What a brush off!
The Brooklyn Museum supported wealthy developers over struggling artists by hosting a conference for real-estate tycoons on Tuesday, say protestors who rallied outside the cultural institution claiming the event promoted practices that are making the borough too expensive for the creative class to live and work here.
“We feel that this event is using the very culture we create and support to endorse profit-driven investment,” read a petition signed by more than a thousand artists and their supporters ahead of Tuesday’s Brooklyn Real Estate Summit. “The summit’s goals are in direct opposition to the needs of the majority of people who are struggling to pay rent in Brooklyn.”
Dozens of protestors unfurled a 65-foot banner reading “Brooklyn is not for sale” in front of the Prospect Heights museum alongside tents emblazoned with “Foreclose on developers not people,” while inside hundreds of real-estate professionals were discussing topics such as “What is the next Atlantic Yards?” and “Which emerging areas are primed for transformation?”
Artists had been demanding the museum cancel the forum since a local illustrator circulated an open letter earlier this month arguing the event runs counter to the Brooklyn Museum’s self-proclaimed mission of serving the borough’s “diverse public.”
The developers involved are deliberately making Kings County a more expensive place to live, she claimed, and artists and communities of color are moving elsewhere because they can’t afford to stay.
“The 600-plus top real estate owners, developers, and investors gathering at the Brooklyn Museum to scheme about how to wring more profit from our neighborhoods are not serving us as Brooklynites,” wrote Bushwick artist Sarah Quinter. “This borough will be a creative graveyard soon enough if things don’t change.”
The museum — which also hosted the conference in 2014 — responded by offering to let Quinter give a speech at the conference and to host a separate forum on affordable housing and work spaces, and said it would do some self-examination about the kind of events it rents space to in the future.
“The Brooklyn Museum cares deeply about issues that affect our communities,” museum director Anne Pasternak wrote in a letter, which the museum offered to this paper in lieu of comment. “We will take a close look at our policies for hosting third-party events for the future.”
But after discussing the speaking gig with her fellow protestors, Quinter decided it was wasn’t worth taking the podium for a 15-minute slot at an event she fundamentally opposed.
She said she would instead use her disappointment with the museum’s decision as fuel to fight even harder against similar events in the future.
“We’ll have to double down our efforts to separate real estate from our cultural institutions,” she said.
