A local weather activist who smeared paint on the glass defending an Edgar Degas sculpture within the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork in Washington, D.C., has been discovered responsible by a federal jury of conspiracy to commit an offense towards the US.
The US Division of Justice introduced right now that Timothy Martin, 55, of Raleigh, North Carolina, was additionally discovered responsible of damage to a Nationwide Gallery of Artwork exhibit, regarding the April 2023 incident wherein he and a fellow activist, with the environmentalist group Declare Emergency, focused the case and base of Edgar Degas’s Little Dancer, Age Fourteen, one of the crucial well-known sculptures within the Western artwork canon and a significant vacationer draw for the establishment.
Per the DOJ, Martin and his companion, Johanna Smith, induced greater than $4,000 in harm, and compelled the exhibit to shut from public view for 10 days of repairs. Smith pleaded responsible in December 2023 to 1 rely of inflicting damage to the gallery’s exhibit and was sentenced to 60 days in jail, adopted by 24 months of supervised launch, and ordered to pay a $3,000 superb and $4,062 in restitution.
Since taking workplace, President Trump has escalated penalties for activism that entails bringing consciousness to the local weather disaster by way of concentrating on artworks. A March 2025 directive, titled Executive Order to Make D.C. Safe and Beautiful, issued broad directives to rectify what the Trump administration has deemed problems with crime and aesthetics within the US capital, together with the restoration of monuments, eradicating graffiti from public areas, and the creation of the D.C. Protected and Lovely Process Drive, nominally charged with coordinating “regulation enforcement efforts.”
