The Museum of the Contemporary American Teenager (MOCAT) is an art and culture program initiated by a teacher in Montgomery County, MD, which operates at American University, the Kennedy Center, and the Smithsonian.
For this year’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall, MOCAT artists painted a mural of teen life and teen issues. It included protest signs that mentioned the climate crisis, the immigrant crisis, the gun crisis, and Free Palestine. One of these was anti-Semitic hate speech, a Smithsonian official told the teen artist, who is Jewish, and who disagreed.
The next day, the MOCAT crew arrived on the Mall and found their entire mural covered with tarps by the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian said they were doing it to protect the kids from angry mobs, which the kids said, “maybe we are not the problem in that situation.” The Smithsonian said the mural violated the no politics policy MOCAT had agreed to, though the document they cited was only distributed two days after the festival began. The MOCAT folks want the mural for educational purposes, but the Smithsonian claims ownership of it, so I guess it was a work-for-hire situation. Or work-for-exposure.
This all happened at the beginning of July, but only hit NPR the other day. So I feel like we should have a lot more clarity over what happened and why. What we do know is that in the three weeks since, Israel has continued starving and killing Palestinians in Gaza while governments in the West throw a tarp over it and walk away.