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Customers line up outside of Conflict Kitchen in Oakland in November.
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Award money to extend Conflict Kitchen’s Palestinian focus
Ralph Musthaler/Post-Gazette
Award money to extend Conflict Kitchen’s Palestinian focus

Artist Jon Rubin, proprietor of Conflict Kitchen in Oakland, said on Monday night that he will use a $15,000 award he received from The Pittsburgh Foundation and Heinz Endowments to expand his restaurant’s controversial presentation of Palestinian foods, culture and perspective.

“I have decided to put it entirely into the Palestinian version of Conflict Kitchen,” said Mr. Rubin, recipient of this year’s Carol R. Brown Established Artist Award. “The money will allow me to bring more Palestinian voices into our city and add greater depth to an iteration of a project that I very strongly believe in, and secondly this will provide a great opportunity to the funders of this award to stand up against the criticism that will certainly come their way because of the use of these funds.”

Mr. Rubin made the announcement before more than 200 artists and supporters who were in the New Hazlett Theater on the North Side for the third annual Carol R. Brown Creative Achievement Awards.

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He also used the occasion to call for foundations and funders that support artists to add “a freedom of expression clause to their bylaws or policies or contracts or whatever they use to indicate their core principles.”

He said the goal would be to avoid tangles such as those encountered last month when Conflict Kitchen was criticized for distributing material detailing the Palestinian perspective of life in the Middle East, which critics perceived as being “anti-Israel.” There were calls for the Heinz Endowments to disassociate itself from the project, and threats were made against the restaurant and Mr. Rubin, prompting him to close the business for a few days.

During his acceptance remarks, Mr. Rubin called out Grant Oliphant, president of the Heinz Endowments, for quotes attributed to him disavowing funding for the Palestinian program, saying the remarks were “unsettling and destabilizing.”

“The Endowments had reinforced the bullying tactics of powerful lobbying groups and created a less-secure environment for their funded project to do its work in,” Mr. Rubin said to Mr. Oliphant, who sat in the front row.

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“You can’t have it both ways,” Mr. Rubin said, adding that a “freedom of expression clause” would be “the easy and safe thing to do to protect the shared space between a funder and an artist and insulate that relationship from the influence of moneyed interests, lobbying groups and politics. ... One statement: freedom of expression. End of story.”

After the ceremony, Mr. Oliphant said he believed such a clause already exists in spirit, if not in writing.

“I think that’s the essence of what we aspire to,” he said. “We’re quite clear that we don’t try to control the artistic content of organizations that we fund. I think he’s calling for something that we all believe in, which is artistic freedom.”

Earlier, during his remarks to the audience, Mr. Oliphant addressed the controversy involving the Endowments and Mr. Rubin, whom he said he had “a less than an ideal introduction to” over the past couple of months.

“I’m really grateful for this evening, that tonight we get to step back and celebrate what we should be celebrating, which is the role of artists who challenge us into that messiness and take on concepts that perhaps we previously hadn’t [faced], to think about things in new ways, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, even if the comfortable you’re afflicting happen to be your funders,” Mr. Oliphant said.

Mr. Rubin said the award money will enable him to continue Conflict Kitchen’s Palestinian focus “probably a little longer and a little bit more in-depth. We’ll have more people coming into town and more programs.”

“I have no problem with outside organizations or individuals critiquing or challenging the methods of our project. That’s part of the nature of working in the public sphere, but I do take issue when individuals and organizations seek to police or silence speech. The counter to the call for less speech should always be more speech,” he said.

The Emerging Artist Award went to Lenka Clayton, who also received $15,000.

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Customers line up outside of Conflict Kitchen in Oakland in November.  (Ralph Musthaler/Post-Gazette)
Jon Rubin  (Ralph Musthaler/Post-Gazette)
Ralph Musthaler/Post-Gazette
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