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OPEN LETTER TO THE MUSEUM OF CHILDREN’S ART, OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA
Hilmon Sorey, Board President
Masako Kalbach, Interim Executive Director
______________________________
We are writing to request an explanation of MOCHA’s decision to cancel the forthcoming exhibition, “A Child’s View of Gaza.”
We commend you for having seen–at least initially–the importance, relevance, and immediacy of such an exhibition. The show’s concept is brilliant: art as a window into the minds of children and, simultaneously, a geopolitical issue. The exhibition, which would have displayed children’s varied artistic responses to life experience–some of it traumatic–was sure to inspire the viewer that museum art is a vibrant, living form of expression. Art like this touches our lives and underscores our common humanity within the global family of man.
Why, then, the cancellation?
We would hope that MOCHA’s decision is not designed to avoid either controversy or controversial art. Surely, there are well-funded institutions whose purpose is to promote a positive view of Israel. Those same parties, unfortunately, see the marginalizing and demonization of Palestinians as an essential corollary to their advocacy for Israel. They work to silence voices that raise essential, appropriate questions about the human impact of Israeli policy.
The individuals who fund and direct these institutions possess, in many cases, a worldview based on limited contact with actual Palestinian individuals or the lives they lead: subjects of military occupation, minority members of a nation in which they are relegated to perennial outsider status, exiles who have been dispossessed so that another people might find a place.
Evidently, some of these narrow-minded individuals with influence and access to decision-makers find it threatening that a direct, uncensored Palestinian perspective might be given a temporary space in American cultural life. Is MOCHA’s decision to cancel the exhibit a capitulation to the demands of such persons–individuals whose ignorance, prejudice, and empathy deficit have taken the form of a narrow, intolerant political agenda? Are we to be denied access to the art of all children living with political violence–or are only Palestinian children to be denied a place?
We Americans do not suffer from an overexposure to Palestinian perspectives; on the contrary, our limited exposure is a critical factor in perpetuating dangerous and damaging misapprehensions. Those working most assiduously to eliminate expressions of the rich and complex Palestinian experience are the very people who would benefit most from encountering it in an honest, uncensored form. The best remedy for ignorance, prejudice, and lack of empathy is exposure to life through the eyes of another. That was to be the profoundly hopeful, transformative possibility of “A Child’s View of Gaza.”
We request an explanation of MOCHA’s cancellation of the exhibition, and action that, to us, appears to reflect a serious error in judgment.
Sincerely,