWitt’s statements: ‘A Jap is a Jap,’ and ‘I have no confidence in their loyalty whatsoever.’ The constant barrage of lies in the media became accepted as truth by the American public.

(….) Although the situation is not as dire for Muslim Americans now as it was for Japanese Americans during World War II, NCRR is concerned that the climate of intolerance and fear being created could, under certain circumstances, lead to the stripping of civil liberties and religious freedom for Muslim Americans. Even worse is the violence resulting from such ignorance, such as the stabbing in New York last month of a 44-year-old taxi driver after his passenger asked if he was a Muslim.

(….) NCRR encourages Japanese Americans and all Americans to speak out against anti-Muslim lies and attacks. At a speech given several years ago, Dr. Maher Hathout, a Muslim American leader, said ‘as long as there is one candle lit, there is no darkness.’ Speaking symbolically, he was referring to the struggle of the Palestinian people against occupation - that as long as there was even one person willing to struggle against injustice, there could not be total darkness or oppression. In a similar spirit, NCRR hopes that many candles can be lit on Sept. 9, to show the American people’s commitment to the truth - not lies and distortions - and for justice, peace, religious freedom, and equality - precious values that we hold dear.”

At the end of the vigil, organizers asked participants to form a giant peace sign by grouping themselves together around an outline drawn on the museum’s plaza. A handful of photographers, myself included, were given access to the museum’s rooftop to take photos of the event. The aim was to present a gift - an image of solidarity and peace - to the beleaguered Muslim citizens of the United States.

As of this writing, save for one solitary article published by the Rafu Shimpo Japanese daily newspaper of Los Angeles, not a single news media source in the U.S. (aside from this web log), has reported on the silent vigil that took place at the Japanese American National Museum.

At the end of the vigil, participants formed a giant peace sign in the museum's plaza. This photograph was taken from the museum's rooftop. Photo by Mark Vallen ©.

[A full listing of the speakers at the vigil includes - Reverend Mark Nakagawa of the Centenary Methodist Church; Noriaki Ito, Rinban (head minister) of the Higashi Honganji Buddhist Temple; Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, a WWII internee; Dana Fujiko Heatherton, 2009 Nisei Week Queen and a J-Town Voice activist concerned with the preservation of L.A.'s Little Tokyo, California State Assemblymember Warren Furutani, Jan Tokumaru of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, Aziza Hasan from the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and Ilham Elkoustaf from the Council on American Islamic Relations.]

Founded in the early 1950s, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG) has long played an important role in the cultural life of L.A. Located in the historic Barnsdall Art Park at the intersection of Hollywood and Vermont, the world class gallery has showcased internationally renowned artists, and provided exhibition space for beginning and mid-career artists. I remember the thrill of exhibiting at LAMAG as an art student in the early 1970s. The gallery annually hosts exhibitions of works created by the those who have been awarded grants from the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs. Over the decades I have been enthralled by LAMAG exhibits, and I was moved to write about their Edward Biberman Revisited show of 2009. The gallery’s history, arts programs, and community vision is exemplary - you can read about this for yourself.

It is a scandal that LAMAG has been marked for “partnering out all of its facilities” by L.A.’s city government because of L.A.’s budget crisis. “Partnering out” is simply a euphemism for the cutting of government funding and pushing the privatization of the arts institution. It is rumored that L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), which received a $30-million “bailout” from billionaire real estate magnate Eli Broad in Dec. 2008, is set to absorb LAMAG.

I received the following call to action from the President of LAMAG, and I am reprinting it here in its entirety:

September 1, 2010
URGENT!

City to Partner Out the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery

Dear Arts Community,

The Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs has been directed to issue Requests for Proposals (RFP’s) as the first step in partnering out all of its facilities. This is being done as a cost savings measure in response to the City’s budget deficit. What has been unclear until recently was that these RFP’s will include the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG).

Rumors have been circulating for some time that the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) is among the institutions considering taking over the fifty-six year old institution. The art community has been uncharacteristically silent about this impending change in the LAMAG’s status. Much like the proverbial deer in the headlights, there is a prevailing air of shock and disbelief among those familiar with its history, and tacit resignation to whatever fate might befall the institution, by those who are not. The lack of any concerted effort to promote the Gallery’s exhibition and educational programs has contributed greatly to making it vulnerable and ripe for the picking.

Since its founding in 1954 the LAMAG’s mission has been to exhibit the work of emerging, mid career and established artists from the region, as well as work relevant to the diverse communities that make up the City of Los Angeles. Prior to the building of LACMA in the 60s, it was the largest space exhibiting contemporary art in Los Angeles. It has operated with equity and impartiality, embracing both the traditional and contemporary aesthetic, while always mindful of its responsibility to the public and its goal of enhancing the quality of life. It occupies a unique niche in the city’s cultural landscape, being neither a museum, nor a commercial gallery, allowing it broad curatorial latitude not enjoyed by other institutions.

The LAMAG hosts the annual COLA Fellowship for Individual Artists and the Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg Feitelson Emerging Artist Fellowship exhibitions, showcasing the work of some of the City’s most creative minds. Biannually the Municipal Art Gallery presents the All City Juried Exhibition and in intervening years, the All City Open Exhibition in which anyone in the city can exhibit their work. LAMAG also serves as a space that hosts important exhibitions from our sister cities, something I dare say other institutions would probably be unable or unwilling to do.

