New York City Mayor Eric Adams delivered an address to the city condemning antisemitism on Thursday after an art exhibit that included praise for Hamas and Hezbollah appeared at a city-controlled site on Governors Island.
Adams said that the exhibition in Building 11 of Nolan Park on the island was “unsanctioned” and “removed within hours of going up.”
“This was a vile, antisemitic exhibit,” Adams said. “I share this story because it reveals the dark underbelly of hate, and it exposes just how deep hate has seeped into our institutions, as installations like this somehow go up in the first place.”
Drawings in the exhibit included the flag of Hezbollah overlaid with the words “the resistance is justified,” an image of a Klansman with a hood topped with a Star of David and the words “Hamas lover” over a red triangle, a symbol that the terrorist group has used in its propaganda videos to indicate targets for attack.
Building 11 is owned by New York City and managed by the Trust for Governors Island, a nonprofit that the city created in 2010. Swale, a food access nonprofit that is a subsidiary of the New York Foundation for the Arts, which grants the space for artist residencies, uses the building for part of the year.
The New York Post reported that the exhibit was created by the activist Rebecca Goyette, who was given access to the house by the site’s current artist-in-residence.
Swale condemned the exhibition in a statement on its website.
“The individual responsible was not part of our programming,” it stated. “A current artist-in-residence invited this unauthorized person into a back studio and allowed them to display work without approval. We had no prior knowledge of this display and view this as a deliberate violation.”
The intended artist-in-residence, Sarah Olson, told the Post that she had also been tricked by Goyette, believing that she would use the space to focus “on the struggles of Palestinian children in Gaza during the war between Hamas and Israel,” but not to exhibit “offensive material.”
Olson said the exhibit was intended to be for a “family event” despite Goyette’s previous work on her website largely consisting of pieces that depict male and female genitals.
In his speech, Adams said that the exhibition was an example of how Jew-hatred is increasingly common in the United States. “Antisemitism has sadly become the ‘in’ thing,” he said. “With the help of social media, we are watching it infect our young people.”
Adams also took an implicit dig at his likely successor, Democratic state representative Zohran Mamdani, without mentioning the state representative by name.
“We will never surrender our city to hate, or to those who want to say they want to ‘globalize the intifada,’ or to choose and believe and not refuse to condemn it, because it is literally a phrase that means death to Jews all over the world,” Adams said.
Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor and frontrunner in the race, has refused to publicly denounce “globalize the intifada,” though he reportedly told a closed-door group of New York City business leaders in July that he would not use the phrase and would “discourage” others from doing so.
Adams has endorsed Mamdani’s main challenger in the race, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent.
