The leading art museums, non-profit organisations and galleries in Minneapolis and St Paul will participate in a general strike on Friday (23 January) as part of a mass protest against the violent activities of federal law-enforcement agents in the Twin Cities region. In addition to shutting down businesses, local leaders are planning a march in downtown Minneapolis to denounce the activities of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents.
Arts organisations taking part in the general strike include the city’s leading museums, among them the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, the Museum of Russian Art and the Praxis Photo Arts Center.
“The Walker Art Center will be closed on Friday 23 January, and Nile Harris’s performance has been cancelled,” a spokesperson for the institution said in a statement shared with The Art Newspaper. “This reflects our institutional values to centre our community, support our staff and to approach our work with care and safety in mind.” Performances of Harris’s this house is not a home will resume on 24 January.
A statement on the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s website reads in part: “We’re pausing operations to recognise the weight of this moment in our community and to care for our employees and people in the Twin Cities community.”
Protesters in Powderhorn Park, Minneapolis on 10 January Photo by Fibonacci Blue, via Flickr
Smaller arts organisations will also participate in the general strike, among them the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Forecast Public Art, the Soo Visual Arts Center and the gallery Dreamsong.
“We believe that the only antidote to Ice’s violent, divisive terrorisation of our community is to stand in solidarity with our immigrant neighbours and our besieged city,” Rebecca Heidenberg and Gregory Smith, Dreamsong’s co-founders, said in a statement. “The Day of Truth and Freedom general strike is an expression of community and mutual support, as well as a condemnation of the federal government’s unconstitutional attack on our populace.”
The general strike and mass protest come just over two weeks after an Ice agent, Jonathan Ross, shot and killed a local woman, Renee Good. Since then, Ice operations in the Twin Cities have grown more violent and local opposition to US president Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in the region—dubbed “Operation Metro Surge”—has become more coordinated and widespread.
The Twin Cities art community’s participation in Friday’s general strike stands in stark contrast to the responses from organisations in most other US cities targeted by the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrant communities. While the Japanese American National Museum and LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes in Los Angeles have been uniquely outspoken at the height of immigration enforcement operations in that city, other art spaces in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Denver, Washington, DC, and elsewhere have largely remained silent. Museums in Washington that depend on federal funding for a significant portion of their operating budget have been particularly reluctant to cross Trump since his return to power, complying with directives to cease diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and submitting to extensive programming reviews.
