Let me start with some musings.Good museums never stand still; they are constantly re-evaluating, re-interpreting, adding new understandings as well as showing new and borrowed collections. We certainly wouldn’t want to view the world and art exactly as centuries-ago founders may have. Repeated visits give us good value.
I also think that it’s possible for a new exhibition to lose its way, either through over-thinking by curators, or by lacking a clear focus. I’ve been following the Brooklyn Museum’s re-thinking of its American art galleries for a year and change, now, from its first big steps last spring to its completely re-imagined exhibition that opened in October under the title “Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art.”
While there is a lot to see and learn from the exhibit, I don’t think it does well at justifying its title or at what it initially promised: offering “bold encounters with art and material culture from across the Western Hemisphere.” Nearly all is from North America, and only a few pieces represent indigenous peoples. What it does achieve, and that’s important, is to incorporate critical ideas from outside the usual art establishment, including feminist, gay and African-American voices.
For all that, as I said above: Nothing is permanent, but much is learned each time a major collection is re-arranged and re-interpreted. This is the second time in ten years that Brooklyn has undertaken a major new project for American art—it won’t be the last, but it will certainly influence the next, and give us quite a bit to think about.
The exhibit opens with its first ‘framework,’ Trouble the Water, the words from an old spiritual. The narrative tells us that water both separates and binds, and reminds us how central it is to people’s daily lives, to their movement, to escape from bondage, and sometimes to the destruction of what has been built. All the works in this section feature water in some form, including two Pueblo ceramic works, a 19th century water jar and a 20th century wedding vase.
Asher Durand’s First Harvest in the Wilderness is a real history painting. Not only does it reflect the idea of Manifest Destiny for European settlers to dominate the continent no matter that it already had inhabitants, it was also the first picture in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, commissioned by its predecessor in 1855. Durand painted the donor’s name on a rock in the picture.
The American (Art) Study is a large structure in the middle of the second gallery; it contains books, objects, workspaces and more that reflect the study that went into imagining and mounting the new exhibition.
The gallery it’s in reflects the next framework: Radical Care. The labeling tells us that the gallery “explores forms of curatorial care—for artworks, belongings, and people” and that the works “illuminate the relationships between their subjects and the land—and those between and within communities, tribes and nations.”
Sometimes, we learn, what we see is quite different from its context; the painting above by Agostino Brunias was painted in the British colony of Dominica in the 1770s on a commission from the British government; its title is Free Women of Color with their Children and Servants. Its aim was to make life there look idyllic to the British public and distract from the reality of slave labor in the colony. Profits from that labor helped support a trade in fine silver and furniture for the wealthy.
Below, two views with a similar feel, both painted in the 1920s—one agricultural and one industrial.
The next gallery takes as its framework “To Give Flowers,” and cites the idea as connected to giving people their due credit while they are still here to receive it.
In the next gallery, the framework is “Counterparts,” and the question is asked “How is meaning made through contrast? Can contrast be complementary?” The labeling refers to the ways in the past in which the work of Black artists was treated differently from that of their white contemporaries, though here the questions is also raised in different contexts such as the painting below which contrasts a scene in a New York City park with industrial work on the adjacent shore.
Below: an interesting idea that doesn’t really work. In parts of the exhibition, rather than providing narrative labels for each work, they’re loaded on a tablet, allowing visitors to scroll through them, and to access additional material. However, if you’re at the tablet six pictures away from the one whose details you’re reading about, or if you’re the fourth person in line waiting for access to the tablet…
The next framework is “Surface Tension,” and focuses on the human body, mainly nude. The narrative explains that “this framework illuminates depictions of the human form and sets them in conversation with contemporary questions of power, agency and embodiment.”
There’s an included subsection that focuses on a rear view of nudes, including a version Thomas Eakins’ painting of William Rush and his nude model for an allegorical figure of the Schuylkill River; close inspection shows a bored chaperone knitting in the foreground, while the model holds her pose by holding a dictionary on her shoulder.
With the framework “Several Seats,” the Museum addresses the issue faced by many art museums: Extensive collections of high-quality portraits of rich white people. Rather than removing them, the curators have hung them near floor level, and provided a row of benches so we, too, may have a seat. During my visit, though, few visitors took this option. Opposite the portraits, the exhibit includes a collection of artistic chairs, from antique to modern.
The next room has fewer seats, but it did draw more people to sit in them, inspired by the framework “A Quiet Place.” where, it says, “the work of Black feminist creatives and cultural critics such as Tricia Hersey of the Nap Ministry and Cole Arthur Riley of Black Liturgies, deeply inform this framework” with calls to “slow down, practice introspection, and move with intention through the world.”
The final framework is “Witness.” The narrative speaks to the significance of bearing witness to events and movements in life and society, especially for the disenfranchised. It poses the sharp idea that “Witnessing is distinct from merely looking. To bear witness means you are accountable for what you have seen.”
At the very end of the exhibit, we come to what could, perhaps, have been a metaphor for the curators’ intent, however much it may have wandered. Titus Kaphar has taken a 17th-century painting, Family Group in a Landscape by Frans Hals, and—literally—whitewashed it, but with the opposite effect of the overall whitewashing of so much of western art: By obscuring what we are used to seeing, he reveals what we have usually missed.
It looks like an awe-inspiring museum. I would love to visit it someday!