THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 2020 Y C3
The exhibition on domestic terrorism had
been on tour since 2006 and had previously
been displayed at four presidential libraries
and museums, including last year at the
George H. W. Bush Presidential Library
and Museum in College Station, Texas.
But in recent weeks the Abraham Lincoln
Presidential Library and Museum in
Springfield, Ill., canceled the exhibition’s
engagement there, citing concerns from
visitors of color who had previewed it and
determined that several of the displays
were outdated or lacking in context.
“We concluded that updating another in-
stitution’s exhibit was not a wise use of our
time and resources,” the museum said in a
statement.
The exhibit, created by the International
Spy Museum in Washington, had been
scheduled to open at the Lincoln museum in
late March, but the coronavirus scuttled
those plans.
The chairman of the museum’s board of
directors, Ray LaHood, said that in the
weeks before the museum’s July 1 reopen-
ing, staff members expressed concern
about two aspects of the exhibition: three
Ku Klux Klan robes on display and a section
about the internment of Japanese-Ameri-
cans during World War II.
The museum invited 40 to 50 Black com-
munity leaders to preview the exhibition,
“Spies, Traitors, Saboteurs: Fear and Free-
dom in America,” in late June and to offer
feedback, said Chris Wills, a spokesman.
The comments, Mr. LaHood said, were
overwhelmingly negative. “They were
clear that this was not the kind of exhibit
they wanted to see at the Abraham Lincoln
Presidential Library and Museum,” he said.
He said the board members concurred and
unanimously decided to cancel it.
Mr. LaHood said that while the show had
been received without objection at presi-
dential libraries and museums devoted to
Bill Clinton, Gerald Ford, George H. W.
Bush and Richard Nixon, it was a poor fit for
the Lincoln institution. (The Lincoln library
is not part of the U.S. presidential library
system run by the National Archives and
Records Administration.)
The show includes three Ku Klux Klan
robes, two adult and one child-size, under a
placard reading “HATE 1865-PRESENT.”
Historic documentary footage of a Klan
march plays on a monitor behind the robes.
The exhibition, which chronicles terror-
ism in America from the Revolutionary War
to the present, also includes pieces of the
planes that hit the World Trade Center and
displays about the 1971 bombing of the Sen-
ate wing of the U.S. Capitol building and the
1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Fed-
eral Building in Oklahoma City.
Kathryn Harris, a Lincoln museum board
member who attended a preview, said the
way the Klan robes are displayed is unnec-
essarily jarring. “They hit you in the face as
soon as you walk in,” she said.
Ms. Harris also said displays about the
Black Panther Party and the internment of
Japanese-Americans are one-sided. The
Black Panther Party section, she said, dis-
cussed the group’s militancy, but not the or-
ganization’s tutoring and feeding programs.
And she said the internment section omit-
ted the fact that Japanese-Americans later
received reparations.
Alexis Albion, the curator of special ex-
hibits at the Spy Museum who helped cre-
ate the show in 2005, said that this was the
first time objections had been raised about
it.
Ms. Albion said she was puzzled by the
complaint that the Klan artifacts lacked
context. “We labeled the section that deals
with the Klan ‘HATE,’ ” Ms. Albion said.
“There are a dozen labels that very clearly
state exactly what they did, from intimida-
tion to murder.”
Doris Turner, a member of the Springfield
City Council who previewed the exhibit,
said that she was troubled by the focus on
negative aspects of organizations like the
Black Panthers. “There were some glaring
omissions that didn’t provide some of the
most positive aspects of some of the sub-jects,” she said.
Anna Slafer, the vice president for exhibi-
tions and programs at the Spy Museum,
said that the section Ms. Harris and Ms.
Turner objected to did not focus on the
Black Panther Party, but on the Black Liber-
ation Army, an offshoot created by Panthers
frustrated with what they considered the
group’s conservative tactics. “They were
considered a radical terrorist group and
weren’t doing any of the positive things the
Panthers were,” she said.
