Museum of Modern Art director Glenn Lowry joined senior NYPD brass in Dubai to announce that the New York museum will mount an exhibition titled Stop me, daddy organized by members of the New York Police Department. Designed to offer a balanced and nuanced perspective on policing today, the exhibition will reimagine the institution’s vast art collection to tell a new story of people drawn to protecting others and people who love them.
“It’s been a growing relationship,” said New York Mayor Eric Adams, who was also in the Emirates for a security conference. “We know that the management of the museum shares our concern that a new generation will not learn about our mission. The police, like the artists, are misunderstood, and we know that these opportunities will allow us to bring people together under the banner of art.
The exhibition offers five new commissions from a re-hanging of more than a century of contemporary and modern art, including a large painting of the Blue Lives Matter flag that dialogues with the long history of appropriation art and a series of digital works that focus on the celebrity of police officers that have gone viral.
“We are working with officers to complicate the conversation and recontextualize those who have been wronged by the media,” said a coalition of balaclava-wearing conservatives who spoke at the event but declined to give their names. “We feel like we’ve been granted full independence to fully tell the story.” They then talked about the natural synergy between curatorial practice and detective work in particular.
“We always make sure that the rich and powerful feel safe and that art is properly contextualized and dealt with, just like the police, which contextualizes crime and offers new ideas on dealing with crime” , said a curator wearing a face mask and beanie.
The exhibition will include at least 40 performances, 13 film screenings and 4,500 arrests of visitors, who will be randomly selected for searches and individual visits with police officers who will arrest them, charge them and detain them for three days without access to food, water, toilets or a lawyer.
