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Episode 1: Five Major Moments in the History of Exhibiting American Art
165 Plays1 month ago
Welcome to Breaking the Frame, a podcast featuring interviews that explore how museums and the people who work in them shape American history and culture — past and present. Before getting to our interviews this season, hosts Emily Casey and Ruthie Dibble set the table in this episode by discussing five major moments in the history of exhibiting American art.
To keep up with Breaking the Frame, subscribe or visit our website at zencastr.com/Breaking-the-Frame.
More information about the artworks and topics discussed in this episode:
- Major Moment 1: Charles Willson Peale, The Artist in His Museum, 1822.
- Major Moment 2: Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire, ca. 1834-1836: The Savage State, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, The Consummation of Empire, Destruction, Desolation. You can also learn more from a video on the series by New-York Historical Society curator Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto here.
- Major Moment 3: The opening of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The first image is of the American Wing building featuring the facade of the Second Branch Bank of the United States. The second image is a photograph of the Marmion Room from a series of images promoting the newly opened American Wing. This photograph can be seen at the top of this article from the Met, and you can learn more about the Marmion Room from their website at this link. You can also look through a new (2002) and old (1938) guide to the American Wing on the Met website via the links.
- Major Moment 4: The Two Centuries of Black American Art exhibition curated by David Driskell. Learn more here, and view the photo discussed here.
- Major Moment 5: The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). See the photo discussed here.
Credits:
- Hosts: Emily C. Casey and R. Ruthie Dibble
- Production Assistant: Katherine White
- Additional research prepared by: The graduate students of the Spring 2024 HA 706/906 Seminar in American Art: American Museums: Race, Class, Labor at the University of Kansas
- Theme music: "Deliberate Thought" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
- Artwork: Designed by Katherine White, featuring a frame (ca. 1849-1858) created by the United States Pottery Company currently in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Bye!
Introduction to the Podcast 'Breaking the Frame'
00:00:14
Speaker
This is Breaking the Frame, a podcast featuring interviews that explore how museums and the people who work in them shape American history and culture. Past and present. Have you ever visited a museum and wondered, why are these things on the wall? Why is this room set up how it is?
00:00:33
Speaker
Who wrote the label? Whose idea was this exhibition? Why is the wall blue or green or yellow or covered with wallpaper? We're going to be exploring these kinds of questions and more with brilliant, game-changing, and overall awesome curators and scholars of American art, broadly conceived.
Meet the Hosts: Emily Casey and Ruthie Dibble
00:00:52
Speaker
I'm Emily Casey, Hall Assistant Professor of American Art and Culture at the University of Kansas. I have a PhD in art history with a focus on the visual and material culture of the colonial Americas and United States. And I moved to Kansas about a year and a half ago after a lifetime on the East Coast. I'm loving getting to know the prairie landscape here. I'm Ruthie Dibble. I'm the Robert N. Shapiro Curator of American Decorative Art at the Peabody Essex Museum.
00:01:20
Speaker
in Salem, Massachusetts. I also have a PhD in art history with a focus on American material and visual culture. And I live in Salem right around the corner from the Custom House where Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote the Scarlet Letter. And I feel starstruck about that every day.
Podcast Goals: Exploring American Art History
00:01:37
Speaker
We are developing this podcast in conjunction with my graduate level art history seminar at Kansas on the history of museums in America. The graduate students will be contributing research and support to the production of each episode. You might hear some of them in some of the interviews as well.
00:01:55
Speaker
But before we bring in our guest interviewees, Emily and I decided to record a first episode where we interview each other about five major moments in the history of exhibiting American art. And this is obviously a very incomplete and subjective overview.
00:02:11
Speaker
There are so many major moments when an exhibition had a defining impact on the history of American art. So Ruthie and I each chose just a few that have been influential on our own thinking about the role of museums in defining American culture and history. And some of these moments are going to set up themes that we'll be exploring in our interviews.
00:02:32
Speaker
Our selections cross four centuries and the geography of the United States. They feature a variety of media, not just paintings and sculpture, but also furniture and silver. And we're going to move through them chronologically. Emily, start us off.
00:02:47
Speaker
So I'm going to start with our earliest moment, which comes at the end of the 18th
Charles Wilson Peale and the Philadelphia Museum
00:02:52
Speaker
century. And to set the scene, it's 1788, and the American Revolution has recently ended. The Capitol is in Philadelphia. In the same city, the artist Charles Wilson Peale founds the Philadelphia Museum, the first museum in the United States. In the early 19th century, the museum is moved into Independence Hall, where the Congress met to write the Constitution.
00:03:17
Speaker
So Ruthie, I'm going to share with you a painting that Peel made ah depicting the museum in the Long Gallery of Independence Hall. And for our listeners, ah we'll include a link so that you can look at this painting on our website as well. Can you tell me what stands out to you when you look at the picture? Yes, I am looking at a painting that features at its center a large imposing man with finely shaped legs um in a black suit. He's holding a curtain up and kind of beckoning in a with one hand as if to say like come forward into this space. Kind of behind the curtain I can see it to one side is a huge skeleton. You know I'm gonna guess it's of a ah mastodon or an elephant and in the foreground next to this figure is oddly enough a dead turkey like
00:04:08
Speaker
Thanksgiving turkey? Fantastic. Yeah, those are like some of the most important details, I think, in terms of understanding what Peale wants us to know about his museum. Let's start with Peale himself. um The painting is called The Artist in His Museum.
