COURTESY DECOLONIZE THIS PLACE
Since November 2018, activists have been calling on the Whitney Museum in New York to consider breaking ties with Warren B. Kanders, who serves as the museum board’s vice chairman and whose defense manufacturing company, Safariland, produced the tear-gas canisters used against asylum seekers along the U.S.-Mexico border. Below, ARTnews has assembled a timeline of the story. This post will be updated as new developments occur.
1996
Warren B. Kanders invests in American Body Armor, a defense manufacturing company. The following year, the company becomes Armor Holdings, Inc., a Jacksonville, Florida–headquartered operation, and Kanders serves as its chairman and CEO.
1999
Armor Holdings, Inc. acquires Safariland, a defense manufacturing company, for $41 million.
2006
Kanders joins the Whitney Museum’s board.
2007
BAE Systems, a British defense and security company, buys Safariland for $4.1 billion.
ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS
July 30, 2012
Kanders announces that he has reacquired Safariland for $124 million from BAE Systems. Kanders, who becomes chairman and CEO of the company, says in a release that Safariland has a “tremendous track record of commitment to safety, reliability and superior product design.” In an interview from the time, Kanders explains that he’d been trying to buy back Safariland for years, but the purchase had been delayed by a federal investigation into Armor Holdings’s former vice president, Richard Bistrong, who had been accused of paying bribes to foreign organizations in order to receive contracts for defense gear.
November 12, 2018
The Whitney’s Andy Warhol retrospective opens to the public. Kanders is listed as a “significant contributor.”
November 25, 2018
Tear-gas canisters are launched at migrants along the border between San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Mexico. Reporting by journalist Patrick Timmons reveals that the canisters bear Safariland logos.
November 27, 2018
A Hyperallergic report details Kanders’s Whitney connections.
ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS
November 30, 2018
In response to the Hyperallergic article, nearly 100 Whitney staff members sign a letter addressed to museum leadership that urges them to consider asking for Kanders’s resignation. “The Whitney has historically followed artists’ lead in finding our way through thorny decisions,” they write. “Now we encourage the Whitney to follow the lead of its staff.” Among the signatories are curators Marcela Guerrero, Rujeko Hockley, and Chrissie Iles.
December 3, 2018
Kanders and Whitney director Adam Weinberg respond to the Whitney staff’s letter to leadership. In a lengthy statement, Kanders says he is “not the problem the authors of the letter seek to solve,” and in his note to Whitney workers, Weinberg makes a plea for conversation.
December 6, 2018
Decolonize This Place, an activist group that has previously led protests at the Brooklyn Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and elsewhere, announces that it will hold a protest at the Whitney. The group also releases a series of signs that intermingle advertisements related to the Whitney’s Warhol show, photographs of violence on the U.S.-Mexico border, and pictures of Kanders.
December 9, 2018
An action organized by Decolonize This Place is staged at the Whitney. Protesters arrive at the entrance and then move into the lobby, where so much sage is burned that the New York Fire Department is called. The action ties Kanders’s involvement in Safariland to larger histories of colonialism, racism, and queer erasure.
ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS
December 19, 2018
Posters by Decolonize This Place are distributed by artist Sibyl Kempson at a performance at the museum.
January 23, 2019
The activist collective W.A.G.E. issues an open letter urging 2019 Whitney Biennial participants to “demand to be paid for the content they provide and withhold that content until the demands of Whitney staff are met.”
January 26, 2019
Decolonize This Place, working with Chinatown Art Brigade and W.A.G.E., holds a town hall meeting at Cooper Union in which attendees devise strategies for continuing their protests at the Whitney. Among the attendees are artists Lyle Ashton Harris and Victoria Sobel and art historian David Joselit.
COURTESY DECOLONIZE THIS PLACE
February 25, 2019
The Whitney Biennial artist list is announced. Some 75 artists are lined up to participate, though the New York Times reports that one—Michael Rakowitz—declined to participate in the exhibition as a protest against Kanders. The Times also reveals that, for the first time, the museum will pay artists in the biennial a W.A.G.E.-recommended fee of $1,500. The collective Forensic Architecture, which is one of the participants in the biennial, later says on Twitter that they will respond to the Kanders imbroglio.
February 27, 2019
In advance of the 2019 Whitney Biennial, Decolonize This Place announces plans to stage “Nine Weeks of Art and Action,” a weekly series of protest-minded events at the museum each Friday. The first protest is planned for March 22.