We should be questioning the wisdom of, or the lack there of, any idea ceding total governance of such an important asset to any institution or individual who’s agenda is not in keeping with the public character of the LAMAG. Such a move has the effect of a greater stratification of the visual arts in a city where the disparity between so called “new school” or “high art” and more populist artistic genres is growing ever wider. Other cities are expanding their municipal exhibition spaces and establishing new ones. Many of these cities are facing the same budget challenges as are we, and see public safety as their number one priority. However they have never lost sight of the fact the that part of their responsibility in providing public safety includes promoting the general well being of its citizenry.

What can you do? Write to the Mayor and your City Councilperson expressing your concern for the future of the Gallery. (Please see the attached template letter and link to City Council.) As for the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery Associates, we are advocating that language be incorporated in the Request for Proposals requiring prospective operators to maintain the public nature of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and that a substantial portion of the Gallery’s mission be preserved. Furthermore, we would ask that the name “Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery” be retained and that the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery Associates have a vital role in supporting the mission of the Gallery.

The Municipal Art Gallery is not only a historic attraction in a city that touts itself as an international arts destination; it is an irreplaceable source of pride for Angelenos and the creative community.

Please act now.

On behalf of the entire board of LAMAG,
Maria Luisa de Herrera,
President

Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
Web: lamag.org. Phone: 323.644.6269. Fax: 323-644-6271. E-mail: info@lamag.org

The emergency faced by the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery must not be viewed as an isolated incident, but as part of a systemic catastrophe faced by the arts community across the United States; the crisis shows little sign of decreasing. The American Folk Art Museum in New York City, which holds an important collection of Americana, is in danger of closing its doors; the institution is currently struggling to pay off a crushing debt that has been exacerbated by the capitalist financial downturn. The museum has cut its budget by over $1 million, implemented layoffs of staff, and ceased printing its publication, Folk Art Magazine. In a further effort to cut costs the museum now publishes some of its exhibition catalogs only online.

The Wall Street Journal reported that New York’s Chelsea Art Museum temporarily closed its doors to the public for the month of August as it battles to avoid foreclosure. The paper reported that the museum, in a desperate attempt to raise money, “pledged its entire permanent collection of artwork as collateral to pay its mortgage.” That move apparently only worsened the museum’s problems, as it was a violation of state laws supervising museum charters.

Many people in the arts community voted for President Obama because they believed his administration would be supportive of the arts, that he would live up to his promises contained in his acclaimed Platform in Support Of The Arts (.pdf here), and that he would drastically increase funding for the arts. So far, the only substantive response from Mr. Obama came on February 1, 2010, when he announced he would be cutting support for the arts in his proposed budget for fiscal year 2011. It is imperative that the arts community demand President Obama act on establishing a new WPA-style arts program that will revive and expand the nation’s museums, cultural venues, and galleries, in tandem with creating a massive jobs program to put the country’s artists to work.

Last year, celebrated American paintings were presented at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, from October, 2009 to January, 2010. Titled American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915, the exhibit was comprised of 103 paintings that recorded the American experience from the colonial period to the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. On display were iconic canvases by the likes of John Singleton Copley, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, John Sloan, and George Bellows, along with artists whose names are unfamiliar to most, but whose works have left an impact on the American consciousness.

"The Gulf Stream" – Winslow Homer (Detail). Oil on canvas. 1899. "The Gulf Stream could be construed as an allegorical painting regarding the status of Blacks in America in 1899, 38 years after the close of the Civil War."

Organized by the Metropolitan, the museum maintains a website about the exhibit, an archive that should be viewed by all. In addition, the Met’s publishing house released an exhibit catalog that features many works not included in the show. People on the West coast of the U.S. can see the Met’s survey of American art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where the show opened on February 28, 2010 for a four-month run.

The exhibit is divided into four categories presenting a timeline of the nation’s development; Inventing American Stories: 1765-1830, Stories for the Public: 1830-1860, Stories of War and Reconciliation: 1860-1877, and Cosmopolitan and Candid Stories: 1877-1915. The Met’s conception of the nation’s history sweeping from the East to the West coast was somewhat meekly “corrected” by LACMA’s adding a fifth category; paintings depicting the Spanish, Mexican, and Chinese influence on the history of California, but sorry to say this section of the exhibit seemed but an afterthought. LACMA reduced the number of paintings the Met originally had on display by around 20, and swapped out paintings from the Met’s collection for works found in LACMA’s collection - for instance, the Met initially included Thomas Eakins’ Swimming (1885), whereas LACMA replaced it with the artist’s Wrestlers (1899).

"Chinese Restaurant" – John Sloan (Detail). Oil on canvas. 1909. 26 x 32 1/4 inches. Sloan’s painting depicted a Chinese eatery in New York with its working class clientele.

The exhibit is important for a number of reasons, not all of them related to the progress of American art. The show gives an overview of the nation’s growth, presenting a wide look at the people and forces that shaped the country. Artists in the exhibit frequently brought up questions of class, race, and gender – unconsciously or not – and to see America’s changing political landscape chronicled by artists is just one of the fascinating aspects of the show.