00:04:25
Speaker
and Peale painted it in 1822 when he was in his 80s. So you noticed how he's in the very middle of the scene, um which really shows both how much Peale regarded himself, and I think he would have appreciated that you noticed his well-turned-calf.
00:04:43
Speaker
ah But it's also showing how he wants us to see him as the mediator between the audience and the culture and objects that are on display in the museum. that He's really the one guiding us through the experience.
00:04:58
Speaker
And you also notice some of the different things that were in the museum. And you're right, there is this skeleton, which is of a mastodon, a prehistoric animal, kind of like a mammoth, that Peale and his family were involved in excavating the bones of a mastodon in North America during this period as well.
Shaping American Identity Through Museums
00:05:18
Speaker
And there are other displays of natural history items, including taxidermied birds,
00:05:25
Speaker
and other types of artifacts that are in the museum. So that turkey that you noticed is set alongside the the type of toolbox that someone doing taxidermy would use and is showing off Peale's many skills, not just as an artist,
00:05:41
Speaker
but also a natural historian that he's in the process of preserving this turkey, which is an animal ah indigenous to North America. um Benjamin Franklin famously wanted the turkey to be the national bird for the United States. So something really linked to American geography and the US nation. And so he's showing us these different types of items in the in the museum that are natural history items as well as fine art.
00:06:09
Speaker
And then he's welcoming us into this space that has like a long haul and in the hall I can see four different figures and they're kind of looking at display cases. One is a woman, um one is maybe ah a father with a son.
00:06:24
Speaker
And the other one is a man on his own. So I'm seeing kind of a variety of stages of life and genders in this painting too. And what I love about these figures is with them, Piel is really showing us how he wants us or or the the visitors to behave in the museum. So in the very far background, the man by himself, he is kind of sitting, standing back on one leg and he's got his hand up to his face in this thoughtful pose. So he's sort of reflecting and ah absorbing what he's seeing. And then the father-son duo, we get the sense of teaching and learning that the father is instructing his son and showing him things in the museum. So we're supposed to be learning in this space. And then the woman figure, she's actually turned towards the mastodon and she stepped back with her hands in the air with this
00:07:16
Speaker
expression of surprise. So we're also meant to be awed and overwhelmed by the things we see in the museum. So I think that's showing us how Peale is interested in teaching people how to be in cultural spaces. And that's related to his own interest in shaping the character of citizens of the early United States. And I would relate that to the fact that, as I said earlier, Peel moved the museum into Independence Hall, the first seat of the U.S. government, which suggests that he saw the museum as part of a nation-building project that was meant to help Americans understand what the United States was as well as what it meant to be a U.S. citizen. That's really interesting, Emily. I would think that, like,
00:08:04
Speaker
there's This is the beginning of a very long history that continues up to the present day of museums shaping citizenship. Do we have a sense of like what specifically citizens of the United States took away from their visits to Peale's Museum?
00:08:21
Speaker
I think that part of what Peel wanted them to take away was a sense of forming American culture, so that and that that culture was not just a present culture, but was also creating a past for the United States. So ancient mastodon bones is linking the United States to a longer history of the land of North America, which You know i would add was important for a settler colonial nation that was occupying territory that had a longer history of relationship to indigenous peoples in north america but that he's also interested in training people in discernment.
00:09:07
Speaker
ah So thinking about, as a US citizen, you are participating in elections, you are part of a ah ah democratic process, and that that involves being able to analyze and make judgments about what you're seeing around you as part of being a participant in that.
00:09:29
Speaker
political culture. And so for Peale, learning how to be in a museum, learning how to look at a natural history artifact or a work of art to ah interpret and understand it, was a way of practicing a type of critical analysis and looking that he was linking to some of the other activities of citizenship and within the early culture of the United States.
00:09:56
Speaker
And I guess the last thing that I would say about that is there are, like you said, definitely elements of that that are still part of how we understand what it means to be participating in ah the process of citizenship today. But I think, you know, remembering that Peale places himself at the middle of the picture, it's also a reminder that he is part of a cohort of elite white men in the United States who really understand themselves to be setting those terms.
00:10:26
Speaker
Yeah, when you were talking about citizens and voting and being politically active, it made me think about how in this period women couldn't vote, but they were certainly involved politically. And it's the same for many different disenfranchised populations in this period.
00:10:41
Speaker
One of the things that I wonder about and notice about this painting is that it seems to be kind of seamlessly mixing art and science, which resonates with me, particularly in my position at the Peabody Essex Museum, because the museum is a combination of very historic, essentially science museum and a very historic historical society with ah different you know types of objects that have been melded together. So I work at a place that is a kind of art and science museum.
