On June 6, climate change protesters from activist groups such as the Climate Organizing Hub, New York Communities for Change and Reclaim Our Tomorrow rallied outside the Museum of Modern Art in New York, calling on the institution to remove the president of the Board of Directors, Marie-Josée Kravis. Kravis’ husband, Henry Kravis, is co-founder and co-executive chairman of KKR, one of the world’s largest private equity firms and a major shareholder in Canada’s Coastal GasLink pipeline. Having timed their action to coincide with the museum’s annual Party in the Garden, MoMA’s biggest fundraiser, the activists carried signs and banners and set up a miniature oil rig in front of the museum’s gates. Their efforts were made poignant by the dystopian pink glow of the setting sun, reddened by smoke cascading south from the massive fires burning in central Canada. At the time of the demonstration, ninety-eight million people on the East Coast were under air quality alerts due to smoke, and New York was experiencing the second worst air quality in the world, after New Delhi.
The Kravis have long been the main benefactors of MoMA, which in 2019 opened a live event studio named for the couple. Rally activists handed out flyers bearing QR codes that took those who scanned them to a open letter calling on the museum to sever ties with Henry Kravis, whom they presented as a “climate criminal”.
“MoMA can’t pretend to be a sustainable organization that wants to fight climate change but at the same time have a fossil fuel investor as chairman of the board, with their names on the walls,” said Jonathan Westin, an activist from the organization Climate Center, says art news. “This is directly inspired by what Nan Goldin and other activists did to get rid of the Sackler name at the Met.”
Goldin and his cohort drew attention to the philanthropic “art-washing” efforts of members of the Sackler family, owners of OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma, through which they provided huge sums of money. money to major arts institutions in exchange for naming rights relating to galleries and other audiences. the spaces. After years of sustained pressure from activists and amid Purdue’s collapse under the weight of thousands of lawsuits from victims of opioid abuse, museums around the world have removed the Sackler name, ceased to accept donations or have moved away from the family.
Kravis is not the first board chairman to be targeted by activists. Leon Black stepped down from the role in 2021 after Asset Management, the private equity firm of which he was CEO, caught the attention of the art world, with protesters occupying MoMA PS1 on the last day of the “Theatre of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011” exhibit, due to Apollo’s investment in Constellis Holdings. Formerly known as Blackwater, the defense contractor changed its name after the 2007 Nisour Square massacre in which seventeen unarmed Iraqi civilians were shot dead by company employees in Baghdad . The allegations, combined with Black’s ties to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, played a role in his departure as chairman of the board. Kravis, a board member since 1994, succeeded him and has held the position ever since.
