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Warren Kanders Quits Whitney Board After Tear Gas Protests [1]
['Elizabeth A. Harris', 'Robin Pogrebin']
Date: 2019-07-25
In what amounted to a brief counterprotest, the hedge fund titan Kenneth C. Griffin also stepped down from the board on Thursday, during a telephone call with other board members, according to a person who was on the call. Mr. Griffin, a billionaire whose name is on the Whitney’s lobby, was dismayed by what he described as the museum’s left-wing tilt, according to the person on the call.
But Mr. Griffin apparently reconsidered, and decided to stay. “I’m a trustee of the Whitney and excited to be on the board,” he said in a telephone interview Thursday evening. When pressed about what had transpired earlier in the day, Mr. Griffin said, “I think board conversations are private,” adding, “I haven’t resigned.”
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He also said, “all cultural institutions in the United States should be places of open dialogue.”
For those who had called on Mr. Kanders to leave, the day was a joyous one. The eight artists who withdrew from the Biennial said that they would now remain in the show. (Their works had not yet been removed.) And the group that led the protests, Decolonize This Place, said that it was heartened by Mr. Kanders’s departure, thanked the museum for heeding its calls while also suggesting that the group was not done demanding changes.
“Now we address the day after Kanders and call on Adam Weinberg and the museum leadership to meet with stakeholders to discuss from tear gas to decolonization, a process of reformulating our museums to be responsive to the constituencies they claim to serve,” the group said in a statement.
Mr. Kanders, 61, joined the Whitney board in 2006, had been on the executive committee for seven years, and has donated more than $10 million to the museum. Through a spokesman, he declined to comment on Thursday.
He and his wife, Allison, are avid art collectors, owning work by contemporary artists like Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Rudolf Stingel and Ed Ruscha. Ms. Kanders was co-chairwoman of the museum’s painting and sculpture committee; she resigned simultaneously with her husband.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/arts/whitney-warren-kanders-resigns.html
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