Three Workers at New York’s Noguchi Museum Fired After Wearing Keffiyehs on the Job

Three employees at the Noguchi Museum in New York were fired for violating an internal policy that banned keffiyehs, a garment symbolic of Palestinian culture. A fourth employee, the director of visitor services, was also terminated. Artists, art workers, and Queens residents protested the firings on Sunday outside the museum, where they demanded the ouster of its director, Amy Hau.

“Kept us silent, kept us down. Fire Amy, shut it down,” keffiyeh-clad demonstrators chanted outside the museum. Others brought signs that read “Stop the Keffiyeh Ban” and the Palestinian liberation chant “From the River to the Sea” written in Japanese. 

A Noguchi Museum spokesperson did not respond to request for comment.

“Arbitrarily deciding whose culture is political is a terrible precedent for a culture institution to set,” Trasonia Abbott one of the four terminated employees said at the demonstration.

Abbott, like many of the approximately 70-strong workforce, worked across multiple departments of the museum, including visitor services, where her keffiyeh was highly visible. According to Abbott, several employees at the museum had been wearing the checkered scarf for months in protest of Israel’s ongoing military assaults on Gaza, where more than 40,000 people have been killed since the October 7 Hamas attack, according to the local health ministry.

Abbott said on August 14, she was taken off the museum’s premises for a meeting with leadership, during which she was told to remove the garment or she would face disciplinary action. “I told them my reasons for wearing it, and how personal it was to me that these reasons included my faith, worldview and my connection to this issue as a victim of police brutality,” she said. “None of this mattered.”

Later that day, Noguchi Museum employees were informed via an email from museum leadership of a new internal policy that banned “political dress.” Staff widely understood that to mean that keffiyehs were no longer allowed, and leadership later explicitly requested the garment be removed while on museum premises.

Within days, 54 of the museum’s 72 employees signed a petition in protest of the ban, arguing—as they reportedly did in an emotional in-person meeting with Hau—that such a policy would “bring shame to the legacy of Isamu Noguchi,” per the petition. Staff also claimed that the decision was a blow to the museum’s reputation among the sizable Arab American community in Queens, and could be met with a boycott from artists who support Palestine. 

In an email that was sent on August 21 by Hau and that was reviewed by ARTnews, Hau told staff that the ban would remain in place: “To maintain a neutral and professional environment, employees are prohibited from wearing clothes or accessories that display political messages, slogans, or symbols. This includes, but is not limited to, apparel or items that promote political parties, candidates or ideological movements.”

Last Wednesday, Abbott and two other gallery attendants, Q.Chen and Natalie Cappellini, were fired after refusing to remove their keffiyehs. Their manager, an employee of Middle Eastern descent who served as director of visitor services, had already been fired. Protestors on Sunday decried the circumstances of the termination of the director and Abbott, who is Black, as racist. The museum has been queried on the allegations.

Cappellini was told of her termination during a meeting with Hau and an external HR consultant. In an audio recording of that meeting, the consultant can be heard incorrectly calling Cappellini by the name “Danielle.”

“They didn’t even know my name. They just saw a keffiyeh and wanted it gone,” Cappellini told ARTnews.

Staff at the museum have found the situation particularly distressing as the institution’s namesake, the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, was avowedly antiwar. In 1942, as an act of solidarity, Noguchi voluntarily interned at the Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona, one of several prison camps built to confine Japanese citizens and American citizens of Japanese descent on the West Coast after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Noguchi, a New York resident born to a Japanese father and American mother, was exempt from the directive. The museum held a retrospective of his self-internment in 2017-18.

At the action on Sunday, demonstrators handed out flyers that detailed more political artworks from his practice, including three memorials for the Japanese victims of the atomic bombs; and a sculpture dedicated to the hosiery factory worker killed during a 1930 labor strike, held in the collection of the museum.

“The museum itself is political,” Cappellini said. She pointed out that the museum had previously taken a stance on issues of police brutality and violence against Asian Americans. “This entire time, [Hau] has continuously asserted that banning the keffiyeh is a way for the museum to maintain an apolitical air, to maintain that the museum is a sanctuary. But a ban is a stance.”