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Lucy Lippard was a contributor to the catalogue of this exhibition, which she recalls was “curated by Kynaston McShine, who was a young, incidentally black curator, which really was the most political show that the Museum of Modern Art ever had and probably ever will have”. With McShine’s support, artists began to change their work in response to contemporary political events, including rage over the My Lai Massacre, President Nixon’s escalation of the war and vicious state repression of waves of protest with the killing of student protestors at Kent State University, in Ohio, and Jackson State College, in Mississippi. Under the banner of ‘Art Strike’, artists called for the temporary closure of museums, as The New York Element reported in its June-July edition of 1970: “On May 22nd, an outrage of 500 painters, sculptors and various kinds of art workers and others involved in New York’s fragmented and often cloistered art world effectively shut down the Metropolitan Museum of Art”.
© 2020. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence