Over the weekend (April 1st and 2nd), GC management ordered the removal of Martin Sostre’s Afro-Asian Bookshop in Exile exhibition from the People’s Commons. When Reclaim the Commons organizers got to the Commons this morning (April 3rd), it was gone.

A trashcan and our info. board are all that remain of the beautiful exhibit. Luckily, we were able to retrieve the posters.

While they will likely claim that the exhibit was taken down because it constituted a “fire hazard” or similar nonsense, we know that the Administration has wanted the People’s Pantry removed from the day it opened and that they are eager to convert the People’s Commons back into a sterile corporate space they can rent out for third-party events like the Parks Department’s Green Thumb conference last weekend…

Management chose to take down an art installation honoring and celebrating traditions of Afro-Asian solidarity and resistance in order to make money off of the cafeteria and its pretty skylight. We demand an explanation and apology from President Garrell and that Martin Sostre’s Afro-Asian Bookshop in Exile exhibition be reinstalled in the People’s Pantry!

Please join us in calling on president Garrell and chancellor Matos Rodríguez to reinstall the Afro-Asian Bookshop in Exile exhibit in the People’s Pantry. If you have trouble with the “mailto” link, you can copy the message here.

Whatever the administration’s response, you have not seen the last of Martin Sostre, we promise.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.