Rafael Shimunov on Guerilla Art at The Whitney and the JFK Airport Muslim Ban Protests

Scene Report

Rafael Shimunov is "just someone from Queens" who was born in Uzbekistan, and incorporates creative tactics into grassroots campaigns. Rafael is a board member of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, and formerly with the Working Families Party and the Center for Constitutional Rights. In December 2018, Rafael guerilla-style installed his own painting on a wall in the Whitney Museum of American Art. The piece depicted a family running from teargas that was fired at the U.S./Mexico border. The action was in protest of The Whitney's Board of Trustees Vice Chairman and owner of Safariland, Warren Kanders. Art magazine Hyperalergic reported that canisters of teargas bearing Safariland’s name were found where U.S. Customs and Border Protection had fired teargas at Central American migrants near Tijuana in November 2018. The migrants, who included children, were seeking asylum in the U.S. If you generally pay attention to lefty news, you may already have seen some of Rafael's other work. He livestreamed the JFK Muslim ban protests for the Working Families Party, which received 16 million views on Facebook alone. He also made the video that used a red overlay to compare videos, the original and the doctored Inforwars version that was shared by the White House, of the altercation over a microphone between Jim Acosta and a White House intern when Trump cut off Acosta's question in November 2018. We spoke with Rafael at the Anchor Podcast Lab in Manhattan, about how to and why to sneak a piece of protest art into a museum, the ownership of cultural institutions, cars honking in support of demonstrations, coming to America from Uzbekistan, growing up in an immigrant family in Queens, and how using art in protest taps into different parts of people’s brains.

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