Maria Balshaw Has the Art World on Her Shoulders
Maria Balshaw, director of Britain’s Tate museum.
Photographer: Nick Ballon for Bloomberg Businessweek
The normally staid world of museum exhibitions has been upended over the past two years by a series of protests that have made global headlines. In 2016, Greenpeace shut down an exhibition at the British Museum sponsored by BP Plc, the fossil fuel giant. In March climate activists in Paris staged dramatic protests demanding that the Louvre abandon its financial agreement with Total SA, another oil and gas behemoth.
That same month, a group of artists in New York attempted to remove a painting depicting the open casket of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, from the Whitney Museum of American Art, because it was painted by a white woman. Meanwhile, anti-gay protests closed a gender-diversity exhibition at Santander Bank’s cultural center in Porto Alegre, Brazil.