00:11:08
Speaker
Cool. I mean, that seems like a good first major moment. First major moment. I'm really curious to see what you're going to bring in next, Ruthie. Okay, Emily, I want you to look at, ah again, a painting, but a rather different
Thomas Cole's Critique of American Society
00:11:21
Speaker
one. This is The Course of Empire Destruction by Thomas Cole. And Emily, tell me what you're seeing here.
00:11:29
Speaker
Oh my gosh, there's a there's a lot going on here. So it's a very overwhelming composition. There's like a lot of different components to it. And the scene looks like it's a city on the coast. There's a lot of water. There's a very stormy tempestuous sky above and The city, it seems to be like an urban space. There's a lot of neoclassical architecture, like a lot of white buildings. I'm seeing columns. But like you said with the title, it is in some sort of state of destruction. It seems to be actively torn apart by what's looking like a violent mob that's on the bridges and on different platforms around the city. There are some of these buildings look like they're on fire.
00:12:17
Speaker
And things like there's a statue I see that looks like it's broken. And then there's this very dramatic woman in the foreground who appears to be sort of throwing herself off a cliff or something into the water. So it it seems very tumultuous.
00:12:34
Speaker
That was perfect. ah You did an excellent job of describing a painting that I would describe as like the ultimate example of more is more. Speaking of more is more, this is the fourth in a series of five paintings called The Course of Empire that was painted by Thomas Cole between 1835 and 1836.
00:12:54
Speaker
And the five canvases depict the rise and fall of a civilization from a European perspective. So it starts with ah a state of what he called savage nature to an agrarian landscape, to a populous and wealthy city. And here what you're seeing is that city's corruption and collapse. And then the last is a return to nature. So there's this sense of the cyclical.
00:13:18
Speaker
um and nature kind of taking back over the ruins of the city. I selected the series as a major moment um because they are among, if not the most significant artworks in early American history that introduced the possibility that art and American art could serve as a social critique and that, ah you know, paintings could comment critically about present-day politics and events.
00:13:45
Speaker
And I think that concept continues to fuel a lot of exhibitions and artists um and interpretive themes in American art to this day. So just a bit of background, this is the 1830s in New York and Thomas Cole is considered the most promising emerging painter in the United States.
00:14:04
Speaker
He was born in England, but he moved to the US as a young child and started producing these moody and evocative paintings of American landscapes in the 1820s that were really unlike what American patrons of the arts had seen before. And he quickly attracted several interested major patrons. One of them commissioned the course of empire, and this was Lumen Reed, who was a wealthy merchant in New York City. Interestingly, I think it's worth parsing out the difference between being like wealthy and elite. Lumen Reed began life as a clerk for a grocer. So he's not one of these people in early America who has an Ivy League education and and is from many generations. you He represents the self-made man in the 1830s.
00:14:46
Speaker
And yeah, so he's kind of representing this new wealth that's happening. And he has this mansion that he's ah built in New York City, and he decides to ask Cole to paint a suite of paintings that will fill, the Course Vampire would fill a whole wall. um And it's meant to be kind of visually overwhelming and sublime. And he also commissioned Cole to create a decorative scheme for the room too. So the Cole painted scenes that would be panels and all the doors and things like that.
00:15:13
Speaker
Cole's take on this, because of course he's an artist and he has his own specific point of view, is that he is very interested in critiquing luxury and the kind of overwrought wealth of the 1830s. So he's thinking about it in terms of corruption, like that the wealth of a civilization quickly declines into a kind of mob rule and violence.
00:15:36
Speaker
And it's often thought by scholars that he was critiquing what we now call Jacksonian America, which was named after the then President Andrew Jackson. So this is a time of economic catastrophes that are coming from the instability of American currency. There's also the trails of tears that were not only the Cherokee, but many other nations.
00:15:56
Speaker
which was you know by many considered very disturbing and controversial. And you're also getting the rapid expansion of the population and ah the ensuing destruction of the American environment, which Cole was particularly sensitive to. So you can see how he has his boots on the ground, critical artist perspective on what's happening in American society.
00:16:18
Speaker
That's super interesting. And I think it's such an interesting moment where there's this more active support you're describing for early American artists. And it makes me wonder, why is Reed commissioning work from someone like Cole in the United States instead of, I don't know, going to Europe and buying either historic or contemporary work by like super famous European artists, which I think is mostly what people were valuing at this time Yeah, I mean, it's a great question.
Formation of American Art and its Social Engagement
00:16:50
Speaker
I think that the the general understanding is that Lumen Reed was part of this group of art patrons who were interested in fostering a national artistic culture for this still new United States that would rival that of Europe. And I think they saw this as being something like what they would have called a native art scene without irony. They wouldn't have seen that in that statement.
00:17:11
Speaker
with artists who, because they're American and rooted in America, could be particularly responsive to the natural beauty and the social conditions and the tastes of the United States and not only respond to but also shape perceptions of the United States. But I think what's cool about the paintings is that there's so much to unpack, but you don't necessarily need to know these historical details to see that the series is trying to make a critical point. It shows the decline and fall and you can sort of piece together what is happening. um And I think it powerfully resonates with most people's experience of modernity today that we've kind of backed ourselves into a corner of being overdeveloped. And I also just love the way that Kohl's visual strategy, which is like that more is more
00:17:56
Speaker
and creating this dense field of visual information is resonating with contemporary artists today. I think of artists like Kerry James Marshall and Kent Monkman, where you can unpack their paintings and start to understand what they're trying to say and what their perspective is without having to be able to make all these like erudite references. They're in there, and you can make them, but you don't have to to appreciate the art.