KATHERINE MCMAHON
March 22, 2019
Decolonize This Place kicks off its “Nine Weeks of Art and Action” series. Joining forces with 30 activist groups, Decolonize This Place leads a protest in the Whitney’s Warhol retrospective, with banners held and speeches recited in front of the Pop artist’s 25-foot-long painting Camouflage Last Supper (1986). After marching through the exhibition, the group continues protesting outside the museum, where the names of the participating activist groups are projected onto its exterior.
March 29, 2019
Decolonize This Place holds the second protest in its “Nine Weeks of Art and Action” series. Attendees meet up in the Whitney’s lobby, where they unfurl banners and sing songs. “This is about love, this is about land, this is about liberation,” one activist says. Kanders’ name is barely mentioned.
April 5, 2019
Ahead of the third event in Decolonize This Place’s “Nine Weeks of Art and Action” series, Verso Books, a New York–based publisher, posts an open letter to its blog regarding the Kanders controversy. Signed by art historian Lucy Lippard, poet Anne Carson, writer Fred Moten, and around 120 more, the open letter asks the Whitney to respect the demands of the staff and remove Kanders from his position. That evening, Decolonize This Place holds its third protest in the Whitney’s lobby. Decolonial Time Zone, an activist group that includes students from NYU, the School of Visual Arts, and other universities, is among the speakers.
ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS
April 12, 2019
Decolonize This Place holds its fourth protest in the Whitney’s lobby. This one includes a pizza party, as well as a teach-in by NYU students about protests in Sudan and a talk by the Movement to Protect the People about gentrification in Brooklyn.
April 19, 2019
Decolonize This Place holds its fifth protest in the Whitney’s lobby. Members from groups such as Within Our Lifetimes, Take Back the Bronx, and Mobile Print Power speak at the event.
April 26, 2019
Decolonize This Place holds its sixth protest in the Whitney’s lobby. The focus is loosely the colonization for Puerto Rico by American forces.
ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS
April 29, 2019
Verso releases an updated list of signatories to its open letter that includes nearly half of the 2019 Whitney Biennial participants. Artists Andrea Fraser, Hans Haacke, Barbara Kruger, Zoe Leonard, Cameron Rowland, and Laura Poitras, as well as art historian Douglas Crimp, are among the new signees.
May 3, 2019
Decolonize This Place returns to the Whitney for a seventh protest. Queer youth groups discuss liberation and the resonance of Biennial participants signing the Verso letter.
May 10, 2019
On the way to the eighth protest at the Whitney, Decolonize This Place activist is arrested, allegedly for defacing a subway car en route from East New York to the Meatpacking District. Afterward, the protest continues on at the museum as planned.
COURTESY THE ARTISTS
May 13, 2019
The Whitney Biennial opens to members of the press. One work in the exhibition deals head-on with Kanders: Triple-Chaser (2019), an essay film produced by Forensic Architecture and Praxis Films that tracks the use of Kanders’s teargas canisters in Tijuana, Turkey, and beyond.
May 15, 2019
At the VIP reception for the Biennial, the Indigenous Womxn’s Collective hosts an action in solidarity with the Decolonize This Place protests. Members read a statement in which they describe how “Warren Kanders’s manufactured weapons of terrorism” hurt indigenous communities and wave a banner reading “DEMILITARIZE OUR ART / PEOPLE OVER PROFIT.”
May 17, 2019
Decolonize This Place closes out its “Nine Weeks” series. After protesting in the museum’s lobby, activists affiliated with the group reveal plans to return to the Whitney in the fall if Kanders has not left his position by then. The activists then lead a march to Kanders’s nearby home and leave an oversized model of a Safariland canister at his door.
July 17, 2019
Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett publish the essay “The Tear Gas Biennial” on Artforum’s website. In the essay, the writers call on Whitney Biennial participants to withdraw their work in protest of Kanders. “We have heard that it would be impossible to remove Kanders; everything is impossible before it happens,” they write.
July 19, 2019
Four artists—Korakrit Arunanondchai, Meriem Bennani, Nicole Eisenman, and Nicholas Galanin—publish a letter in Artforum in which they call on the Biennial’s curators to withdraw their work from the exhibition. “We found ourselves in a difficult position: withdraw in protest or stay and abide a conflicted conscience,” they write. “We decided to participate.”
July 20, 2019
Four more artists—Eddie Arroyo, Forensic Architecture, Christine Sun Kim, and Agustina Woodgate—announce plans to remove their work from the exhibition as a protest against Kanders.
July 25, 2019
Warren B. Kanders resigns from the Whitney’s board. “The targeted campaign of attacks against me and my company that has been waged these past several months has threatened to undermine the important work of the Whitney,” he said in a statement. I joined this board to help the museum prosper. I do not wish to play a role, however inadvertent, in its demise.”