Goldwashing: How The Brooklyn Museum’s “Solid Gold” Exhibit Hides An Ugly Reality With Pretty Things

If you entered the Brooklyn Museum’s “Solid Gold” exhibit feeling eager and alert, only to exit an hour later foggy and fatigued, wondering what just happened to you, you’re not alone.

The show aims to both awe and educate according to the website: “The fashion world’s embrace of gold will be seen in standout designs by Anna Sui, Christian Dior, Demna, Gianfranco Ferré, Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, Halston, Mary McFadden, The Blonds, Walter Van Beirendonck, and Yves Saint Laurent…. While celebrating the seductive magic of this luminous material, the exhibition will also confront darker histories, inviting frank discussions about the human and environmental costs of extracting gold ore from the earth. Solid Gold will immerse you in one of humankind’s most dazzling obsessions.”

*“Back of The Neck” by Jean Michel-Basquiat*

It’s more dizzying than dazzling to pass from a 2,500-year-old Egyptian coffin to Elizabeth Taylor’s golden cape from 1963 Hollywood film Cleopatra; a gold chain designed by Virgil Abloh to gold coins from the Islamic and Roman empires; and a centuries-old gold threaded uniform for the Chinese Imperial Guard to a painting by Jean Michel-Basquiat depicting the police murder of artist Michael Stewart, not to mention the overwhelming volume of gold attire. (For an exhaustive account of the 500+ object hodgepodge, plus insights on appropriation in the show, read Aruna D’Souza’s review in the New York Times.)

How “Solid Gold” presents the metal’s “darker histories” hides more than it reveals. It’s impossible to decipher the gold thread connecting how the metal factored into European colonization of the Americas, Africa, and parts of Asia, giving way to our current Western-dominated geopolitical world order and the modern Big Gold industry.

One wouldn’t learn from “Solid Gold’s” telling of history how hoarding gold helped establish European and then American empires, or the magnitude of suffering, dispossession, and death associated with the metal. Chronology is scrambled as ancient and contemporary items appear side by side. Historical artifacts and accounts are peppered amid countless fashion and art works from any given era. Gallery text conflates symbolism with materialism and omits essential context and analysis. The result is a flea-market-esque incoherence that feels less like a faux pas and more like the point.

Out of the incoherence, a thesis coalesces: gold has an innate allure, which no one can resist. Thus, violence enacted to possess it is absolved, past and present. “Solid Gold” makes an implicit apology for the yellow metal’s colonial legacy and seeks to relegate it to history by ignoring how the Western empire it gave rise to and the neocolonial relations that are violently enforced today have everything to do with the modern Big Gold industry, the peripheral artisanal small-scale mining industry and the problems therein. To prove its thesis, “Solid Gold” declares past and present are linked by gold’s “enduring resonance” and oversaturates its galleries with supposed examples. In reality, geopolitics and the empirical pursuit of global dominance are what link gold's past and present. In what can only be described as goldwashing, the notion of gold’s universal desirability is instrumentalized to obscure how the yellow metal factors in facilitating our world order of racialized capitalism, which puts profit and wealth over people and the planet.

Materialism as Symbolism

“As a symbol as ancient as civilization itself, gold has come to embody the essence of beauty, joy, success, wealth and spiritual enlightenment,” reads the exhibit’s opening inscription.

This is naked luxury industry branding, invoking the quintessential use of gold: jewelry. Jewelry is symbolic by nature, regardless of its material. As long as 142,000 years ago, early humans adorned themselves with shells made into beads. Shell jewelry continues to be treasured by many of us, an affinity we have in common with our very ancient ancestors. Gold jewelry is more recent, dating back to 4000 BC.

Gold’s particular meaning and price come from its material social function established over centuries: its purchasing power. Around 1500 BC, gold became currency in certain empires and cultures. As such, unspeakable acts of brutality, murder, theft and environmental devastation were committed to extract gold. Mining gold was like robbing a bank or winning nature’s lottery. “Solid Gold” attributes this to human nature's fait accompli rather than organized, greed-fueled capital and property accumulation that primarily fortified empires. Gold itself is innocent of any wrongdoing. But, to purely enjoy the beauty, artisanship and symbolic power embodied in gold jewelry, we must reckon with the real gold economy.

Gold is no longer currency, but it's remained a store of value. Central banks worldwide bought nearly one quarter of the metal sold in 2024. The United States government keeps a basement stocked full of it. Gold jewelry doubles as an investment for today’s buyers. Symbol whisperer Carl Jung describes objects as symbolic if they mean much more to us than what they actually express. For gold, the opposite is true. It means *exactly* what it expresses: wealth and its emotional substrates (power, happiness, security, etc). Both gold and money wealth conjure similar emotions. What’s perceived as gold’s unparalleled symbolic force is more accurately a mystification. Why is something that holds so little functional use worth so much? The same can be asked of money. The social relations undergirding our society are shrouded in mystery as they’re objectified through money, which is worth nothing and everything simultaneously. Our obsession with gold is a projection of the confusion this system besets us with, which we rarely consider as a culture. It’s just a given.

A placard entitled, “The Legend of El Dorado” about modern day Colombia reads, “European conquest and colonization of the Americas was fueled by the legend of a golden empire named El Dorado, the ‘Golden One’....European greed resulted in the plundering of tombs and confiscation of Indigenous goldwork…” Focus is turned away from the organized violence, including genocide and enslavement, committed by European empires in the Americas to expropriate and extract gold that would enrich the empires back home. Neither is there mention of Colombia’s ongoing resistance against industrial, large-scale gold mining by multi-national corporations from the global North.
A disc of gold bullion recovered in 1985 from a shipwreck is displayed with the following description: “In 1622, while returning to Spain as part of a twenty-eight ship convoy, the Spanish galleon Neustra Senora de Atocha was shipwrecked off the Florida Keys in a hurricane. Nearly 300 members of the crew drowned - all of the cargo- taken from Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela sank.” Facts omitted: the deceased crew members included enslaved people and the cargo was stolen property. Information about the wreck indicates that shortly afterwards, enslaved people were sent to the ocean floor at the risk of death in newly invented diving bells to retrieve the sunken gold and return it to the colonizers. Little was brought back. The relic, goldwashed of its genocidal stains via its glittery symbolic associations, is on loan from the Thomson Collection, owned by the richest man in Canada.

Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz minces no words to drive home how material interests fueled “gold fever” in the Americas in her renowned work, “An Indigenous People’s History of the United States:”

The story is well known. In 1492, Columbus sailed with three ships on his first voyage at the behest of Ferdinand, King of Aragon, and Isabella, Queen of Castille…. Columbus planted a colony of forty of his men on "Espanola" (now the Dominican Republic and Haiti) and returned to Spain with Indigenous slaves and gold. (Dunbar-Ortiz 42)

In l 5 21, following a three-year bloodbath and overthrow of the Aztec state, Hernando Cortes proclaimed Mexico as New Spain. Parallel with the crushing of Mexica resistance were Ferdinand Magellan's explorations and charting of the Atlantic coast of the South American continent, followed by Spanish wars against the Inca Nation of the Andes. In both Mexico and Peru, the conquistadors confiscated elaborate artwork and statuary made of gold and silver to be melted down for use as money. During the same period, the Portuguese laid waste to what is today Brazil and began a thriving slave trade that would funnel millions of enslaved Africans to South America, beginning the lucrative Atlantic slave trade.

The consequences of this amassing of fortunes were first felt in the catastrophe experienced by small farmers in Europe and England. The peasants became impoverished, dependent workers crowded into city slums. For the first time in human history, the majority of Europeans depended for their livelihood on a small wealthy minority, a phenomenon that capitalist-based colonialism would spread worldwide. The symbol of this new development, indeed its currency, was gold. Gold fever drove colonizing ventures, organized at first in pursuit of the metal in its raw form. Later the pursuit of gold became more sophisticated, with planters and merchants establishing whatever conditions were necessary to hoard as much gold as possible. Thus was born an ideology: the belief in the inherent value of gold despite its relative uselessness in reality. Investors, monarchies, and parliamentarians devised methods to control the processes of wealth accumulation and the power that came with it, but the ideology behind gold fever mobilized settlers to cross the Atlantic to an unknown fate. Subjugating entire societies and civilizations, enslaving whole countries, and slaughtering people village by village did not seem too high a price to pay, nor did it appear inhumane. The systems of colonization were modern and rational, but its ideological basis was madness. (Dunbar-Ortiz 43)

