LOS ANGELES — After the Noguchi Museum in New York terminated three workers for wearing keffiyehs, artists David Horvitz and Ali Eyal wanted to send a message of protest and solidarity. Between October 3 and 4, visitors to the sites of several Isamu Noguchi artworks around LA may have caught a glimpse of a keffiyeh draped on the Japanese-American artist’s recognizable sculptures. Or they may have seen them on social media, photographed with the headscarf that has become a symbol of Palestinian solidarity.
The action is the latest response to the Noguchi Museum’s controversial decision to enforce a new staff dress code policy banning “political statements,” which the institution says include keffiyehs. Over 50 museum employees signed an internal petition demanding the policy’s reversal, and last month, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri declined an award from the museum in support of the terminated workers.
Last Thursday, Horvitz and Eyal visited California Scenario, a public sculpture garden in Costa Mesa designed by Noguchi and commissioned by the Segerstrom family, prominent Orange County arts patrons. They hung the black-and-white patterned scarf from “Spirit of the Lima Bean” (1980), consisting of 15 granite boulders named for the Segerstroms’ lima bean farm that once occupied this site. The following day, they took photos holding the keffiyeh next to “Cronos” (1947, cast 1986), a large bronze sculpture resembling a safety pin at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; “The White Gunas (Abstract Sculpture)” (1946), five interlocking white marble forms at the Norton Simon Museum; and Noguchi’s ebony wood bust of socialite “Rosita Winston” (c. 1934), enclosed in a Plexiglas case at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens.
Horvitz and Eyal also made a stop at the University of California, Los Angeles’s Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, home to Noguchi’s “Garden Elements” (1962). The sculpture was not on display, so they placed the keffiyeh on the grass where it typically sits.
Horvitz told Hyperallergic that they were careful not to touch the art at the museums when staging their photos, in part out of respect for Noguchi’s work, but also in reverence for Eyal’s keffiyeh, which he inherited from his father. The Iraqi-born artist was a boy when his father disappeared in 2006, abducted by a militia, and never returned.
“We lost everything, this is the only thing I have,” Eyal told Hyperallergic of the garment. He has since carried it with him as he moved from Iraq to Beirut, Lebanon, for an artist’s residency in 2016, then to Europe, and now to Los Angeles.
“This is the right thing to do with this piece of fabric, to give it a voice and meaning, to show support for Palestine,” he said. “It’s an amazing thing to add to the history of the keffiyeh.”
The subversive interventions also hold a personal significance for Horvitz, whose biography has several resonances with Noguchi’s. Both are LA-born artists with one parent of Japanese heritage. Horvitz’s maternal grandparents were imprisoned in Japanese concentration camps during World War II, as was Noguchi, who self-interned in 1942, voluntarily relinquishing his freedom. Horvitz recently learned that his grandfather was held at Poston, Arizona, the same camp where Noguchi was incarcerated.
Before he was imprisoned, Horvitz’s grandfather lived in LA’s Little Tokyo, where Noguchi designed the Japanese-American Cultural and Community Center Plaza in the early 1980s. The centerpiece of the red brick courtyard is “To the Issei” (1980–1983), two 12-foot-long basalt blocks intended “as a theatrical backdrop to the community’s activities,” according to the Noguchi Museum’s website. The diasporic term “Issei” refers to first-generation Japanese immigrants in North America. Horvitz recalls visiting the plaza as a child, where Mo Nishida, a relative of his grandmother’s and a community activist, would be serving ozoni, a traditional Japanese New Year’s soup, to anyone in attendance. Last Friday, Horvitz returned to the plaza with Eyal, gently placing the keffiyeh on one of the massive stone blocks, its folded fabric cascading over the edge as if left behind after a celebration or protest.