Today’s Americans will hardly be able to recognize the country and people depicted in American Stories; the transformation of American society from 1765 to the present having been truly astonishing in scope. Existing U.S. culture with its digital communications and amusements, “reality” television shows, and celebrity worship, bears little if any resemblance to the country as it was from 1765 to 1915; yet, some things never change. Thoughtful viewers will be compelled to ask the questions, “What does it mean to be an American?” and “Where are Americans going as a people?”

I attended the LACMA exhibit on March 1, 2010, and recommend it to others. There are simply too many fabulous artists and paintings in the show to write about, so I proffer the following opinions regarding just a few of the works found in the show.

The first painting to greet the viewer is Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley (1738-1815). His iconic 1768 portrait of the Boston silversmith, who would come to play a major role in the American Revolution, is a remarkable work of art, partly because the artist was self-taught at a time when there was not a single art school or museum in the colonies. The jolt of standing in front of Copley’s flawlessly realistic painting of the American revolutionary is repeated when seeing that the room in which it is hung also holds other marvelous canvasses; The Cup of Tea by Mary Cassatt, Chinese Restaurant by John Sloan, The Breakfast by William McGregor Paxton, The Gulf Stream by Winslow Homer, Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley, and Eel Spearing at Setauket by William Sidney Mount. That African Americans are central characters in three of these paintings is but an introduction to the complicated racial dynamics in the U.S. that serves as a subtext for much of the exhibit.

In Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778), it is a black man that holds a rope lifeline to the imperiled Watson, who is being attacked by a shark in open water. The artist put the black sailor at the apex of a triangular composition in order to draw the eye directly towards him; he is also portrayed as an equal to all the others – a remarkable narrative for a canvas painted when America held African people in bondage. Painted 16 years before the American Civil War, Mount’s Eel Spearing (1845) has as its focus a black slave woman at the bow of a small boat teaching a young white boy how to catch eels. While the woman is obviously in control, she is also a slave. Homer’s The Gulf Stream could be construed as an allegorical painting regarding the status of blacks in America in 1899 – 38 years after the close of the Civil War. The canvas depicts a black man in a small wrecked sailboat cast adrift on a stormy sea filled with sharks. I could write lengthy essays about each of these extraordinary paintings, but for the sake of brevity I shall restrict my remarks to John Singleton Copley’s Revere.

"Paul Revere" – John Singleton Copley. Oil on canvas. 1768. 35 1/8 x 28 ½ inches. Copley (1738-1815). From the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photograph © 2009 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Copley had no formal training in art, but his stepfather was an engraver and portrait painter who undoubtedly tutored the precocious teenager for the three years they lived together. By the time Copley was fifteen he was known for producing impressive oil portraits of notables in his community, and that reputation, not to mention his technical skill as a painter, grew considerably. He was thirty when he painted Paul Revere (1735-1818).

When Revere sat for Copley he had not yet carried out the acts that would make him famous, like his illustrious April 18, 1775 Midnight Ride from Boston to Lexington to warn patriots of British troop movements.

He was nevertheless deeply involved in the Sons of Liberty, that underground organization of patriots whose  “no taxation without representation” slogan came to epitomize the anti-colonial struggle. Only five years after Copley painted Revere, the Sons of Liberty initiated the legendary Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773, when patriots, including Revere, seized three ships in Boston Harbor in order to dump the cargo of British tea overboard in an act of protest against British taxation. That fact is not insignificant when considering the portrait of Revere, since Copley’s father-in-law was the merchant that had his British-consigned tea tossed overboard during the Tea Party! The issue of British taxation went back to 1767, a year before Copley painted Revere, when the British Parliament imposed heavy new taxes on tea in the colonies. Given that evidence, Copley’s painting takes on new meaning.

"Paul Revere" – John Singleton Copley (Detail). Photograph © 2009 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Revere had Copley paint him as a master craftsman in the silversmith trade, he was after all one of the most famous silversmiths in colonial America. On the mahogany table at which Revere sat, you can see his silversmith tools set out before him, and he had himself pictured holding a silver teapot. It has generally been accepted that Copley’s painting of Revere is simply a portrait of a successful artisan, but I think there is ample evidence to suggest otherwise.

One must take into account that at the time of the painting’s creation, people living in the thirteen colonies were entering a period of intense political conflict that would ultimately lead to revolutionary war. Viewed in that context, it is incorrect to see the portrait merely as an expression of Revere being proud of his profession, rather, it appears he meant his portrait as a political statement. An outspoken radical, Revere was no doubt infuriated by the 1767 British tax on tea, and so it was probable that by having himself painted holding a teapot, he was challenging viewers over British rule. Revere stares directly at the viewer as if to ask, “Which side are you on?”