Today, roughly 15 million people perform the dirty work of artisanal small-scale gold mining (ASGM) to earn meager incomes primarily in South America, Africa and Southeast Asia. Many artisanal miners must defend their right to mine their own territories against transnational mining corporations, a consequence of neocolonial dominance. At the same time, Indigenous Peoples are defending their lands and water against large and small-scale mining. The ongoing use of mercury in many ASGM operations is of particular concern. When, where and whether to mine is a debate complicated by economic needs, values specific to every place and community and the intensive water consumption mining requires. Above all, the agency of local people to determine the use of their lands and water should come before the interests of multibillion-dollar mining giants with shareholders who live nowhere in the vicinity.

Communities around the United States are also exercising their power to say no to gold mining. Northern Idaho is a case in point. In January, company Perpetua Resources was granted federal approval to move forward with its Stibnite Gold Project at an abandoned mine site on the ancestral territory of the Nez Perce Tribe. A coalition of concerned Idahoans, conservation groups and the Nez Perce organized opposition to the proposal based on a trove of evidence showing that contamination and alteration of the region's rivers would irrevocably harm the environment, wildlife like salmon, and public health. In an official statement of opposition sent to the U.S. Forest Service, the Nez Perce Tribe likened the project’s violation of their land rights to the grievous days of the American Gold Rush:
“The Tribe has endured immeasurable harm over the last two centuries as a result of misguided federal policies, exploitative resource extraction and land management practices, and broken treaty promises that have ignored our culture and threatened our way of life. Gold mining has played a particularly egregious and lasting role in this ignominious history of hardship and loss. Shortly after the 1855 Treaty was ratified, gold was discovered within the Tribe's homeland. Multitudes of prospectors, ignoring our treaty rights, illegally flooded our lands, stealing vast quantities of gold and other resources and befouling our pristine waters and sacred places. The United States, unwilling to enforce its treaty obligations and expel the gold-seeking trespassers,
instead forced the Tribe to enter into a new treaty ("1863 Treaty"). While the 1863 Treaty retains our fishing, hunting, gathering, pasturing, and travel rights, our Reservation was substantially reduced-opening to non-Indian settlement lands from which gold and other resources had been illegally taken.”

Hellbent on promoting its unrealistic promise to leave the mine site better than how it was found, Perpetua has bankrolled slick public relations and marketing activities, all but bribing locals into embracing the company. They’ve adopted a highway and sponsored fun events like the Idaho Sled Dog Challenge and the Yellow Pine Harmonica Festival. Recognizing how museums shape beliefs, Perpetua invested in a mining exhibit at the Children’s Museum of Idaho, giving this reason: “Many people do not have a positive image of mining, as they believe mining is the same as it was 100 years ago. Our goal with the exhibit is to emphasize modern mining to both children and parents.”

Ninety-three percent of Perpetua’s forecasted profits will be generated from gold, and seven percent from antimony, a designated critical mineral commonly found with silver and gold deposits. More than any other public relations strategy, fearmongering about threats to national security and the need for antimony in military applications (i.e., to fireproof uniforms and produce night vision goggles) has helped Perpetua justify its mine to the public and win a $75 million subsidy from the Department of Defense to boot. The Stibnite Gold Project is expected to be fully permitted soon. It was recently included in President Trump’s initiative to fast-track approval for certain infrastructure projects. A lawsuit filed in February by the community coalition trying to block the mine awaits trial.