00:18:18
Speaker
I love that connection you're making to some of the artists who are working today. And their work we tend to see in major museums and exhibitions. But I'm remembering that you said that Lumen Reed commissioned these for his home. So would people have been able to see them? Like who saw them? And are they still at his house? Where are they now?
00:18:40
Speaker
Yeah, so funnily enough, Lumen Reed actually died before the commission was complete, but his family continued to support the project. So they, instead of just, you know, simply being closed up in his house, where I'm sure he would have hosted people and people would have seen them, instead the paintings go on public view in 1844 in this New York gallery of fine arts.
00:19:01
Speaker
I want to say that the other way that they went out into the world is through print reproductions of the Course of Empire, which were quite popular and allowed people of, you know, many different socioeconomic statuses and in far-flung places to view and unpack and appreciate these works. In 1858, the collection was donated to the New York Historical Society where these paintings are now.
00:19:24
Speaker
It's interesting, i they're so they're really large scale and I think it would be surprising to many that they were made for a private home, but in fact a lot of paintings in museums today were originally commissioned for homes, which is interesting because you don't necessarily get that domestic history unless you're looking at like literally a period room, but it's important on song history of a lot of paintings anyway. That's great. Yeah, so interesting thinking about these first two major moments that are about kind of the foundation of a public museum space, but also the formation of really a sense of of what American art is and how it engages with social issues from the time and how that's involving
00:20:09
Speaker
private patronage as well as then public exhibition as well. So we're going to switch things up for our next major moment because in fact, for our third major moment where we're squarely into the 19th and early 20th century and in a more traditional art museum space, Ruthie and I actually chose the same thing. So we both chose the same major moment. The opening of the American wing. The opening of the American wing.
The American Wing at the Met: Significance and Strategies
00:20:39
Speaker
i but but and nineteen more twenty four Okay, Emily, I'm gonna let you go first with why you picked it. So I am so excited about this because I think we picked them for different but related reasons. So I think it'll be a good conversation. So Ruthie, I'm going to share with you the image I picked for the Met. Can you describe to me what you're seeing?
00:21:00
Speaker
I can. I know parts of this photo well because I was fortunate to be an intern and then a fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but this image is still like wildly unfamiliar to me. So I'm looking at the facade of the second branch bank of the United States, which was maybe an 1820s historical structure.
00:21:20
Speaker
And I can see like on one side, it's connecting to some of the pre-existing Met building. like I can see like a kind of early 20th century modern facade. But what's crazy is that it's outdoors, the space in front of the the facade. So what's now like an enclosed courtyard is like a grass lawn with flagstones and beautiful plantings around it and then sky above. Yes, totally. And like you said, if any listeners have been to the Met and been in this space, you're probably familiar with it as a huge covered courtyard so that the entire floor is a marble floor. There's a very brilliant glass the ceiling above. There's an upper level of galleries. That's where one of the cafes for the Met is.
00:22:14
Speaker
That's actually a space that is where they host the Met Gala many years when it's at the Met, is in that courtyard. It's called the Engelhard Courtyard. So in 1924, when the American Wing opened, that space was in addition to the main building and it had a historic facade. The facade came from the second branch bank of the United States, which was a building in Lower Manhattan from the early federal period.
00:22:42
Speaker
early 19th century that was slated to be destroyed. So when the building was destroyed, the facade was preserved, the front of the building was preserved and brought uptown to be the front of the Met's new American wing. And so what has always struck me as really fascinating about the opening of the American wing is this idea that it had to be separate and visually distinguishable from the Met's main building and its collection.
00:23:09
Speaker
And that approach was true once you entered the American Wing as well, since the displays there focused on the decorative arts. And we're going to talk about that more in a second. So they weren't what you would consider as traditional museum galleries with paintings on the wall and sculptures in the middle of a kind of large, mostly empty room.
00:23:30
Speaker
ah They were spaces that had furniture and other types of decorative arts in them. And I think that says a lot about what was considered American art at the time, as well as how it was valued. Now it's true in the same period, a lot of the early donors to the museum, as well as members of its board, were collecting what was to them contemporary American art, meaning painting and sculpture from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
00:23:57
Speaker
Those works were part of their personal collections and they also were on view at the Met, ah just not in these spaces ah where the display of decorative arts were installed in the American wing. But in terms of thinking about what a city art museum would be holding and displaying, the value is still really placed on the cultures of Europe and the art of europe as well as i said these archaeological artifacts and architectural structures that are on earth through archaeology which is a is about a sort of ancient civilizations that are seen as,
00:24:41
Speaker
the precursors to European culture. And so there's this understanding we get of the status of American art and culture vis-a-vis that of Europe through the physical landscape of how American art is introduced into the Met campus as it were in this period in the early 20th century that I find so fascinating.