It was also unusual for a gentleman to have himself painted wearing anything other than his finest frock coat, yet Revere had himself depicted wearing an open sleeveless waistcoat (the undergarment worn beneath a fine coat) and a linen shirt, which at the time was a form of “undress” appropriate only for hard work or relaxing at home in private. The British controlled the economy of the colonies through the importation of goods and by imposing taxes. As the anti-colonial movement gained strength, patriots found multiple ways of resisting British hegemony, such as boycotting imported goods. When the colonists began producing linen as an act of resistance, those using imported British linen were isolated as Tories, conservative supporters of British rule. By having himself portrayed wearing a billowing shirt of American-spun linen, Revere was making a statement in favor of independence; the shirt was not so much a symbol of being a craftsman as it was an affirmation of revolutionary politics.

"Paul Revere" – John Singleton Copley (Detail). Photograph © 2009 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

While Revere’s linen shirt and teapot were more than likely politically charged props, Copley had no interest in political matters, besides, his family members were Loyalists devoted to the British Crown. In a 1770 letter Copley wrote to Benjamin West (an American-born artist who moved to England and became a painter to the court of King George III in 1772), he flatly stated that he was “desirous of avoiding every imputation of party spirit. Political contests being neither pleasing to an artist or advantageous to the art itself.”

Though he helped establish American painting and created portraits of prominent American patriots, Copley did not have a passion for independence. His relationship to Revere, as well as his attitude towards the anti-colonial movement, is indicative of the complicated human drama that occurred during the revolution. Copley left the colonies for London in 1773, a year after the Boston Tea Party – never to return to America.

Another notable artist from the Revolutionary War period whose works are included in the exhibit is Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827). A fiery radical and member of the Sons of Liberty, Peale created portraits of many leaders involved in the War of Independence – John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Hancock, and Alexander Hamilton to name but a few. In 1765 Peale met the artist John Singleton Copley, and studied in his Boston studio for a time before traveling to London in 1770 for two years of formal training under the tutelage of Benjamin West. Upon return to the colonies, Peale settled in Philadelphia, and in 1776 he joined the Continental Army to wage war against the British Empire.

After the successful War of Independence, Peale refocused his energies on the arts and sciences. In 1782 he opened the very first art gallery in the United States, and in 1786 he established the nation’s very first museum, the Peale Museum, which was given to the exposition of paintings and natural history. There are two paintings by Peale in the LACMA exhibit, a 1788 double portrait of the merchant Benjamin Laming and his wife Eleanor, and the 1805 Exhumation of the Mastodon, whereupon Peale recounted his having discovered and excavated a prehistoric mastodon skeleton in New York, painting the scene for posterity.

Skipping ahead to mid-point in the exhibit there is a collection of splendid canvasses by Winslow Homer, these are aside from his painting in the exhibit’s opening room. Of the handful of works arranged on their own wall under the Stories of War and Reconciliation section of the show, two took my breath away, The Veteran in a New Field and The Cotton Pickers.

"The Cotton Pickers" – Winslow Homer. Oil on canvas. 1876. 24 1/16 x 38 1/8 inches. LACMA permanent collection.

Created in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln (April 14, 1865), The Veteran in a New Field (1865), depicts a former soldier hard at work harvesting wheat, his Union army jacket cast off and laying in the field at the picture’s lower-right corner.

The ex-combatant swings his scythe into the tall wheat as if he were the grim reaper, the fallen wheat symbolizing the massive numbers of deaths from the war – including the nation’s chief executive. Some 620,000 soldiers from the Confederate and Union armies perished in the conflagration, along with an undetermined number of civilians. By contrast, around 416,000 U.S. soldiers were killed in WWII. It is not hard to imagine the impact this painting had on Americans in 1865, but while the painting’s imagery is a metaphor for a people’s sacrifice and loss, so too is it a symbol of recuperation and redemption.

"The Cotton Pickers" – Winslow Homer (Detail). Oil on canvas. LACMA permanent collection.

The Cotton Pickers was not included in the original Met exhibit, but since it is part of LACMA’s permanent collection, the L.A. museum wisely placed it in their showing of American Stories; luckily for the public I might add, it is one of Homer’s finest works. Painted just 11 years after the end of the Civil War, the canvas depicts two emancipated black slaves, except they are working at the same backbreaking labor they performed prior to their liberation, and likely for the same property owner. The slave’s lament of working from before sunrise until after sunset had not changed; Homer painted the two African American women standing in a cotton field at the crack of dawn, their bags heavy with cotton picked from before daylight. The artist’s handling of the dim light of morn is awe-inspiring, but it is the expressions on the faces of the women that I found extraordinary. Far from being broken, they appear dignified and ready to step beyond dreadful circumstances. The woman in red looks positively defiant, exemplifying the spirit that would carry blacks through some very unhappy days.

The exhibit’s final category of paintings, Cosmopolitan and Candid Stories: 1877-1915, might have the most resonance for present-day viewers, since we continue to grapple with the same questions portrayed in the canvases; the evolving status of women, global expansionism, waves of immigration, industrialization and urbanization, and the predicament of the working class.

I found The Ironworkers – Noontime by Thomas Anshutz (1851-1912) to be of specific interest. Anshutz was an influential painter whose genre paintings were in great demand. Trained by Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) and William Bouguereau (1825-1905), he might at first glance seem an Academic painter, but a closer examination reveals an artist breaking with convention. His portraits of women appear to be celebrations of American Victorianism, though paintings like A Rose (1907) and The Challenge (1908) depict women who were a far cry from the timid and demure model of the Victorian Lady. Anshutz was a respected teacher of painting who instructed at the Pennsylvania Academy. His students included John Sloan, Everett Shinn, and William Glackens; painters who would initiate America’s first art movement, the Social Realist Ashcan school, it is their works that comprise the final group of paintings on display in American Stories.

