The Patterns of Life exhibit in New York’s Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum blames the American military for homes destroyed in Gaza in the Israel-Hamas war. The Office of the Inspector General identified multiple flaws in the Smithsonian’s exhibition review process that allowed Cooper Hewitt to funnel $36,000 earmarked for American women’s history to an exhibit blaming the U.S. for “domicide” in the Middle East.
The OIG report, released only days before the White House’s 162-page report on the left-wing bias in the Smithsonian American History Museum, continues to reveal how America’s museums are captured by anti-American ideologies. The OIG began investigating the Patterns of Life exhibit after the museum received more than 2,600 complaints from visitors and the Israeli nongovernmental organization Shurat HaDin Law Center.
The exhibit, which ran from November 2024 to August 2025, featured three white apartment buildings with colorful interiors meant to mimic “documented homes destroyed by weapons manufactured in the United States during airstrikes in Iraq (2015), Syria (2016), and Palestine (2023),” the museum’s website states. The buildings reflect “on the experiences of three individuals whose homes were destroyed by domicide — the widespread and systematic destruction of housing due to military conflict, urban development, or social upheaval.”
The museum claims the exhibit exists to question the “complex role of the United States … as the leading financial contributor to United Nations peacekeeping initiatives, but also the world’s largest producer of arms.”
Mona Chalabi, the exhibit’s creator, is a far-left Iraqi-British journalist. In her new book, Ten Lives, she addresses the financial situations of ten people and the “lack of [money] in America.” Chalabi also headed a four-part “sex education” series for The Guardian called “Vagina Dispatches,” which featured a man identifying as a woman. Chalabi has numerous posts on Instagram saying that Israel is engaging in intentional genocide of Palestinians. She also believes that the tripartite U.S. government system is “fascist.” Another Chalabi post lists all the countries America has purportedly “interfered in elections.”
The OIG report said that various museum-goers felt alarmed by the exhibit and “expressed concerns that the exhibit provided a national platform for political activism, lacked balance of perspectives, and editorially omitted broader context.”
The Shurat HaDin Law Center stated that the exhibit “promotes a narrative sympathetic to terrorism and detrimental to U.S. interests” because it aligns with “pro-Hamas messaging” and “false claims that ‘U.S.-backed Israeli operations deliberately targeted civilian homes.’” The law center also argues that the exhibit omits the context of the Hamas Oct. 7 attack on Israeli homes and citizens, which was “domicide that prompted Israel’s military response.”
The museum seemed to ignore these complaints until after the OIG investigation. Only months before the investigation, the director of the museum faced another visitor complaint because of the exhibit for “a bias against America and Israel and editorially omitted context, complexity, and sensitivity to multiple viewpoints.”
Central Smithsonian management and the Under Secretary for Museums and Culture decided to install a “trigger warning” plaque to placate guests, but they installed it “near the entrance to the museum, one floor below the exhibit.” It was so small that during the OIG investigation, personnel had difficulty finding it. Furthermore, the plaque only contained a message stating that “views expressed by these artists and designers are their own.”
The OIG investigation also found that the $36,500 used for the Patterns of Life exhibit wrongfully came from the American Women’s History Initiative Pool fund. AWHIP requires that its funds go to programs that “research, share, and amplify the histories of American women,” which the Patterns of Life exhibit does not do. “Cooper Hewitt used federal funds from the American Women’s History Initiative pool without notifying fund administrators that the exhibit no longer had the nexus to American women’s history as initially proposed,” the OIG report noted.
The OIG’s “case study” investigation revealed an ineffective implementation of Smithsonian Directive 603 (SD 603) — a policy that governs the Smithsonian museum body that aims to create “balanced perspectives within the content while preserving creative independence.” The SD 603 Committee “functions informally without defined authority and procedures to review content and make recommendations,” the report found, leading to confusion and lack of oversight. Inadequate time devoted to meetings during the review process and failure to document the content and conclusions of the meetings that were held also contributed to the flawed vetting of the exhibit.
The Smithsonian’s tepid application of SD 603 led to an environment where review standards could be mainly determined by the subjective whims of the personnel at the Cooper Hewitt. The OIG office found that “a number of Smithsonian personnel, including directors, did not understand that they had obligations under SD 603 and that the policy applied to their content. … There seemed to be a lack of uniform awareness that the Smithsonian had specific standards around content.” Even though SD 603 requires a balance of perspectives present in any exhibit, the policy failed to “provide guidance regarding … what it means to have a reasonable balance of perspectives.”
To right the wrongs of the Smithsonian oversight in the Patterns of Life Hewitt exhibit, the OIG proposed seven changes to SD 603 to make the exhibit-approving process more rigorous and documented. Smithsonian management accepted almost all of the requested changes.
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