00:25:06
Speaker
That is really fascinating. Yeah, it's interesting like how you walk through the the Met today and it still is, you know, the the American wing is its own physical space. I've been intrigued to see in the past several years the Met creating these like areas, these kind of connection areas where they bring together works from different departments related to a common theme, and they'll kind of place it in part of the museum that's a kind of connective point, which is an intriguing example of like curatorial interpretations like working against things that are, um in a really productive way, against things that are big and kind of unbudgeable, like architectural spaces conceived a century ago.
00:25:46
Speaker
Emily, can I show you a photo of the American wing in 1924? Late on me, I'm ready. Okay, this one's pretty great. Can you describe it for the viewer? Yeah, okay. So this is an indoor scene. It looks like a living room maybe.
00:26:03
Speaker
and it is an old-timey space. So I'm seeing what looks like colonial period chairs, there is wood paneling on the walls, and then there's actually a person in the picture. It's a woman, she's sitting by a fireplace, and she's in this fancy colonial dress with a white cap on her head. So I have some questions about when this photograph was taken and and how that scene came to be. Yeah, so this is one of several promotional photographs that the Met created when the wing was opened, showcasing the period rooms that were really like the star of the wing. This is the parlor of Marmian, a plantation house built around 1756. It was owned by the Fitzhugh family of Virginia and likely built, at least in part, by enslaved people.
00:26:57
Speaker
As you can see, there's not a lot in this period room, and I think in part that is because the Met was interested in showcasing what makes this room really exceptional, which is the beautiful painted woodwork. It has some of the most complex painted panels of the 18th century colonial America.
00:27:14
Speaker
It's difficult to see in this photo, but there's decorative garlands and a landscape. And then they've placed this woman here who we can kind of imagine as the lady of the house. She is shown individually rather than surrounded by the family that she was probably responsible for and the people that she and her husband would have enslaved.
00:27:36
Speaker
One thing that I love about this scene and how much it kind of reflects how we imagine the wealthy elite past in this period is that she's doing absolutely nothing. like she's just a woman of leisure. And, you know, I think that kind of speaks to the fact that these rooms weren't meant to be extremely historically accurate. They were meant to showcase objects and costumes that spoke to the American past and the strengths of its like craftspeople and artisans.
00:28:07
Speaker
The New York Times, of course, covered the opening ah of the American Wing in 1924 in great detail. And they published the opening remarks ah made by Elihu Root, who, as a shout out to my alma mater, was a Hamilton College class of 1864. So I really found this passage fascinating. he He says, the result of providing, again, that atmosphere is that we have this story not told by what anybody says of our forebearers.
00:28:36
Speaker
not by what anybody has written or printed about them, but the story told in the facts, deeds, and documents they have left, arranged in due and argumentative order, from the little low-ceilinged room of the 17th century all the way down, answering in nature to the changing and enlarging conditions of life, to the ballroom where Washington danced, and the fine rooms of the early 19th century.
00:28:57
Speaker
So he's kind of doing an extended metaphor here. I feel ambivalent about this passage, but I find it really fascinating. One thing he's saying is he's kind of positioning the things that you see in the wing as being primary documents, like rich with information about the past that's firsthand. And I think that is like so important and interesting and the way that I still like to think about objects when I curate them today. I think the problematic part of it is, you know, there's no acknowledgement of the narrow range of history that is perceived to live in these objects and the narrow range of objects all very elite that are on display. I think it's a really interesting passage and kind of speaks to why these types of objects were so valued when the wing opened and why they continue to be now because actually he's so right that in fact these as primary documents is actually a lot more capacious than he even understood. So there are so many things that were installed in the American wing in 1924 that could now be talked about through the lens of
00:29:54
Speaker
for example, enslaved crafts people. He's not you know seeing that, but um his overall point that these are really rich documents holds true. And I also, just reading this and thinking about our previous major moments, it's like we've reached like the third scene of Course of Empire. it's like Because he's talking about this progress, American progress, from the low-ceilinged room to ah you know a ballroom where George Washington danced. But it's so much about optimism. He's not seeing like the downfall that Cole first saw, but it definitely is playing into that kind of rise of civilization motif.
00:30:32
Speaker
Absolutely. And I really appreciate how you're pointing out the sort of positives and negatives of of this kind of perspective, that there are elements of how he's describing these rooms and what is possible with them, that we still want to carry forward with us or maybe even resonate with some of the things that we see as being important in museums today. While also, I think this is a really good example of how exhibition spaces can make certain types of perspectives on history seem inevitable without making other perspectives visible. So you know these were actually highly curated rooms, right? They are saving historic exteriors and interiors and moving them across the country from Connecticut or New Hampshire or Virginia to New York City where they're reinstalling them and then putting furniture in them, sometimes from those same houses, but sometimes not. So these are invented spaces that are envisioning a particular story about earlier American life.
00:31:40
Speaker
but they're presenting them in a way that makes them feel completely truthful and factual so that what's invisible in them, whether that's, like you said, the enslaved people who also lived and worked and made those spaces possible, or the types of spaces that were not saved, whether they were lonelier homes or other types of temporary structures, we're not noticing their absence because we're completely overwhelmed by this total environment.
