Hi,
Welcome to Looking Around Boston, a newsletter about art and culture in Boston and beyond. If you aren’t already signed up, you can do that here.
This newsletter started out as a class project, sharing public art happenings in Boston, and has been on hiatus for months while I tried to decide what to do with it in the age of a pandemic. The cultural events that serve as markers of time in the hottest months in Boston--Shakespeare on the Common, concerts on the Esplanade, even the SoWa arts market--were mostly canceled, as we experienced a radically different summer this year.
As peak foliage surrounds us now, it’s still strange to me that I’m not going back to school this year. But since I badly need to keep creating, I’ll keep writing about whatever bits of art I can find out in the world, and also dip into some of my favorite art history learnings from college, to explore and share something beautiful and interesting with you all every other week (at least, that’s the goal). Please let me know if you have any comments or something you’d like me to write about. Send me your thorniest art questions and I will answer them!
Today I’m sharing some thoughts on a little dust-up in the museum world several weeks ago that you might have missed (and I might have missed had not my college roommate, and fellow art history major, texted me about it). You can read the NYT coverage of the controversy here, but here’s the short version: earlier in the summer, racial justice groups organized several charity art sales featuring artists--many young and up-and-coming, many black--who contributed easily produced activist art like posters and flyers that was sold at an attainable price, in the $50-$200 range. The intention was to raise money for racial justice, raise these artists’ profile, and draw attention to activist art, which has a long and rich history in the US and is perhaps a topic for another issue.
The Whitney Museum of American Art--which, it seems relevant to note, was founded by a Vanderbilt and has total assets of $785 million as of last fall--has long collected such art materials including posters and flyers to preserve visual culture around activism. In late August, many artists who had participated in the charity sales received a notification email that their work had been acquired by the Whitney and would appear in an upcoming exhibition highlighting art of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The Whitney’s shiny new roof deck
The twist? These artists normally sold their work for far more than the charity sale prices, and they had not donated them with the intent for these pieces to be shown in museums. Of course, once an artist sells their work, they can’t always control what the owner does with it--whether it’s destroyed, locked up in a vault, or simply displayed in the buyer’s house.
But the real issue here becomes apparent when you place this latest debacle in context with the treatment of women and minority artists by the Whitney, the museum world, and by a culture that values specific kinds of art at the expense of others. I loved studying art history in college, and I love writing this newsletter now, because looking at visual art tells you about the people who made it and the culture they’re from. That’s true for ancient artifacts that can show us how people have historically practiced religion (for example), and it’s true for these pieces that the Whitney purchased. Future art historians will be able to examine these primary sources in their collection and understand, far better than reading in a textbook, the climate of racism and unrest we are living in in 2020.
A popular Tweet critiquing the Whitney’s planned exhibition
What we display in museums, what art we elevate, tells us a lot too about what our culture values. At first glance, it would seem that the Whitney is valuing creative voices—elevating the brave activists speaking out for Black Americans by purchasing these pieces and mounting this exhibit. But this initiative rings hollow when the Whitney, part of a New York art world that has historically undervalued the work of women and racial minorities as illustrated in the brilliant Guerrilla Girls campaign below, does not compensate the Black artists whose work they are acquiring (remember, the proceeds of the auctions, which were a fraction of the normal cost of these artists’ work, went to charity—not the artists themselves).
The Guerrilla Girls’ Pop Quiz, screenprint on paper, image from The Tate.
The lifetime memberships the Whitney gave to these artists in return for their work is a slap in the face. I’ve been to the Whitney. It is a wonderful museum located in a wealthy, white neighborhood in Manhattan. Though the biennial exhibit I attended had an exciting diversity of artists in terms of race and nationality, the rest of their exhibits--especially their modern art rooms--were skewed toward white and male artists. The Whitney decided to jump on the Black Lives Matter bandwagon and pay lip service to change without actually using their massive cultural capital to elevate the artists whose work they have acquired--and without paying them what they deserve.
Remember what I said before about visual culture representing the broader culture’s issues? Look around and you’ll see more. The massive Black Lives Matter plaza mural in DC, ordered by Mayor Muriel Bowser, herself a Black woman, who has not only been criticized by racist white people who think BLM is itself a racist slogan, but also critiqued by the DC BLM group (and many others) for sending a visual message, yet still signing off on increased police funding. Or the huge, already deteriorating Black Lives Matter painted on Broadway in Somerville, while ICE detains a Black man simply for jogging across the river in Boston, with its long history of racism no matter how much we’d like to think otherwise.
A new BLM mural on Broadway in Somerville, photo from Greg Cookland.
I don’t claim to know creators’ and curators’ intentions, but in many ways, it doesn’t matter. These instances of performative visual culture often treat Black Lives Matter like a trend or catchphrase. Like the memes you’ve probably seen on Instagram or the cover of Vanity Fair about Breonna Taylor’s life, turning her into a symbol she never asked to be, while true justice eludes us. Like the politicians who pay lip service to racial justice but fail to enact the policies that Black activists fight for.
It’s a start that the Whitney cancelled their show after a concerted effort by artists of color and an almost universal backlash on social media. If we listen and learn, we can use our voices to effect change in our institutions, in the art world and beyond.
Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend.
Stay safe,
Cordelia