Ms. Slafer also said that the section about
internment included information about
President Reagan signing the Civil Liber-
ties Act of 1988 and offering survivors a gov-
ernment apology and compensation.
Though curators differ about the propri-
ety today of an exhibition created with sen-
sibilities framed by events of 15 years ago,
experts said the difference of opinion re-
flects the heightened concern over the ef-
fects of museum displays, whatever their
intentions.
“I think people are realizing the emo-
tional impact that seeing reminders of op-
pression has on people of color,” Erin
Thompson, an art historian who studies the
destruction of cultural heritage, said. “What
had been thought of as a merely educational
display is now recognized as something
that can reopen traumas.”
This is the second time this year that the
work of the Spy Museum has drawn objec-
tions. After members of the Senate Intelli-
gence Committee criticized the museum in
January for “sanitizing” torture techniques
in an exhibition about the “enhanced inter-
rogation” program the C.I.A. used after 9/
11, the museum revised that show.
Mr. Wills said the library is seeking a re-
fund of the $70,000 it paid to display the arti-
facts through January 2021.
Ms. Slafer said the exhibit has not been
booked by another institution, but has not
been taken out of touring commission, ei-
ther. Currently, she said, the museum has no
plans to update it.
“It was meant to get people talking about
the issues,” she said. “And so, far from being
outdated, it’s more relevant than ever.”Black community leaders voice
concern that displays were
outdated and lacked context.
By SARAH BAHRAn Abraham Lincoln
museum board member
said the way the Klan
robes were shown was
unnecessarily jarring.VIA ABRAHAM LINCOLN PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUMLincoln Library Cancels Exhibition
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
laid off dozens more of its workers
on Wednesday and reduced its
ranks even further through fur-
loughs and voluntary retirements,
leaving the museum with a staff
that is about 20 percent smaller
than it was before the pandemic.
The coronavirus has kept the
museum closed since March and
prompted an initial wave of more
than 80 layoffs in April. Adding on
this new wave of staff cuts means
that the Met will have an employ-
ee count of about 1,600, a steep
drop from about 2,000 in March.
According to a memo sent out to
the Met’s staff on Wednesday, 79
staff members were laid off, in ad-
dition to 93 who took the option to
voluntarily retire. Another 181 em-
ployees were furloughed.
The museum told staff mem-
bers that they expect that the fur-
loughs will last no longer than six
months.
The museum made the decision
on the number of people fur-
loughed based on the fact that
even after it opens its doors, the
number of visitors will likely be
significantly lower than before the
pandemic.
The Met had previously an-
nounced a reopening date of Aug.
29, but museum officials acknowl-
edge that the timing is subject to
change. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo
surprised administrators by an-
nouncing last month that muse-
ums would not be allowed to open
in Phase 4, which started on July
20.
“We recognize that the Mu-
seum that we will return to —
whenever that may be — will be
very different from what we left
behind only six months ago,” the
museum’s chief executive, DanWeiss, said in a statement.
In the note to staff, Mr. Weiss
and Max Hollein, the museum’s
director, said that museum offi-
cials had done what they could to
stave off these cuts through ac-
tions like a hiring freeze and cuts
to museum programs. A spokes-
man said that Mr. Weiss and Mr.
Hollein took 20 percent pay cuts,
while other executives received a
10 percent pay cut.
The museum has said that it
also changed the formula for how
it spends the earnings of its more
than $3 billion endowment, si-
phoning $25 million that would
typically be used for specific pur-
poses like acquiring art and
putting it toward operating ex-
penses.
Factoring in five months of flat-
lined revenue from areas like ad-
missions, retail and events, as
well as the predicted reduction of
visitors, a spokesman said that
the museum estimates that it will
lose $150 million in revenue.
A spokesman for the museum
said that the cuts occurred across
the museum — though they were
deeper in the retail, visitor serv-
ices and security departments.
