Since October 7, 2023, Western art institutions have been increasingly canceling, silencing, and excluding Palestinian artists and their supporters for condemning Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza—despite these same art spaces claiming to endorse diversity and calling for the “decolonization” of the art world. This exposes a troubling disconnection between the performative inclusion of marginalized voices in Western art spaces and the urgent need for genuine solidarity with Palestinians, especially as Palestinian artists in Gaza are being killed and their art institutions reduced to rubble. And though many artists and art professionals have faced consequences for speaking out against this hypocrisy and donor influence in the Western art world, they continue to follow in the footsteps of their predecessors in using their art to communicate to Western audiences the political realities of life under Israel’s violent settler-colonial occupation.
