attempt to interpret Guston's work, as well as the museums' own "history of prejudice." It calls Guston's KKK themes a timely catalyst for a "reckoning" with cultural and institutional white supremacy, and argues that's why the exhibition must proceed without delay. On October 28, 2020, the museums announced earlier exhibition dates starting in 2022. Biography Early years The child of Jewish parents who escaped persecution by immigrating to Canada from Odessa, Guston was born in Montreal in 1913, and moved to Los Angeles in 1919. The family were aware of the regular Ku Klux Klan activities against Jews and Blacks and which took place across California. In 1923, possibly owing to persecution or the difficulty in securing income, his father hanged himself in the shed, and the young boy found the body. Guston's interest in drawing led his mother to enroll him in a correspondence course from the Cleveland School of Cartooning. In 1927, at the age of 14, Guston began painting, and enrolled in the Los Angeles Manual Arts High School where he met Jackson Pollock, who became a life-long friend. The two studied under Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky and were introduced to European modern art, Eastern philosophy, theosophy and mystic literature. The pair later published a paper opposing the high school's emphasis on sports over art, which led to expulsions, although Pollock eventually returned and graduated. Apart from his high school education and a one-year scholarship at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, which left him dissatisfied, Guston remained a largely self-taught artist, influenced, among others by Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, whom Guston repeatedly acknowledged throughout his career. He died in 1980 at the age of 66, of a heart attack, in Woodstock, New York. Work Political murals An early activist, in 1932, the 18-year-old Guston produced an indoor mural with artist Reuben Kadish in an effort by the communist-affiliated John Reed Club of Los Angeles to fundraise money in support of the defendants in the Scottsboro Boys Trial, nine Black teenagers falsely accused of a rape in Alabama and sentenced to death." The mural was then defaced by local police forces, organized into violent anti-communist Red Squads. The subsequent court ruling found no fault on the part of L.A. police, even though irreversible damage was sustained to many works of art. In 1934, Philip Goldstein (as Guston was then known), and artist Reuben