Art is inherently political, but the art world is often reticent to take a political position, wary of alienating those who sustain it—particularly at the market’s highest price tiers. Very few international galleries responded overtly to the war in Ukraine, the destruction and bloodshed in Gaza or the more than 30,000 deaths that have been widely reported as resulting from the recent protests in Iran. Domestically, the sector did not mobilize when the Trump administration rolled back funding for arts and culture and democratic structures across the federal government were progressively weakened. Nor did it respond collectively in recent weeks as international law was openly tested in Venezuela, military rhetoric escalated in unprecedented ways with pretenses on Greenland and diplomatic norms all but fell by the wayside.
The most the art world tended to do was engage online; many galleries and institutions, for example, participated in #BlackOutTuesday by posting black squares and issuing statements of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. After October 2023 and throughout the Gaza war, galleries and institutions also shared posts on social media expressing solidarity with Palestinians or calling for a ceasefire—some after facing internal pressure from staff or artists to take a position.
Today (Jan. 30), however, something shifted, and galleries across the U.S. have suspended operations to jointly participate in a nationwide general strike opposing the expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) funding and operations. Included among them are industry heavyweights such as Gagosian, Pace Gallery, White Cube, David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, Lisson, Almine Rech and Perrotin, with historically significant and medium-sized spaces like Sean Kelly, Sprüth Magers, Marian Goodman, Galerie Lelong, Greene Naftali, Paula Cooper, Olney Gleason, Tanya Bonakdar, Mendes Wood DM, PPOW, Vielmetter, Shrine, Chris Sharp, Half Gallery, LATITUDE, Charles Moffett, Swivel Gallery, Margot Samel, Management and Hesse Flatow.
This unprecedented day of collective protest is the result of a group of New York galleries—Astor Weeks, Silke Lindner and Margot Samel—sending out an email inviting a handful of other dealers to take part in the initiative. But that email quickly spread, and the call to action was amplified on social media. By Thursday afternoon, more and more galleries had announced their intention to participate, leading to a widespread, coordinated physical shutdown of art galleries across the U.S.
Some institutions are also participating in the general strike, including the Drawing Center and El Museo del Barrio in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. They join other institutions in Minneapolis-St. Paul, including the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) and the Walker Art Center, that closed after the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in solidarity with the ongoing protests.
In the face of deportations seemingly carried out without investigations or trials, deeply troubling reports of disappearances and the killings of U.S. civilians—dynamics that alarmingly recall both the Gestapo and the desaparecidos of more recent South American dictatorships—pressure has continued to mount. The events in Minneapolis suggest there’s something more fundamental than immigration enforcement going on here. According to the recent surveys, three in five Americans now agree that ICE operations are too forceful.
What is General Strike U.S.?
General Strike U.S., a decentralized network, estimated that just 3.5 percent of the U.S. population, or 11 million people, need to participate across sectors to be effective. The striking effort was organized not by a single union or central body but by a coalition of grassroots and labor organizations, under banners like National Shutdown and local groups that helped organize a similar action in Minnesota earlier in January. “The people of the Twin Cities have shown the way for the whole country—to stop ICE’s reign of terror, we need to SHUT IT DOWN,” the National Shutdown website says. “On Friday, January 30, join a nationwide day of no school, no work, and no shopping.”
Crucially, all of this comes on the last business day of January, which marks the deadline for Congress to conclude negotiations over remaining federal funding, including the Department of Homeland Security budget that covers ICE. Negotiations have stalled for this specific point, raising the prospect of another partial government shutdown if no deal is reached by that date. On January 29, the New York Times announced that a spending deal had been reached on most of the budget for the rest of the fiscal year, but allowed only two more weeks of funding for the Department of Homeland Security while lawmakers try to wrangle over restrictions to rein in what has become, at least in Democrats’ eyes, an out-of-control deportation campaign.
As a powerful recent opinion piece in the New York Times by Shalom Auslander, They Were Ordinary Germans. We Are Ordinary Americans, reminded us, omertà—the choice to remain silent—is what has enabled some of history’s deadliest atrocities, from the Holocaust to many other genocides that are still unfolding around us. Being misled by a distortion of truth is dangerous. Ignorance, as a form of protection or denial, is even more dangerous. And many aspects of what is happening in America today—particularly since the start of the year, from language to enforcement dynamics—sound alarmingly like a déjà vu to those familiar with world history.
Galleries and museums shutting down for one day likely won’t have extreme economic ramifications, but the closures are, at the very least, a way of saying, “We see. We know.” It is the art world standing up, as part of the cultural sphere and a country made by a unique mix of multicultural voices, and proclaiming that it will not ignore what is unfolding in the United States, which has veered increasingly far from the principles on which it was founded.
