The Brooklyn Museum’s American collection gets a makeover
inspired by Black feminism.
Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art, curated by Stephanie Sparling Williams, Caroline Gillaspie, Catherine Futter, Liz St. George, Nancy Rosoff, and Dare Turner, with Grace Billingslea and Michael Gibson-Prugh, Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn
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The problem with permanent collections is that you’re kind of stuck with them—a fact that museums are increasingly grappling with as the assumptions and priorities of long-dead curators seem further and further removed from the urgencies of today’s world. This is especially the case for encyclopedic museums. Much of the material culture in their collections—produced by people who weren’t white, male, from the Global North, and more or less rich—wasn’t considered art at all at the time of its making. On top of that, many people who weren’t white men couldn’t make art within the traditional categories and structures that defined the term. (Painting and sculpture academies, workshops, exhibitions—all these were closed to them.) For an institution like the Museum of Modern Art, with its seemingly endless resources, sins of omission can be corrected by going on a buying spree, as they did leading up to their 2019 reopening after a $450 million expansion—although even then the shift in what was on view was modest in relation to the mega millions spent on acquisitions. But for a place like the Brooklyn Museum, shopping one’s way out of the problem was never going to be an option.
Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say. Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art, curated by Stephanie Sparling Williams and a team of her colleagues, is an ambitious and, indeed, inventive attempt to deal with the collection as it stands, not merely by augmenting it but by shifting the frameworks through which it can be seen, and by speaking frankly about how and why it developed in the way it did. This is a pretty rigorous form of institutional critique, in fact. Organized into eight sections, each motivated by ideas largely derived from Black feminist thought, the more than four hundred works on view, including 120 that have been brought out of the storeroom for the first time, are put into conversation about topics especially critical now. These include, as an introductory panel explains, “settler colonialism, global imperialism, genocide, enslavement, and environmental degradation.”
The title of the first room, “Trouble the Water,” derives from an African American spiritual; this gallery offers a good introduction to the approach. Here we find some standard fare—a range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sea and riverscapes by artists including Thomas Moran, John Koch, Martin Johnson Heade, and William Glackens—alongside a mid-nineteenth-century Zuni Pueblo water jar, a late nineteenth-century earthenware vase adorned with graceful fish produced by the Rookwood Pottery Company, a late nineteenth-century whale tooth engraved with fishing scenes by an Iñupiaq artist, and many more objects besides. Contemporary work by the Canadian Inuit artist Janet Kigusiuq and US artists Andrea Chung and Adama Delphine round out the display. The juxtapositions here—of medium, of Indigenous and settler cultural production, of time period—highlight the multiple and even conflicting significations of water in the American experience: not only a ripe subject matter for white American artists picturing their young nation, newly founded on stolen lands, but a vital source of life and culture for Indigenous people and a site for loss of freedom or its reclamation for Black people. (The latter is alluded to, poignantly, in Chung’s 2022 untitled sculptures of women’s arms that project from the wall, which draw from the contemporary myth of Drexciya, wherein the children of enslaved mothers thrown overboard on the Middle Passage create a new civilization under the sea.)
Another room, organized around the depiction of the nude (“Surface Tension”), asks us to think about agency “in a time of heightened visibility and contentious control over human bodies.” “A Quiet Place” explores the question of who has access to rest, an idea informed by the work of Tricia Hersey of the Nap Ministry and Cole Arthur Riley of Black Liturgies. “Witness” focuses on portraiture as a form of self-determination; at the center of the room is a platform where viewers can scroll through a series of short film clips, including one of Shirley Chisholm “bearing witness” in a fiery political speech made in Brooklyn.
Some of these galleries work exceptionally well. “Counterparts,” for example, is a double-size room inspired by two groundbreaking, artist-curated shows from the past: the Spiral group’s First Group Showing: Works in Black and White (1965) and Lorraine O’Grady’s The Black and White Show (1983). O’Grady took on the shocking segregation of the art world at the time—Black artists were almost exclusively shown in race-specific exhibitions at mainstream institutions, when they were shown at all—by inviting fourteen Black and fourteen white artists to submit pieces limited to those two hues, in effect “leveling the playing field.” The result was a demonstration of the deep resonances among the works and a refutation of any insistence that Black artists just weren’t as good as white ones. At the Brooklyn Museum, eighty-eight examples of black-and-white painting, furniture, pottery, photographs, and sculpture from fifteenth-century Peru up to present-day US are hung salon-style so as to emphasize their formal echoes, even as the curators invite us to think about their historical and conceptual differences. The result is energetic and, yes, joyful—I loved being in that room and seeing the rhyming and counterpoints within the heterogeneous display.
“Several Seats,” however, is less successful for me. The title alludes to the expression “have several seats,” meaning something like “it’s time for you to sit down and shut up—you’ve had your turn.” The victims of the withering directive are found in a series of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraits of elite Americans, many of whom acquired their wealth through the use of slave labor. The pictures are close to the floor in a long row, an act of demotion; opposite is a display of chairs from the decorative arts collection. New York City–based drag and ballroom artists were invited to “spill the T” on the portrait subjects in the form of labels mounted below the paintings. But there are two problems here. One is that either the museum has found drag queens who moonlight as art historians, or the labels are clumsy in their execution—they sound like fairly standard analyses with a few sassy interjections about how sitters look and what they’re wearing rather than a proper read. Another is that whatever pleasure might be derived from talking back to these canvases, you’re still left with a room of portraits of mostly boring and often terrible people. Some things are better left in storage.
At the heart of the second room of the installation, devoted to the idea of “Radical Care,” is a freestanding structure with glassed-in bookshelves called “The American (Art) Study,” announcing clearly the curators’ intention of making transparent the “learning and unlearning” that underpins their strategy. (Full disclosure: my book is on a shelf about whiteness.) It’s a form of citational politics—paying homage to the thinkers who have laid the groundwork for their efforts, or naming those whom they’re pushing against—and a declaration that caring about an audience means letting them become part of the thought processes that shaped what they’re seeing. Additionally, labels marked “Showing Our Work” appear throughout the galleries, explaining certain curatorial choices. This move toward self-referentiality is refreshing, and for the most part I wholly approve. Occasionally it gave me pause, though, by foregrounding the curators’ voices in ways that are a little too much, as with an audio recording in the first gallery, accompanying Louis Rémy Mignot’s painting Niagara (1866), of Sparling Williams reading one of her own poems. But never mind—what we have here is a proposal, which will surely be revisited over time, that begins a genuinely consequential undertaking of challenging the authority of the past by asking it to speak to the present.
Aruna D’Souza is a writer and critic based in New York. She contributes to the New York Times and 4Columns. Her new book, Imperfect Solidarities, was published by Floating Opera Press this summer.