Brooklyn Talks: SENSATION with Arnold Lehman and Darren Walker

Join Arnold Lehman, former director of the Brooklyn Museum, and Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation, for a timely conversation about Lehman’s long-awaited book Sensation: The Madonna, the Mayor, the Media, and the First Amendment (2021). The book presents Lehman’s personal account of the controversy, which took place during his time as director and surrounded the lightning-rod exhibition SENSATION: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection (1999–2000). It details the Museum’s bitter fight with New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and others. Artist Chuck Close said of the book, “Looking back at one of the most important contemporary exhibitions ever, Lehman's book is filled with the excitement and anxiety of the moment. I know, I was there.”

Two decades later, in a time of reckoning for institutions and as controversies increasingly shape the art and museum fields, the SENSATION exhibition takes on new resonance. Walker and Lehman ask how this critical case study in First Amendment rights changed how we think about the issues of freedom of speech and artistic expression that continue to be debated today.