Pittsburgh Cultural Trust features artist who has accused Israel of war crimes
Scott penned opinion piece on Oct. 20, calling Israel an apartheid state
Dread Scott, an artist who has called Israel an apartheid state and accused it of war crimes, is being featured by The National Museum in Pittsburgh’s Cultural District.
Scott’s work is part of the exhibit “The National Museum of…”, which invites a different artist to change the name of the museum on a storefront every two months. Scott, whose real name is Scott Tyler, has altered the space’s name to “International Museum of People’s Uprisings.”
On Oct. 20, 2023, Hyperallergic published Scott’s opinion piece “Shall I Condemn Myself a Little for You?”
The essay — written less than two weeks after Hamas murdered nearly 1,200 people and kidnapped another 250 during a Oct. 7 terror attack — attempted to link the unprovoked assault in Israel to the Aug. 21, 1831, slave revolt led by Nat Turner.
Scott wrote that “persistent calls for people to denounce Hamas’s actions serve to dehumanize Palestinians and their supporters.”
“It is presumed that all human beings denounce the murder of all civilians,” the piece continues. “Questions about condemnation have been asked by people who presume to have the moral authority (and superiority) to evaluate whether a supporter of Palestinians has any right to speak.”
His essay also contains a one-sided history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict written by Noura Erakat, without any context or attempt to include Israel’s claims on the land it occupies. Scott also accuses Israel, which he calls an apartheid state, of committing war crimes.
The opinion piece goes on to condemn the United States’ war on terror following Al-Qaeda’s Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and murdered 2,996 people.
“The world is being asked to side with and accept either an unending militarized apartheid state carrying out ethnic cleansing to maintain an oppressive and violent status quo, or theocratic Islamist would-be liberators who murder civilians,” Scott wrote near the conclusion of his piece.
This isn’t the first time Scott, and his work, have proven controversial. In 1989 he exhibited “What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?” that resulted in the desecration of an American flag. Because of the work, he was one of the defendants in United States v. Eichman, a Supreme Court case in which it was decided that federal laws banning flag desecration were unconstitutional.
Scott isn’t the only controversial connection to the Cultural District’s National Museum.
The exhibition space’s founder and curator, Jon Rubin, an art professor at Carnegie Mellon University, was the co-director of Conflict Kitchen.
Created in 2010, Conflict Kitchen was a restaurant in Schenley Plaza that served food from countries that were in conflict with the United States. It included cuisine from Iran, Afghanistan, Cuba and North Korea, among other countries.
In 2014, the restaurant presented Palestinian food and included a discussion billed as an examination of current events in Palestine, but instead presented a one-sided anti-Israel perspective. Then Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh Community Relations Council Director Gregg Roman had asked to be part of the discussion. His request was denied.
Rubin, who is Jewish, also participated in a December 2014 panel discussion at the Mattress Factory after a May 2014 exhibit, “Borders, Walls and Citizenship,” was canceled amid outcry from BDS supporters who accused Palestinian artists of normalizing relations with Israel because Israeli artists were included in the proposed project.
During the panel discussion, titled “Difficult Work,” Rubin accused the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh of labeling the Conflict Kitchen discussion as antisemitic to funders of the project and to the media.
The groundswell of outrage led to the Heinz Endowment, which had provided $50,000 in funding for Conflict Kitchen, to condemn the Palestinian iteration and state that it had not funded that part of the project.
At the time, Rubin also said that since Conflict Kitchen was an art project, it was not obligated to present both sides of an issue, nor was it necessary to fact-check information presented.
“The viewpoints presented in our material are the viewpoints of Palestinians. We present them as such. We do not need to vet facts on viewpoints,” Rubin said.
In a statement to the Chronicle about the National Museum exhibit curated by Rubin, a spokesperson for the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust said the project explores what “museums commemorate, what societies remember, and the role artists have in conversations.”
The artist Dread Scott was selected by Rubin, in consultation with an advisory board, according to the Cultural Trust, and the “current installation is…a global reflection not focused on a specific location or conflict.” PJC
David Rullo can be reached at drullo@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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