00:32:09
Speaker
of the historic interior. So I think it's an interesting example of how exhibition spaces can work on us to really emphasize a certain perspective on history or culture and make it easier to not notice other perspectives. Yes, Emily, I agree. Museums can be really powerful, persuasive spaces, and there's always double-edged sword to that.
00:32:35
Speaker
So moving on to our fourth major moment, ah Ruthie, I'm sharing another picture with you here.
Highlighting Black American Art History
00:32:43
Speaker
And I'm wondering if you can tell me what you see going on in this photograph.
00:32:51
Speaker
Okay, I'm looking at a black and white photograph and it's an installation shot of a gallery and I'm gonna guess it's like 1970s. I'm seeing a lot of sharp hard lines. I'm seeing some can lighting, white walls. In terms of art, I can kind of say what I'm seeing based on what I know. There are two smaller statue sculptures by the 19th century Black and Indigenous artist, Edmonia Lewis. And amazingly, they are on a plinth that also seems to include plants. I don't know if they're real. um And then behind that, I'm seeing a painting of a landscape that
00:33:31
Speaker
It looks like it could be like a George Innes or maybe a Robert Duncanson or something like that. Great. Perfect. Yeah, and you are absolutely right. This is an installation shot from an exhibition from 1976 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LACMA.
00:33:51
Speaker
And the exhibit was called Two Centuries of Black American Art. So you're right that the artworks that you are noticing are works by really prominent 19th century artists, including Edmonia Lewis and Robert Duncanson. The show also included works by other prominent 19th century artists like Henry Osawa Tanner and Edward Bannister, as well as artists from the 20th century, including Alma Thomas, and the shows
00:34:23
Speaker
expand the years from 1750 to 1950. So the earlier portion of the show was really featuring the work of black craftspeople. That means it had furniture as well as ceramics and other decorative art objects. Some of them by known makers like the furniture maker Thomas Day and others by once known makers whose names we have now lost.
00:34:50
Speaker
The exhibition was curated by the Black American artist and scholar David Driscoll. And his goal was to really highlight the work, not just of contemporary Black artists of the 1970s, but to really make a case for the long history of Black Americans making art in the United States.
00:35:13
Speaker
and to explore the period of the 19th century as this time of cultural emancipation where there is a flourishing of production by Black artists. And so there's just so much that's going on with what Driscoll achieved in two centuries of Black American art. He is through a museum exhibition.
00:35:37
Speaker
forming a history and canon of Black American art, which was something that hadn't really existed in that way prior to the kind of scholarship that came out of this show. Driscoll himself, in talking in the 1970s about the exhibit, he said, quote I was looking for a body of work which showed first of all that blacks had been stable participants in American visual culture for more than 200 years. And by stable participants, I simply mean that in many cases they had been the backbone." Unquote.
00:36:10
Speaker
So you know I think one of the things that he was responding to was that in the 60s and 70s, if we think about the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, the rise of the Black Arts Movement in conjunction with those political and social activities, there is more attention to the work of contemporary Black artists in the United States, but there's not really the same attention to this longer history. And so in doing so, Driscoll is saying not just that African-American people have been present in and participating in American culture from the colonial period onward, but in referring to them as the backbone, he's making a larger case for the significance of their contribution to the formation of American culture. and that he's doing all of that through a museum exhibition. He's allowing the objects to tell this story. A lot of the emphasis in this period of the 60s and 70s was on the social function of art, the social critique of art that was being made by contemporary Black artists. But there was really a flattening of the possibilities of what
00:37:22
Speaker
black creators could comment on. So that unless the work was really politically engaged with the civil rights movement, it often was disregarded. And that's something that contemporary black artists struggled with their desire to be participating in broader artistic discourses, to be understood as artists with varied social aesthetic and political commitments in their work and not just to be seen solely through the lens of their race. And so Driscoll is taking that project of complicating the narrative of Black culture and of Black artistic creation, and he's extending it across the history of the United States.
00:38:09
Speaker
So that in itself is a form of political engagement representing black creators as um complex actors and contributors whose sense of identity and artistic contribution is as varied as that of white creators. And that for the history of art and the history of art in the United States, that capaciousness was something that had been granted to the assessment of white artists in a way that it had not been for black artists.
00:38:37
Speaker
And that's something that Driscoll is exploring and making space for in this exhibition as well. It sounds like David Driscoll, while building off of the legacies and work of many previous artists and scholars, had a really original and like broad sweeping take on this project. It just makes me wonder, who was David Driscoll? What was his background? And do we know like how he came up with this idea?
00:39:03
Speaker
Yeah, such good questions. And I totally agree with you that um this show was what it was because of David Driscoll's vision. And I think a really big part of that is that Driscoll was a curator, a scholar and an artist himself. And so I think, you know, he had firsthand experience about his own sense of his artistic project and how it was being received during his lifetime as a way of thinking about the artists that he then featured in the exhibition. So Driscoll was educated at Howard University and he worked at the University of Maryland. And so he comes to LACMA as a guest curator to work on this exhibition.
