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Tai Shani, a London-based artist who won the Turner Prize in 2019, said this week that she was terminating a book contract with Phaidon, the arts book publisher that has been owned by billionaire art collector Leon Black since 2012.
Shani cited Black’s connections to disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, including “numerous horrific allegations” about Black and some which have been newly revealed as part of the Department Justice’s recent release of Epstein-related documents.
“I think of withdrawal as a feminist practice,” Shani wrote in a statement posted to Instagram, which has garnered more than 3,200 likes. “Not a retreat, or a silence, but a refusal to contribute to any cover for the violence and misogyny that underpin so many of spheres of culture.”
Shani said she did not make her decision lightly and that “walking away from this decision is heartbreaking and scary; but there is no other choice for me.” She said that Phaidon, whose team she described as “truly wonderful,” planned to publish a monograph on her art. The publication was green-lit a few months ago and Phaidon had not yet released an expected publication date.
Phaidon did not respond to ARTnews’s request for comment.
Black’s ties to Epstein were first revealed in 2019, when it was revealed that Epstein was still listed as director of the Leon Black Family Foundation. (The organization has said that Epstein resigned from the post in 2007 and his being listed as a director was a clerical error.) A 2021 investigation revealed that Black had paid Epstein $158 million between 2012 and 2017, which caused Black to resign from Apollo Global Management, the private-equity firm he founded. He also decided not to seek reelection as chair of the board of the Museum of Modern Art, where he still is a trustee.
In 2023, Black paid $62.5 million to the US Virgin Islands, where Epstein owned a private island, to settle Epstein-related claims while admitting no wrongdoing. At least two women have accused Black of raping them at Epstein’s New York mansion. One woman dropped the case she filed in 2024. Black has denied the allegations.
The latest batch of Epstein documents released by the Justice Department also revealed the depth of Black’s billion-dollar art holdings, as well as Epstein’s communications regarding artworks that Black was looking to purchase, including a $115 million Picasso sculpture.
“Behind these allegations,” Shani’s statement reads, “whose specifics many of us have read with horror, behind the geopolitical implications, the many unsurprising ties to the art world, behind the gossip, behind the observations about global networks of power, behind the spectacle of violence are human beings, victims: young women, children, often from precarious backgrounds, real lives exploited and destroyed. Even in this age of increasing impunity and breathtaking ruthlessness, their suffering, their lives matter and must be acknowledged.”