"The Ironworkers - Noontime" – Thomas Anshutz. Oil on canvas. 1880. 17 x 23 7/8 inches. From the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Painted in 1880, The Ironworkers – Noontime is about as bleak a picture of America’s industrial landscape as one is likely to find. Anshutz painted men and boys who worked at a nail factory in West Virginia taking a break from their dreary work. At the time there was no such thing as an eight-hour work day.

Most American and immigrant workers labored seventy hours or more per week for extremely low wages and absolutely no benefits whatsoever. Factory work was hazardous and often injurious or fatal as safety standards were non-existent. Child labor was rampant. The burgeoning union movement was just beginning to make the eight-hour day one of its central demands.

"The Ironworkers - Noontime." Thomas Anshutz (Detail) Oil on canvas.

Anshutz based his painting on sketches he made at an actual factory, and if the poses of the men seem founded on an Academic approach, overall the artwork contains important differences with Academic painting.

To begin with, the artist recorded a scene from real life, a dismal factory where laborers worked to the point of exhaustion. It was a tableau painted without romanticizing or sentimentalizing its subject; the workers were shown as simply worn-out and poverty-stricken. It was a disagreeable scene that would have sent any Academic painter to flight. The work’s gritty realism ran counter to the saccharine idealism of Academic art. Late in life Anshutz declared his belief in socialism, and while trained by Bouguereau, he had more affinity with Robert Koehler (1850-1917), a German-born painter and fellow socialist that spent most of his career in the U.S. The two were among the first artists to depict industrialism and its impact on working people (Koehler’s work was not included in American Stories).

A prominent painter in Minneapolis, Minnesota, who also served as the director of the Minneapolis School of Fine Arts for twenty-two years, Koehler created a number of paintings that portrayed urban workers. His 1885, The Socialist, is the earliest known portrait of a working-class political agitator. Between the years 1878-1890, Germany banned socialist organizations, publications, and meetings, and as a result many German socialist leaders came to the U.S. where they addressed the growing worker’s movement in cities like New York and Chicago. Koehler’s The Socialist could have portrayed such a meeting or rally anywhere in the U.S. or Germany.

Anshutz’s The Ironworkers – Noontime was created six years before the Haymarket massacre of May 4, 1886, when violence between workers and police in Chicago led to the deaths of eight police officers and an unknown number of workers, who were on strike demanding the eight-hour day. The authorities arrested eight labor leaders and anarchist activists from Chicago’s eight-hour day movement, charging and convicting them for the murder of one of the police officers. The U.S. labor movement was dealt a decisive blow when four of the defendants were executed, even though there was no evidence linking them to the killing of the officer. Koehler’s The Strike was painted that same year, and when his painting was shown at a spring 1886 exhibit at the National Academy of Design in New York City, a review in the April 4, 1886 edition of the New York Times referred to it as the “most significant work of this spring exhibition.” At that very moment activists were organizing for a national strike that would bring 350,000 workers into U.S. streets to demand the eight-hour day – and the Haymarket massacre was only weeks away.

"Cliff Dwellers" - George Bellows. Oil on canvas. 1913. 40 1/4 x 42 1/8 inches. In this canvas, Bellows painted the poor immigrant slums of New York’s Lower East Side. This work is the very embodiment of American Social Realism.

The final room in the exhibit is a showcase for the Ashcan School, with works by George Bellows, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, and William Glackens on display. Stylistically these works seem closest to our own reality; their technique, approach, and content having been influenced by the Modernist revolution. In fact New York’s Armory Show of 1913, where Americans got their first eye-opening exposure to modern art, was in part organized by Sloan; those in the Ashcan circle like George Bellows, William Glackens, Robert Henri, George Luks, and John Sloan exhibited in the groundbreaking Armory Show.

Sloan’s small oil on canvas The Picnic Grounds depicts flirtatious working class youth in a public park in New Jersey, the energetic brushwork epitomizing the best of the artist’s early works. William Glackens was a brilliant colorist who concentrated on the depiction of city life as enjoyed by middle-class layers of society. The Shoppers is one such painting, portraying a group of fashionably dressed women as they wonder through a department store, a new phenomenon in America at the time. Everett Shinn was given to portraying life in the theater, though he created his share of canvasses depicting harsh realities on the street. In The Orchestra Pit, Shinn’s depiction of a popular vaudevillian theater in New York’s Madison Square, the artist places the viewer at the lip of the stage directly behind the orchestra pit. Of the Ashcan paintings displayed, two by George Bellows were my favorites – Cliff Dwellers and Club Night.

"Cliff Dwellers" - George Bellows (Detail). As with the central figures of Bellows' painting, the entire canvas was painted with a limited palette of colors using quick, spontaneous brush strokes.