Diversity and Equity in Museum Curation
00:39:47
Speaker
And Driscoll was one of a cohort of curators and people who involved in the museum world who really understood that given the inequities in museum spaces for African American people at this time. It wasn't enough just to be exhibiting the work of Black artists, but what was really important was to have Black people be in positions of power and positions of decision making within museum spaces. So Driscoll is part of an effort to include African American people
00:40:23
Speaker
within the administration and curation of museums and really seeing that as a primary site for change making. And I think that's another thing that's significant about this exhibition and the people involved in it is you know that question that we asked about who decides what goes in the museum or what we see and that in this case it really mattered the cultural perspective of who was making those decisions and creating more equity at that level and not just simply broadening what is visible on the walls. How did people respond to Driscoll's show? I'm curious if we know Emily.
00:41:05
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think there were both really positive responses and critical responses. And I think, again, the critical responses are interesting because they get both at the question of what belongs in an art museum, as well as this question of who or what kind of art represents Black American culture. So in terms of the question of what belongs in an art museum, there were critiques of the exhibition that it included work that was not art. And that was referring to the decorative arts and craft objects that were in primarily the early part of the exhibition, the part that's representing the first century, 1750 to 1850.
00:41:54
Speaker
I was just gonna say it's so interesting to think about how much that's changed because now you have like the Met doing the show Hear Me Now, which is all about the very types of 19th century ceramics that David Driscoll was featuring in that show. and rightly received major critical acclaim. And then that critique which was about sort of who was included. I think there was because there was so much emphasis in this period on the work of contemporary Black artists. The fact that this exhibit Two Centuries of Black Art ended at 1950 or like with that cutoff date and was not including more contemporary work
00:42:30
Speaker
that also was a critique of the show. And I think that was also as much about how it was not directly engaging with the political movements of its day, which again, I think this show was political, it was It was a political comment and engagement on the role of African-American people in American society, but it is choosing to navigate that engagement in a different kind of way. And that didn't necessarily fit with other narratives of what politically active art or curatorial activities looked like. So in that sense as well, I think the critique is interesting.
00:43:11
Speaker
Thank you, Emily. That was so interesting and also points out some of what was missing from our previous major moments and more for us to discuss in future interviews, too. So, Ruthie, we are at our fifth major moment. Where are you going to take us? Our fifth and our last, Emily, and I am taking us to 1990, as well as 2024. Hear
NAGPRA and Museum Accountability
00:43:35
Speaker
me out.
00:43:35
Speaker
This last major moment is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, also known as NAGPRA, which was enacted into law, federal law, in 1990. But actually, thanks to many people, including Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, has recently had important updates to the law that actually only took effect on January 12th of this year.
00:44:02
Speaker
so Speaking of what's happened in January, Emily, I just sent you a photo. Tell me what you see. I think what's ah significant about this photo is what I can't see. um I'm looking at a museum gallery, which I can tell because I see some cases in the background and some signage on the wall, looks like a museum. But the cases in the foreground that I'm looking at have been covered over, so i I can't see what's inside them. They have some kind of opaque screen or material blocking them. And then there's a kind of stanchion with a sign that has clearly just been put up in front of them. Do you want me to read what I'm seeing on there? Yes, please, Emily. So it says, recently issued regulations pertaining to the 1990 Native American Graves Repatriation Act, NAGPRA,
00:45:00
Speaker
stipulate that museums must secure the consent of lineal descendants, Indian tribes, or Native Hawaiian organizations before exhibiting cultural items. We are currently in the process of consulting with the relevant parties.
00:45:17
Speaker
until such consent can be obtained, the items in this and other nearby cases will remain protected from public view. So I'm really curious what's being reflected in this picture. Yeah, so this is a photo recently taken at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and it is an example of numerous museums, American art museums and science museums, that in the past few weeks have covered different displays of indigenous ah North American artworks and objects as they grapple with the consequences of the updates to NAGPRA. First, just to address like why is this a major moment, to me as a museum curator, I think it's a really powerful example of museums being
00:46:08
Speaker
held accountable and in the best circumstances working closely with their publics. And it tells us a lot about how indigenous civil rights activism has shaped what we see and don't see at American museums. I also want to highlight a kind of assumption that I came up with in the world of the museums, which is that you know that we're operating under a model of making things visible as a public good. Because you know that's what museums do. So many of the things that we've talked about today are moments where a culture's artistic production became more visible for the first time. And we often see that as a very positive thing, and it often is. But it's also important to think about the opposite of that.
00:46:53
Speaker
which is when museums need to take things off you in order to do the good and right thing. And I just want to mention as I talk a little bit more about NAGPRA that an important source for me was the Caring Our Ancestors Home Project that has come out of the Fowler Museum of Cultural History. And just to say a little more about NAGPRA, it's a fundamentally human rights legislation and it is in place to protect the cultural and ancestral remains of Native Americans. And what is the purpose of NAGPRA? The idea is that it will allow for the removal of items from federally funded institutions that should be with Indigenous communities. And that requires collaboration between Indigenous communities and institutions, which can often stretch over many years.
00:47:47
Speaker
NACRA is so important because beginning in the early American Republic, like in the early, probably early 1800s, many museums and collecting institutions in the United States in very unjust and unfair circumstances through archaeological digs and through coercion brought cultural and ancestral remains of Native Americans into their collections.
