Last year, Warren Kanders stepped down as a vice chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art following widely publicized protests over the sale of tear gas by his company, Safariland. At the time, Decolonize This Place, the activist group that was leading the protests, had raised complaints that Safariland’s tear gas was being used against migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. Kanders and his company have been receiving more negative attention recently after a surge in demand for tear gas and other aggressive crowd-control technologies from local police departments in response to ongoing protests over the death of George Floyd.

Now, Safariland will divest from “crowd-control solutions, including chemical agents, munitions, and batons, to law enforcement and military agencies,” says Kanders. The divestiture “removes the active component and allows Safariland to focus on passive defense protection,” which includes body armor, bomb suits, and safety holsters. The transaction is expected to be complete in the third quarter of 2020.

Though protesters acknowledge the move signals progress, some argue that further action is needed. “Tear gas is a chemical weapon,” says Eyal Weizman, the founder of Forensic Architecture, an artist group that focuses on potential human rights violations and showed a video work critical of Kanders at the 2019 Whitney Biennial. “We need to move beyond Kanders and use the momentum of the current protests to ban tear gas outright and worldwide.”

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Surface Summer School, our summer partnership with UPenn’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design in which students design a mobile Covid-19 testing unit, launched last week. Headed by Miller Professor and Chair of Architecture Winka Dubbeldam, the program will be bolstered by a digital lecture series that features prominent design-world figures. On Monday, Yves Behar kicked things off with a lecture on the power of design’s reactivity. Tune in this evening for a talk by Ferda Kolatan, Associate Professor of Practice and the founding director of su11.

“Like an artist, a cook holds the key to the transformation of material,” writes the chef Mina Stone, who is hosting a new interview series, Cooking With Artists, for MoMA’s online magazine. As most of us have been forced to become more comfortable in the kitchen during the quarantine, the series sees Stone dive into the culinary experiences that have shaped the likes of Dara Friedman, Anicka Yi, and Hugh Hayden. Each artist shares personal anecdotes, family food rituals, and one go-to recipe that “shines a light on the essence of who they are, their work, and hopefully who we are as a society,” writes Stone. “It’s a universal language that we can all relate to—a pause in the day that offers a release when so much is out of our control.”

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