Club Night was from a series of artworks Bellows created from direct observation of public boxing matches, which at the time were illegal in the U.S. To avoid the law but still be able to attract paying customers, fight organizers would hold bouts at private gyms, and boxing fans gained admission by becoming “dues paying members” of the athletic clubs; competitions were held behind closed doors for members only.

Bellows frequented a squalid New York City gym across the street from his studio called Sharkey’s, where such contests were held. Disdainful of those who attended the fights, Bellows pictured them as bloody-minded bourgeois individuals slumming in poor neighborhoods.

The groups of men dressed in tuxedos in the lower right portion of the painting bear a striking resemblance to the demented characters in Francisco Goya’s The Pilgrimage of San Isidro, one of Goya’s so-called “black paintings” depicting fanatical religious zealots.

In the end the limitations of the American Stories exhibit at LACMA are overshadowed by the show’s strengths. Despite curatorial exclusions and a tendency to expound a somewhat rosy view of American history, there is still an immeasurable sense of the real, the human, and the historic in American Stories. Compared to the cynical and socially detached gimmickry of postmodern art, the paintings in American Stories exude idealism, compassion, and a deeply felt humanism. It is regrettable that the timeline for the exhibit stops at 1915, when Modernism in the U.S. was just beginning to percolate. It would have been instructive to have included artists from the 1930s and 1940s, when the “American Scene” and “Regionalist” painters from coast to coast were in their heyday and Social Realism was the dominant aesthetic. It is unlikely that LACMA will hold such an exhibit in the future – but without a doubt I will continue to cover that era in articles yet to come.

Robert Hughes: "The entanglement of big money with art has become a curse on how art is made, controlled, and above all - in the way that it’s experienced."

In these “postmodern” days it has been said that there is no more passé a vocation than that of the professional art critic. Perceived as the gate keeper for opinions regarding art and culture, the art critic has supposedly been rendered obsolete by an ever expanding pluralism in the art world, where all practices and disciplines are purported to be equal and valid.

Robert Hughes, however, is one art critic who has delivered a message that must not be ignored.

On September 18, 2008, British television’s Channel 4 broadcast The Mona Lisa Curse, a documentary film by Mr. Hughes that offers a devastating critique of contemporary art and its over commercialization.

While a DVD release of The Mona Lisa Curse has not yet been made, a complete version of the film has been published on YouTube, though it is an uncertainty how long the movie will remain posted. The streaming video is presented in twelve parts that are each approximately 6 minutes in duration. In this article I summarize each part and provide a link to it. I encourage one and all to view Hughes’ documentary in its entirety.

In The Mona Lisa Curse, Hughes has described with remarkable clarity the forces seeking to tame art, putting it in the service of plutocrats. The market driven and controlled cultural landscape outlined by Hughes reminds me of what the Italian political theorist and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci once said of society in decline; “The old is dying. The new cannot be born. In the interregnum, a variety of morbid symptoms appear.” The candor and forthrightness of Hughes in identifying the trap art is currently ensnared in should be responded to as a call to arms – especially by artists.

The Curse: Part 1
Hughes opens his film by comparing Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, with Damien Hirst’s, For the Love of God. Hughes tells us that; “What ties the Mona Lisa to this glittery bobble is their role in a giant shift in the art world, that shift is all about money. It’s a story that I’ve watch unfold during the last 50 years. I’ve seen with growing disgust; the fetishization of art, the vast inflation of prices, and the effect of this on artists and museums. The entanglement of big money with art has become a curse on how art is made, controlled, and above all - in the way that it’s experienced. And this curse has affected the entire art world.”

“Apart from drugs, art is the biggest unregulated market in the world, with contemporary art sales estimated at around $18 billion a year. (….) Boosted by regiments of nouveau riche collectors, and serviced by a growing army of advisors, dealers and auctioneers. As Andy Warhol once observed, ‘Good business is the best art.’”

The Curse: Part 2
In 1962 the Mona Lisa was temporarily loaned to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art by the Louvre in Paris for the painting’s first exhibit in the United States. Over one million Americans filed past Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece – including President Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. As Hughes noted about the display of the Mona Lisa; “People came not to look at it, but to say that they’d seen it. (….) The painting made the leap from artwork to icon of mass consumption.” The postmodernist period of art as commodity and mass spectacle had begun.

Screen capture of Andy Warhol from The Mona Lisa Curse. Said Hughes: "He was one of the stupidest people I’ve ever met in my life."

“(….) If anyone had told Leonardo that 500 years after his death, his portrait would be the most famous painting in the word, he’d have thought the notion mad. In 1963 in New York, the Mona Lisa was now treated like it was a photo in a magazine. To be quickly scanned and then discarded.

When Andy Warhol heard the painting was coming to New York, he quipped: ‘Why don’t they have someone copy it and send the copy, no one would know the difference.’”

The Curse: Part 3
Hughes recalls his early days in the vibrant late 1960s art scene of New York, where he met and befriended the likes of Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) and James Rosenquist (1933-).

Rent was cheap, art was affordable, and anyone interested in purchasing original artworks could do so for a song - as art was not yet considered a profit making investment. Hughes adds; “In just a few years this would change, art as commodity would begin to take over from art as art.”