Among the staff members whose
positions have been cut during the
pandemic, 48 percent are people
of color. (Forty-three percent of
the museum’s total staff members
are people of color.)
“We share the pain and sadness
we will all feel across the Museum
saying goodbye to so many of our
friends and colleagues impacted
by the position eliminations,” Mr.
Weiss and Mr. Hollein said in the
staff memo.
Other art museums around the
country are also coming to terms
with steep reductions. The Phila-
delphia Museum of Art said on
Tuesday that it would be laying off
85 employees, in addition to 42
who had accepted voluntary sepa-
ration agreements, cutting the
museum’s employees by about 23
percent.Max Hollein, left, and Dan Weiss of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.VINCENT TULLO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESMore Layoffs at Met
New cuts are part of
the museum’s pandemicsurvival strategy.
By JULIA JACOBSFill the grid with digits so as not to repeat a digit in any row or column, and so that the digits within each
heavily outlined box will produce the target number shown, by using addition, subtraction, multiplication or
division, as indicated in the box. A 4x4 grid will use the digits 1-4. A 6x6 grid will use 1-6.
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Two Not Touch
Put two stars in each row, column and region of the grid. No two stars may touch, not even diagonally.
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Cryptogram
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Crossword Edited by Will Shortz
ACROSS
1 K follower
5 Run for it!
9 Ingredient
separated and
whipped in
meringue
13 One with a title
14 Purloin
15 TV host with the
memoir “Born a
Crime”
16 “Hoarders”
network
17 Novelist Walker
18 Major-___
19 Political party
founded in 1966
22 Oh, it’s nothing
23 Perimeter of a
billiards table
24 Devil dog
26 Speakeasy, by
another name
29 “Bye-bye”
30 Mailroom stamp:
Abbr.
31 ___ vez (again,
in Spanish)
33 T-shirt choices,
for short
34 Shortly before
the events of the
New Testament
36 Wyatt, Virgil or
Morgan of the
Old West
38 “Praise be to
___”42 Language
in which the
majority of words
are monosyllabic
44 Up votes
46 Woman’s name
that means
“violet”
47 Pushes to the
side
50 Like the
Kardashians’
heritage
52 Sole
proprietorship?
54 They might help
you get a grip
55 Little downtime
56 Saying “You’ve
never looked
better,” maybe
60 Chorus at an
arena de fútbol
62 Time off
63 Inland’s opposite
64 Sage
65 Hard hit, in
baseball lingo
66 Wear in ancient
Rome
67 Many a country
road
68 Brand of
“anti-aging”
products
69 Fr. religious
figuresDOWN
1 [blown kiss]2 Author of
“Interview With
the Vampire”
3 Old Glory
4 Hesitant to act
5 What a foul
mouth is full of?
6 Counselor to Job
7 Get into
8 Container brand
that lost its
trademark status
in 1963
9 Terminus
10 “I’ll be right
behind you”
11 Main Las Vegas
industry
12 Outer space
phenomenon
photographed for
the first time in
2019
13 Clif Bar bit14 MuggleNet, for
Harry Potter
devotees
20 Prime Cuts and
T-Bonz brand
21 Actress Hayek
25 It might prevent
an overload of
the power grid
26 Compadre
27 ___ Wiseman,
director of “Total
Recall”
28 & 32 Ambiguity ...
or a hint to this
puzzle’s theme
35 Is allowed to,
quaintly
37 Significant other
39 DC reporter
40 Carrier to Tokyo
41 Chick magnet?43 Game whose
dual-colored
pieces are apt
for this puzzle’s
theme
45 Air apparent?
47 Gene with a
large ’stache of
films?
48 “Fingers
crossed!”
49 Cirque du ___
51 Passes
52 “Grimms’ Fairy
Tales” heroine
53 Starter course?
57 Two-time Tony-
winning actress
Judith
58 Goddess often
depicted holding
an ankh
59 And so on: Abbr.
61 Mo. when
Oktoberfest
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