00:48:12
Speaker
These items do not belong in institutions and it has long been seen and with a great amount of consensus that they in fact belong with the descendants and communities that they were once a part of.
00:48:26
Speaker
I appreciate that one of the things you're bringing in in this last moment is the intersection between museums and the law, as well as, as you said, museums and their publics. And so I'm curious under the framework of NAGPRA, who must comply with these policies? Is it every type of cultural institution or is it a kind of specific named number?
00:48:53
Speaker
It's many of them, but the most important qualification is that they receive federal funding. So universities are included within that. Any museum that's gotten a grant from the NEH or the and NIH, would it be included in this? And what it doesn't include, though, are private collectors, which is, as you can imagine, deeply troubling. And then you also have these interesting moments where private collections come into museums.
00:49:20
Speaker
and then are subject to NAGPRA. So yeah, it's it's quite far reaching, but then it doesn't encompass private collectors or institutions outside of the United States. So that's one of the ways that it's limited and um problematic too. The other is that, I mean, there are several, but one that's been a major struggle is the 1990 version of the law had some loopholes in it. One of which was if the items were from a culture that could be described as culturally unidentifiable and they could not be linked to modern day tribal community,
00:49:57
Speaker
then the museum could maintain possession of them and that has led to many things remaining on view that would not have been on view if it had been up to modern descendants whose lineage was not establishable by the standards of this original 1990 law. and So those are kind of like some some of the problems, not even all of them, of NAGPRA. So I want to, you know, say that, and you can read more about this if you look at the Caring Our Ancestors Home Project, is that there's always been great promise in NAGPRA, but at the same time a lot of problems as well.
00:50:36
Speaker
Yeah, and I just wanted to underline one of those that you mentioned, which is enshrining some of these policies into law creates protections that, as you say, can hold institutions accountable. But the framework for the US government interacting with Indigenous communities is one that is about federally recorded recognized tribes and so as you said there are many communities who perhaps they because of some of the histories of colonization that they experienced historically are not able to produce the kind of materials that would allow them to become federally recognized
00:51:19
Speaker
So just understanding that these legal and federal frameworks provide opportunities, but they're also operating again under the kind of logic of a ah settler colonial state that requires a certain type of documentation and recognition in order to even be engaging with communities in a way that would allow them to take advantage of these kinds of protections.
00:51:43
Speaker
So, keeping in mind the ways this overlaps with ongoing colonial histories is super important. I remember that you were mentioning that there were recent changes to NAGPRA to this law. Can you talk a little bit more about what those are? Yeah. One has to do with timeline. so one of the critiques of NAGPRA is that many institutions continue to hold items that are subject to NAGPRA. So one of the changes is that the revisions require museums to inventory their collections of native ancestors
00:52:20
Speaker
and sacred objects within the next five years and get, quote, free prior and informed consent from lineal descendants, tribes or native Hawaiian organizations um before conducting any research or exhibiting those items. And the other kind of main one that I want to highlight is that this requirement that the materials be, quote, culturally identifiable or or the loophole that says if they are culturally unidentifiable, they're not subject to NAGPRA.
00:52:48
Speaker
that has been removed. And instead, through the simple use of geography and tribal consultation, an item's cultural and ancestral affiliation will be established. And that is a major and important change.
00:53:02
Speaker
Well, I can imagine, you know, this is going to have a lot of implications for museums, um as you said, both in terms of what we see what's on display in museums, as well as how museums are engaging with communities near and far that are connected to their institution, their collections. And so, like you said, this is a major moment that begins in 1990, but we're going to be continuing to see how that
Future of Curatorial Practices
00:53:33
Speaker
unfolds. And I think learning from curators, from cultural leaders within Indigenous communities, both within and without of the museum, about kind of what this means going forward.
00:53:46
Speaker
Yeah, so I think realizing that this last major moment isn't one that just lives in the past, but is continuing to have implications and evolving into the future is a great way to be thinking about what we're going to be doing this season and how this opening episode relates to the rest of the season. know We're looking to have conversations with people who are working now today in curatorial spaces to help us unpack how American art was traditionally understood and where it's going and to help us expand our sense of the field of American art and to introduce us to ideas and histories that have long been under-considered or really deserve a fresh point of view.
00:54:36
Speaker
And so that's about how um the past and present are intertwined um and how the study of American history is something that we're still, you know, we're making that today through these museum projects. And our um our guests will help us to unpack that. Absolutely, Emily. And our interviews this season are going to build on all of the ideas that we've talked about today and that you've just kind of built out as well as open up new areas, including like thinking about geographies of American art beyond the United States, thinking about ah different categories of American art, like folk art and decorative arts, as well as thinking about how American art is framed in art museums versus cultural institutions. So I'm really excited for all the conversations that we're going to have. Me too.
00:55:27
Speaker
Thanks so much for listening to our first episode of Breaking the Frame. Be sure to follow the link in the episode description for more on some of the things that we talked about today. And keep an eye out for future interview episodes where we'll be in conversation with some wonderful curators across the United States.