The Curse: Part 4
I found this segment particularly interesting, since I wrote about the history it covered in a 2008 web log post titled, The Unveiling of Robert Scull. In this clip Hughes uses historic footage to tell the tale; “On the 18th of October, 1973, the Sculls auctioned off 50 works from their collection through Sotheby Park-Bernet, Inc. This was the first time a collector from that small contemporary art world treated their collection as an investment.”

The Curse: Part 5
This segment is a continuation of the Scull auction saga from part 4. According to Hughes, “American contemporary art as a serious ‘commodity’ was about to be born.” (….) The Scull auction shifted the art world’s emphasis from aesthetics to money. From now on, not just art lovers, but everyone would want a piece of the action. Contemporary art and big money would be ever more closely entwined.”

The Curse: Part 6
Hughes argues that contemporary art is expensive, not because of any intrinsic spiritual or historic worth, but because it makes for good investments that yield high profits. “The consequences of such prices, was that art became admired, not through any critical perspective, but for its price tag. Auction houses were the new arbiters of taste.” (….) The prices, they have a cultural function - their cultural function is to strike you blind, so that you can’t make your own judgments.”

A particularly funny scene in the documentary is when Hughes visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to view a Damien Hirst ’sculpture’ – a dead shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde titled; The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Barely concealing his amusement Hughes calls the pickled shark; “The world’s most overrated marine organism” - adding that Hirst’s work is “a comedy, but a kind of tacky comedy too, that bears a lot upon the way that we think about art and how it is made.”

The Curse: Part 7
In this segment Hughes tells us that; “At the age of 70, I belong to the last generation that could spend time in a museum without ever once thinking about what the art might cost.” Hughes delves into the changing role and function of art museums, interviewing Philippe de Montebello, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from 1978 to 2008.

Circa 1960s photo of Robert Hughes and Robert Rauschenberg. Still from The Mona Lisa Curse.

Also interviewed is the affable Thomas Hoving, who served as the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1967 to 1977. Hoving ushered in profound changes in museum culture, using public relations and advertising for the very first time in history to promote museum exhibits. Hoving was the first to allow corporations to underwrite or sponsor museum exhibitions – paving the way to today’s increased corporate control of art institutions.

On the role of museums, Hughes says; “The way that art is experienced in these spaces has changed beyond recognition. The museum has adopted the strategy of mass media; an emphasis on spectacle, the cult of the celebrity masterpiece, art clocked through the blink of an eye or through the lens of a camera. But what it’s gained through an increase in these numbers, it’s lost in terms of freedom of access and availability to the eye and the mind.”

The Curse: Part 8
This portion of the video deals with the recent transformation of art museums into business franchises. The former director of the Guggenheim Museum, Thomas Krens, states in an interview; “The Tate is a brand, the Louvre is a brand - is the Guggenheim a brand, I guess it is.” Hughes comments that “Krens is renowned for putting on shows of Giorgio Armani, in return for massive underwriting from - guess who? - and for franchising the Guggenheim around the world. He pioneered the museum’s global brand, building Guggenheims in Bilbao, Berlin, and Venice, with varying degrees of success and failure.”

In his interview, Krens also said; “If you look at this in global terms, it’s probably in some sense related to the power and importance of brands that represent quality. Quality automobiles, quality wristwatches, or quality cultural objects.” That Mr. Krens can equate the world’s cultural heritage to “quality wristwatches” is telling. Hughes observed that; “Krens’ agenda to popularize the museum is a euphemistic and more palatable way of saying how the art market transforms the museum into a commercial model.”

The Curse: Part 9
Hughes speaks of the commodification of art, saying that in order “To give everyone their Mona Lisa, you must escalate the production process.” The artist’s studio literally becomes an industrial unit churning out “product”, as with Warhol’s “factory.” On the subject of Warhol, Hughes said the following; “I admired some of his work in the 60s and early 70’s, but he turned into a dull celebrity business man branded to the hairline. It was as good as printing dollar bills. The dominance of the art market has produced multiple Andys - global brands like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.”

Hughes examines the role of “art advisors” who peddle misleading information to clueless wealthy clients regarding art as investment; “CEO’s and art speculators have created a feeding frenzy, and they’re serviced by a swarm of art advisors buzzing and crawling around the jam jar.”

The Curse: Part 10
Hughes converses with New York art dealer Richard Feigen, who says; “A menu of certain favored artists has gotten expensive because they have been promoted - this is my opinion - and it has very little to do with how important they are (….) If you have an artist that has a huge supply, it permits promotion of the artist. You can have exhibitions everywhere; it’s worth people’s while to promote it. But some of the stuff that’s consequential doesn’t get shown because it isn’t trendy. Why isn’t it trendy - I’ve just explained, basically it’s not worth anyone’s while to make it trendy.”

A single Warhol print on sale at Sotheby’s for a mere $6 million. Screen capture from The Mona Lisa Curse.

Hughes also focuses on mega-collector and art dealer, Alberto Mugrabi. The men of the Mugrabi family – father Jose and his two sons, Alberto and David, have some 800 works by Warhol in their collection of more than 3,000 works; a private collection thought to be the largest and most expensive in the world.

