Brian Slattery Photo
Brown in the studio in October.
New Haven-based artist Amira Brown‘s Bailout Gallery has returned — this time to try to raise funds to rebuild Palestine. As its tagline on Instagram reads, “we sell art and raise money for causes. That’s it. We support Palestine and reject anti-Semitism.”
“It’s been on and off in my mind for a while,” said Brown (who alternates pronouns). The push toward reopening Bailout Gallery happened when “I saw a community member of mine” in the grocery store, they said. That acquaintance wanted to buy art for Bailout, to support the cause. “This person I don’t even know is really interested in it,” she recalled thinking. “It was really invigorating.”
The first iteration of Bailout Gallery ran in June 2020, when Brown put out a call to artists to contribute artworks for sale, with all the proceeds going to the Pimento Relief Fund, Black Visions, Liberty Fund, and Connecticut Bail Fund to help Black Lives Matter protesters make bail after being arrested during protests. She ended up collecting works from over 40 artists. She listed all the art for sale on the gallery’s website. Artists held on to their individual pieces. When a piece was sold, the artists shipped the piece to the buyer, with Brown paying for shipping and making sure they were shipped in a timely manner. Brown won an arts award from the Arts Council of Greater New Haven in December for her Bailout Gallery work.
As Brown considered opening Bailout Gallery again, it was possible to continue to direct the funds toward Black Lives Matter. But the news in March that Samaria Rice and Lisa Simpson, the mothers of Tamir Rice and Richard Risher, were asking Black Lives Matter leaders to stop using their slain sons’ names and images in their activism and fundraising work resonated with Brown.
“A lot of the movement and the fundraising of the movement is using people we don’t know as victims as violence,” they said. That didn’t sit well with Brown as a working artist, and one figuring out how to use art in activist work. “I didn’t want to be one of those artists who says, ‘I made this art using this image without their permission, and I’m doing it to raise money for them,’” they said. She had felt a similar sense of ambivalence about participating directly in Black Lives Matter protests last summer given the threat of Covid-19, as much as she supported the cause. “I didn’t want to be the person who endangered myself and the people around me who I care about and love,” they said.
But still, she turned the idea of Bailout Gallery over in her head.
“As I kept thinking about it, I thought, ‘Amira, there’s never not going to be a cause that needs some help,” they said. As she was looking around for another cause, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict turned warlike once again, with the news full of images of rockets and burning buildings.
“Seeing what was going on was extremely heartbreaking,” Brown said. “In a way, the Palestinian movement reminded me of the Black Lives Matter movement, in that people were not treated with respect, rights were trampled on, and people were redlined.”
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most complicated, divisive, and intractable disputes on the planet; the shadows of both the Holocaust and colonization loom over it as it has swung in the past century among brief periods of fragile hopefulness, simmering tensions, and all-out war. Israelis and Palestinians who are interested in peace struggle to find a way forward while political forces fueled by mounting grievances pull them apart. The political ground of the conflict shifts constantly, and Israel today finds itself more censured than in the past; this week Ireland (no stranger to intractable conflicts) became the first EU country to call Israeli authorities’ occupation of Palestinian territory an “annexation.”
Amid the crushing weight of history and the fractious politics of today, there is a humanitarian crisis that people caught in the crossfire between the two sides — the great majority of them Palestinian — face, as they struggle to rebuild from the latest round of fighting.
That crisis is where Brown placed her focus. As a U.S. citizen, “I do feel a sense of complexity and complicity, because I live in this country and pay taxes” — funds that go toward supporting the conflict in Israel, especially as the United States sells weapons to that country. “As an American, I’m going to be held liable,” Brown said. In the face of that situation, they imagined having to answer the question: “you as an American, what did you do?”
They had seen Build Palestine — a nonprofit that has connected potential international funders with community projects within Palestine since 2016 — on social media and had tagged the organization in a post. Then “they reached out to me,” Brown said. She met virtually with the executive director. “They’re just young women like me, on the other side of the world, who just want to help. It was the representation that I needed,” Brown said.
Since reopening the call for artists to Bailout Gallery, Brown has noticed “the response has not been as immediate” as it was in June; as of this writing, seven artists have signed on. “I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I’m raising money for a different cause, and it’s a different time.” But they are hoping to involve as many artists as they did in the previous Bailout effort, and have begun reaching out to artists.
“I really just want to help,” she said, and “build up support for the arts.”
Combining art and activism in a way that worked for Brown was what both iterations of Bailout Gallery have been about. “It was really a murky area before I started Bailout Gallery,” they said. “Protest art and murals are cool, but I didn’t want to paint a mural.” Nor did she want to simply raise funds by herself. “There weren’t really a lot of options for art activism for me.”
By involving more artists,“Bailout opened for me a way to meet people and do more art activism,” Brown said. “Together and with people you don’t have to rely on just yourself…. Sometimes it’s hard because things are complicated like this.” But they press on “because we’re humans, and humans need to help other humans.”
To contribute art to Bailout Gallery, see submission guidelines on Instagram and Facebook.