**Misleading Mining**

Gallery text lists the largest gold-producing mines in the world but fails to inventory the controversies that mire them. For years, people in the Dominican Republic have suffered illnesses they say are from the world’s fifth-largest gold mine, Pueblo Viejo, owned by Canadian and American-owned mining behemoths Barrick Mining Corporation and Newmont. Dominicans are actively petitioning the government to be relocated away from the so-called “barbarity.” Chart-topping Nevada Gold Mines in the U.S. was charged in 2021 by the National Labor Review Board for violating the union rights of its employees. The site occupies public lands and the ancestral territories of many Great Basin Tribes, including Western Shoshone, who’ve sued to block mining on their lands to no avail. An archaic code known as the 1872 Mining Law establishes that mining is the “highest and best use of the land.” U.S. Senator Aaron Sargent of California, a former gold speculator and newspaper owner, introduced the bill. (Sargent was a noteworthy proponent of both women’s suffrage and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.) The 1872 Mining Law still stipulates that anyone can stake a claim to mine gold and other minerals on public lands. The applicant must produce a plan that satisfies environmental safety requirements and a permit will be granted. The federal government isn’t owed a cent from profits from minerals found on public lands. Could policies like this make clean water, like gold, a luxury good only a few can afford?

Egregious Omissions

“Solid Gold” includes a 1917 short documentary film by Thomas Edison. Its description reads, “The film showcased the use of the cyanide-leaching process, a late 19th century advancement in extracting gold from low-grade ore…. Edison’s film brought attention to this innovative, efficient mining technique that had established South Africa as a leading gold producer.” A scene from the doc shows shirtless Black miners digging in a hole in the ground as a professionally clothed white man looks down from above. The film isn’t self-conscious about the slavery-like mining conditions it captures; all the more reason it ought to be captioned with appropriate context. Imagine how Edison’s “advancement” could’ve been understood were museum goers to learn that the South African Gold Rush in the late 1800s ushered in a corporate, racially segregated gold industry that laid the groundwork for Apartheid later to come. Black South African gold miners proudly fought back against abusive and deadly working conditions. They led a historic strike in 1946 that helped catalyze the anti-apartheid movement. Years later, that movement sparked a global boycott on South African gold. Even the United States under Ronald Reagan participated, adding pressure to end the racist regime.

*Still from 1917 documentary film by Thomas Edison*

Cyanide leaching, mentioned in the film, is widely used today and poses potential harm to water systems, wildlife and people. While the industry claims it to be non-toxic, local communities and environmental scientists beg to differ. In fact, the controversial Stibnite Gold Project mentioned earlier is a planned open-pit cyanide vat-leach mine. Though it isn’t easy, there’s precedent for grassroots movements to resist mining companies successfully. Over a decade ago, ordinary El Salvadorans known as “Water Defenders” united to block a large-scale cyanide heap-leach gold mine they knew would contaminate their waters and land, threatening livelihoods for generations. Their epic victory over transnational mining giant OceanaGold came in 2016 and led to an all-out mining ban in the country that lasted until December 2024. Community leader Marcelo Rivera was tragically murdered in the process; his killer remains at large. According to Global Witness, over 2,100 people have been murdered since 2012, opposing the extractive industries.

“Solid Gold” highlights a disastrous spill of cyanide-contaminated water at the Aurul gold processing plant in Romania in 2000, but regrettably adds: “Despite the ecological and humanitarian repercussions of the extraction of gold, its allure persists. Communities continue to face hardship in the quest for this coveted metal.” It's like how DreamWorks would describe gold mining if they were to make a movie about it. Mining is inherently unsustainable; it always comes with a risk, yet it's inevitable in modern life. How justifiable is moving mountains (literally) to dig gold when it's highly recyclable and less than 1% annually is put to functional use in electronics? The Big Gold and Big Jewelry industries go to great lengths to assure customers that their products are “responsibly sourced.” But, is large-scale gold mining responsible, period?

Maybe Check It Out

“Solid Gold” presents truly impressive handcrafted jewelry, stunningly designed clothing, and unforgettable artwork. But the exhibit is tarnished by a not-so-hidden agenda to burnish the Big Gold industry’s image while boosting the metal’s appeal—aka goldwashing. Historical accuracy could drive value and demand for the yellow metal down. One can assume the show's sponsors (Bank of America and Dior) would disapprove of that.

Goldwashing: How The Brooklyn Museum’s “Solid Gold” Exhibit Hides An Ugly Reality With Pretty Things

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