Mugrabi is shown at Sotheby’s Auction House bidding with his father on a painting by “appropriation” artist Richard Prince – a painting that sold for $7.4 million. Mugrabi professed; “We support these artists by promoting them, by buying them at auction, by buying them privately - you could say it’s a way of controlling it.”

The Curse: Part 11
This is my favorite portion of the documentary. It shows Hughes visiting the Lever House skyscraper in New York City for an interview with collector Alberto Mugrabi. The bottom floor of the building is where the Lever House Art Collection is located; a project conceived by real estate tycoon Aby Rosen and Alberto Mugrabi in 2003 as a way to inject corporate art into the public sphere. At the ground floor courtyard at Lever House, Hughes is confronted by The Virgin Mother, Damien Hirst’s 35ft-tall statue of a young pregnant woman that shows half of the woman’s skin and tissue removed to reveal the fetus.

Damien Hirst’s "The Virgin Mother", a 35ft-tall statue of a young pregnant woman. Screen capture from The Mona Lisa Curse.

Hughes surveys the sculpture and says; “Isn’t it a miracle what so much money and so little ability can produce? Just extraordinary. You know, when I look at a thing like this I realize that, so much of art - not all of it thank god, but a lot of it - has just become a kind of cruddy game for the self-aggrandizement of the rich and the ignorant, it is a kind of bad but useful business.”

The Hughes interview with Alberto Mugrabi is priceless; a confrontation between two philosophies, one that extols art as spiritual and necessary to the human heart, the other that sees art strictly in business terms. Hughes is sagacious, looking all the world like some great wise owl as he controls the discussion from his perch. Mugrabi attempts to hold his own but he is clearly outgunned. It is remarkable to see Mugrabi, a man who shapes, manipulates, and controls a fair share of the elite art world, reduced to babbling in the presence of an opinionated art critic who speaks his mind. A typical exchange in the conversation follows:

Hughes: “You take Richard Prince to be an artist of significance, do you?”
Mugrabi: “Absolutely”
Hughes: “What is significant about his work?”
Mugrabi: “He’s a guy that has his own ideas… he’s a person that has done a lot of different types of work…”
Hughes (interrupting): “But Richard Prince’s works seems to consist of basically two types. One is those rather weak jokes, and the other one is the transcription of photographs in paint.”
Mugrabi: “He’s such a deep person that maybe you don’t see it in his paintings – but he definitely is.”
Hughes: “If he is why does one not see it in his paintings?”
Mugrabi: (momentarily struck silent) “Cuz… I, I see it… I think, I think…”

The Curse: Part 12
Hughes wraps up his documentary with some final words;

“Some think that so much of today’s art mirrors and thus criticizes decadence, not so – it’s just decadent, full stop. It has no critical function, it is part of the problem. The art world beautifully copies our money driven, celebrity obsessed, entertainment culture; same fixation on fame, same obedience to mass media that jostles for our attention with its noise and wow and flutter.”

“For me, the cultural artifact of the last 50 years has been the domination of the art market. Far more striking than any individual painting or sculpture. It has changed art’s relationship to the world and is drowning its sense of purpose.”

“If art can’t tell us about the world we live in, then I don’t believe there’s much point in having it. And that is something we are going to have to face more and more as the years go on; that nasty question which never used to be asked because the assumption was always that it was answered long ago - ‘What good is art?, What use is art, what does it do? Is what it does actually worth doing? - and an art which is completely monetized in the way that it’s getting these days, is going to have to answer these questions or it is going to die.”

McDonald’s Corporation, the world’s largest corporate chain of fast food hamburger restaurants and unfortunately an icon of American “culture”, will celebrate its 30th anniversary in France by opening a McDonald’s restaurant and McCafé in the Louvre museum this coming November, 2009.

The U.K. Daily Telegraph confirmed the story in an October 4th article, reporting that McDonald’s “faces a groundswell of discontent among museum staff.” The article quoted an art historian who works at the Louvre, who spoke only under the condition of anonymity: “This is the last straw. This is the pinnacle of exhausting consumerism, deficient gastronomy and very unpleasant odors in the context of a museum.” No doubt there will be an outpouring of displeasure from the French people as well, since many have regarded McDonald’s as the spear point of U.S. cultural imperialism.

The Daily Telegraph article mentioned the activist group Louvre Pour Tous (Louvre For All), an arts advocacy organization I have written about in the past. A spokesperson for the group said the following about the Louvre McDonald’s: “Henri Loyrette, president of the Louvre museum, just had to say one word to stop the whiff of French fries from wafting past the Mona Lisa’s nose. He chose otherwise.”

It should be remembered that French farmer José Bové became a national hero in France when in 1999 he used a tractor to bulldoze a McDonald’s restaurant under construction in the town of Millau. Bové acted in unison with thousands of other farmers who were angrily opposing - not just American junk food (”malbouffe” - “foul food”), but the juggernaut of corporate globalization and its crushing of national culture.

While the French people have become more accommodating towards the U.S. corporate giant since Bové’s protest, it is difficult to imagine their accepting the spectacle of Ronald McDonald in the palatial halls of France’s greatest museum. I have no doubt French citizens will view the Louvre McDonald’s as an affront to their palace of fine art and to their world renown cuisine – it is an unbearable insult that I too find wholly unacceptable.