Participating galleries include:
- 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica
- 303 Gallery, New York
- 56 Henry, New York
- Adams and Ollman, Portland, Oregon
- A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn
- Alexander Gray Associates, New York
- Alisan Fine Arts, New York
- Alison Bradley Projects, New York
- Almine Rech, New York
- Anat Ebgi, New York and Los Angeles
- Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York
- Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
- Anonymous Gallery, New York
- Anton Kern Gallery, New York
- Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena
- Artists Space, New York
- Astor Weeks, New York
- Baker—Hall, Miami
- Berry Campbell, New York
- Blade Study, New York
- Blue Rooster Art Supplies, Los Angeles
- Bortolami, New York
- The Brick, Los Angeles
- Broadway Gallery, New York
- Bruce Silverstein, New York
- Brigitte Mulholland, Paris
- Canada, New York
- Casey Kaplan, New York
- Center for Art, Research, and Alliances (CARA), New York
- Chapter New York, New York
- Charles Moffett Gallery, New York
- Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles
- Chart, New York
- Château Shatto, Los Angeles
- Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles
- Company, New York
- Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago
- Cristin Tierney, New York
- Cue Art Foundation, New York
- David B. Smith Gallery, Denver
- David Klein Gallery, Detroit
- David Kordansky, New York and Los Angeles
- David Zwirner, New York and Los Angeles
- DC Moore Gallery, New York
- Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles
- Dimin, New York
- Document, Chicago
- The Drawing Center, New York
- El Museo del Barrio, New York
- The Empty Circle, New York
- Eyebeam, New York
- Foster/White, Seattle
- François Ghebaly, New York and Los Angeles
- Fraenkel, San Francisco
- Fragment, New York
- Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York
- Gagosian, New York and Beverly Hills
- Gallery Kendra Patrick, Bern, Switzerland
- Galerie Lelong, New York
- Gladstone Gallery, New York
- Gordon Robichaux, New York
- Greene Naftali, New York
- Hair and Nails, New York and Minneapolis
- Hales Gallery, New York
- Half Gallery, New York
- Hannah Traore Gallery, New York
- Harkawik, New York
- Harper’s Books, East Hampton
- Hauser and Wirth, New York and Los Angeles
- Henrique Faria Fine Art, New York
- Hesse Flattop, New York and Amagansett
- Higher Pictures, New York
- Hoffman Donahue, New York, Los Angeles, and Beverly Hills
- Hostler Burrows, Los Angeles
- Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
- ILY2, New York and Portland, Oregon
- Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery, New York
- James Cohan, New York
- Jane Lombard Gallery, New York
- Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles
- Joan, Los Angeles
- Junior High, Glendale, California
- Kaleidoscope Collective, Rogers, Arkansas
- Karma, New York and Los Angeles
- Katia David Rosenthal Gallery, Miami
- Kavi Gupta, Chicago
- Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York
- Kravets Wehby Gallery, New York
- Kurimanzutto, New York
- KV Tiles, Farmington, Connecticut
- La Luz de Jesus, Los Angeles
- The Lapis Press, Culver City, California
- Lehman Maupin, New York
- Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York
- Lisson Gallery, New York and Los Angeles
- Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles
- Luhring Augustine, New York
- Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles
- The Luminary, St. Louis
- Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, Wisconsin
- Magenta Plains, New York
- Make Room Los Angeles, Los Angeles
- Management, New York
- March Gallery, New York
- Margot Samel, New York
- Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
- Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
- Martha’s, Austin
- Mary Ryan, New York
- Mendes Wood DM, New York
- Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York
- Michael Werner, New York and Los Angeles
- Microscope Gallery, New York
- Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York
- Monique Meloche, Chicago
- Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles
- Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit
- Museum of Neon Art, Glendale, California
- Mrs. Gallery, Queens
- Nara Roesler, New York
- Nazarian/Curcio, Los Angeles
- New Art Dealers Association, New York
- New River Art and Fiber, Blacksburg, Virginia
- Nicola Vassell, New York
- Nightjar Arts Collective, Columbia, Missouri
- Nina Johnson, Miami
- Nguyen Wahed, New York
- Nova Community Arts, Los Angeles
- Olney Gleason, New York
- Ortuzar, New York
- Pace Gallery, New York and Los Angeles
- Palo Gallery, New York
- Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
- Parent Company, New York
- Perrotin, New York and Los Angeles
- Peter Blum Gallery, New York
- Peter Freeman, Inc., New York
- Petzel, New York
- Peter Blum Gallery, New York
- The Pit, Los Angeles
- Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, Oregon
- PPOW, New York
- Printed Matter, New York
- Project for Empty Space, New York and Newark
- Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco
- Recess, Brooklyn
- Regan Projects, Los Angeles
- Richard Grey Gallery, New York and Chicago
- River and Words Art Collective, Tahlequah, Oklahoma
- Roberts Projects, Los Angeles
- Ryan Lee, New York
- Salon 94, New York
- Screen Slate, New York and San Francisco
- Sean Kelly, New York and Los Angeles
- Sea View, Los Angeles
- Sebastian Gladstone, New York and Los Angeles
- Shoshana Wayne, Los Angeles
- Shrine, Brooklyn
- Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York
- Silke Lindner, New York
- Smack Mellon, New York
- Sprüth Magers, New York and Los Angeles
- Susan Sheehan Gallery, New York
- Tanya Bonakdar, New York
- Templon, New York
- Timothy Taylor, New York
- Tina Kim Gallery, New York
- Uffner and Liu, New York
- Ulterior Gallery, New York
- Van Doren Waxter, New York
- Vielmetter Los Angeles, Los Angeles
- Western Exhibitions, Chicago
- White Columns, New York
