Pro-Palestine Activists Occupy Met Steps with Massive Quilt

A group of about 350 demonstrators unfurled an enormous quilt on the front steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on March 24, demanding that the museum publicly call for a ceasefire in Gaza. The roughly thirty-by-fifty-foot quilt, which cascaded in bright hues toward Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, was inspired by the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt of 1987. Instead of memorializing those lost to HIV and AIDS, as that one does, this quilt expressed solidarity with Palestine. Panels by more than sixty artists, many in the red, green, and black of the Palestinian flag, variously illustrated scenes of fear and struggle, as well as those of peace and plenty, representing a hoped-for future. Among the art-historical references contained in the quilt were Picasso’s 1937Guernicaand the so-called Jenin Horse, a sixteen-foot-high sculpture built from scrap metal by Thomas Kilpper and a dozen Palestinian youths in 2003 that was destroyed by the IDF last October. Prints based on the quilt’s squares arefor saleto benefit the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa).

The action, conceived by a group of international artists, came just a few weeks after more than 150 Met employees signed anopen letterurging museum director and CEO Max Hollein to “take a stand in defense of Palestinians and the cultural heritage of Palestine.” Amid a pronounced police presence and received with both cheers and heckling, protesters unrolled the quilt at about 12:30 on a sunny Sunday, in the midst of the Met’s prime visiting hours. Activists danced, sang, read poetry, and held up placards bearing slogans such as “Let Gaza Live” and “None Of Us Are Free Until Palestine Is Free” while chanting phrases including “Free Palestine” and “Art for liberation, not for colonization.” Some handed out pamphlets, made to resemble exhibition brochures distributed by the Met, that called for the removal of three of the museum’s board members—World Jewish Congress leader and Neue Galerie founder Ronald Lauder, Morgan Stanley CEO Edward Pick, and collector Michael Steinhardt—over what the demonstrators cast as their complicity in the emergency in Gaza. Visitors to the museum were able to enter and exit the institution during the protest, which ended peacefully, its participants dispersing about two hours after it began.

According the health ministry in Gaza, the death toll there owing to Israel’s continued assault on the region—conducted in retaliation for the October 7 Hamas attack on Israeli soil in which 1,200 were killed and roughly 250 taken hostage—has risen past 32,000.