Viv busted in P.R. hedgie protest at MoMA
The board — which oversees the city’s Department of Correction — will also weigh in on other forms of restrictive housing, including Enhanced Supervision Housing.
“Solitary confinement is state-sanctioned torture,” said Councilman Bill Perkins (DManhattan), who joined the rally. “It is an abomination that has destroyed far too many lives. It has no place in New York City.”
Yet Correction Officers’ Benevloent Association President Elias Husamudeen said punitive segregation is the most effective tool for keeping correction officers and other inmates safe from those who break the law behind bars.
“We use it to remove only violent offenders from general population who commit crimes against our officers and other inmates while in jail,” he said.
Former City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito was one of seven people arrested during a protest Monday that disrupted the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown.
The former speaker demanded that the museum cut ties with trustee Steven Tananbaum, who runs a hedge fund that has purchased a large amount of the Puerto Rican government’s debt.
“MOMA is being complicit in accepting the money of Steve Tananbaum, who has made his money on the backs of Puerto Rico, and we must end that,” Mark-Viverito shouted after she and other protesters burst through a barricade and blocked the museum’s E. 53rd St. entrance.
A line of art lovers stretching down the block waiting for the Museum of Modern Art to open its doors for the first time in four months watched the protesters.
The famed museum’s temporary closure was part of a $400 million renovation and expansion of its Midtown facility. The city landmark — known worldwide as the home of Vincent Van Gogh’s masterpiece “Starry Night” — added a reporters before being taken into police custody. “Puerto Rico is suffering, people are losing their pensions, there are privatization of resources, schools are closing down … These practices must end.”
A few of the city’s other art museums have also come under fire for how trustees handle their business affairs, including Warren Kanders, who was ousted from the Whitney Museum of American Art earlier this month amid outcries that the former vice chairman manufactured tear gas used on refugees at the U.S.-Mexico border. number of new galleries, like Tananbaum, who cofounded the one room devoted solely to GoldenTree Asset Monet’s “Water Lilies” Management, told Reuters in paintings, and another interactive 2016 that his hedge fund space dedicated to performance, expected to restructure sound and music. Puerto Rico’s debt within one
The protest temporarily interrupted year. the public unveiling GoldenTree declined to of the new additions. comment on the arrests and
“We cannot allow these cultural Tananbaum’s trustee status. institutions to be used as a MOMA did not immediately way of white washing … money,” respond to requests for Mark-Viverito told comment.