Untangling pain, joy, care and violence in the history of American art

“… Brooklyn should have an Institute of the Arts and Sciences worthy of her wealth, her position, her culture and her people.”

– The First Yearbook of the Brooklyn Institute, 1889

The origin stories of museums are often fascinating. Some were born out of the spirit of nationalism and an interest in collecting, some as a civic service and others from the lack of space in a collector’s private mansion. Unlike its neighbours, the Brooklyn Museum didn’t start with the donation of a precious art collection, but rather in the village of Brooklyn in the 1820s. The population was around 8000 and they needed a library. From that necessity emerged the ancestor of the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library, the first free and circulating library in Brooklyn. Two hundred years later, the museum’s roots are entrenched in the borough and its community. For its bicentennial, the Brooklyn Museum brings forth an array of programmes, initiatives and exhibitions. This includes their recent exhibition focusing on American art, Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art, which is currently on view in the American Art Galleries at the Brooklyn Museum.

The exhibition aims to focus on Black feminist approaches to inclusive space-making and institutional critique, providing the audience with a new lens to experience art and material culture from across the Western Hemisphere. The American Art collection was established in the Brooklyn Museum in 1855 with Asher B. Durand’s The First Harvest in the Wilderness, a piece relating to Manifest Destiny – a conceptual precedent to American exceptionalism. Since then, the collection has come a long way, currently extending to over 7000 works. Therefore, the ‘reimagining’ of American Art concerning the Brooklyn Museum and its unconventional history was indeed a challenging but exciting one for Stephanie Sparling Williams, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art at the museum. The curatorial process unfolded through work with an advisory committee, monthly Black Feminist Roundtable conversations and biweekly team workshops spanning many of the Museum’s departments. Many individuals of diverse cultural, social, political and historical backgrounds came together to frame this narrative of American art. Thus, Toward Joy comes from a place of collective and collaborative attempts, from beyond and within the museum.

The exhibition offers a new and radical lens through which to view American art—an evolution that aligns with the museum’s storied history.

In the press release, Williams raises the question, “As an art museum, the Brooklyn Museum is a site for celebrating beauty. But what does one do when beautiful artworks are entangled in ugly and often violent histories?” This question lays the groundwork for the exhibition. How do you look at Adama Delphine Fawundu’s photographs on the African diaspora and not think of the horrors and traumas that the slave trade instilled on the generations that followed? How do you sugarcoat the significance of the title in Whitfield Lovell’s Thursday(2006) which deals with Black domestic workers? Can the family fleeing enslavement charges in Eastman Johnson’s A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves (1862) be viewed by setting aside the atrocities of enslavement? Can indigenous objects be simply seen as tangible cultural artefacts, without acknowledging that the American Dream is built on land stolen from many of these tribes? So, how does one find beauty in art that’s entangled in “settler colonialism, global imperialism, genocide, enslavement and environmental degradation”, terms that the museum boldly adds to its exhibition text?

Williams has tried to find an answer to this question, one which museums should have started asking a long time ago. Talking to STIR, the curator shared, “The exhibition is organised into frameworks. The reason for this is two-fold. One, it won’t be a ‘set it and forget it’ installation. Instead, we build new foundations, a fresh starting point from which future curatorial works would be developed. It would be a work in progress. The second is about representation. This reinstallation is trying to rethink representation. We’re thinking about epistemologies emerging out of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) thinkers and historically undervalued or strategically undervalued communities and the ways that they see and experience the world…further using that as a way to organise the collection.” In the reinstalled American Art wing, American art is not solely relatable to ‘Americans’. It recognises all communities, races, nationalities, tribes, people and world events that have shaped the United States.

The exhibition unwinds through eight frameworks – Trouble the Water, Radical Care, To Give Flowers, Counterparts, Surface Tension, Several Seats, A Quiet Place and Witness. Trouble the Water explores the powerful links between water and notions of freedom, life, spirituality and progress. Radical Care examines what it means to care for both the collection and for audiences. To Give Flowers is a spatially exciting provocation: with Joseph Stella’s The Virgin (1926) hanging against Loïs Mailou Jones’ early 20th-century floral-patterned wallpaper, the gallery is a visual treat. “This framework is inspired by the Black vernacular saying from funerary traditions: ‘You better give somebody their flowers while they’re still alive so they can smell them.’ It’s about giving people their due credit and appreciating them while they are still here,” said Williams.

Counterparts offered the most powerful impact; it puts pieces in conversation but what comes out of that relatability is thought-provoking. In a black-and-white gallery space, only artworks in the spectrum of black and white were displayed, all engaging in a rich dialogue of contrast and complementarity. Who would have thought Graciela Iturbide’s Vendedora de Zacate (Sponge Vendor), Oaxaca (1974) would have an unprecedented relationship to William Edmondson’s limestone statue Angel? The wings of Angel and the imaginary wing around Iturbide’s vendor, created by the objects she is selling, make for an interesting juxtaposition.

Surface Tension requires a little explanation – how does its nude art contribute to the politics of gender and representation? While this gallery deals with themes of cultural difference, sex work, sex and body positivity, this isn’t directly imparted through the works. There is a history and background one needs to access to frame the work thematically. Several Seats feels like a walk along a museum corridor with seated historic figures, such as portraits of Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) and William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) watching over you as you pass them. “We selected seated portraits and then we hung them near the floor or below the sidelines so that visitors can walk up and look down on them if they want…changing the power relationship that is typical within these galleries. Or you can sit down in the New York City park benches that will line the gallery and have an eye-to-eye relationship with them,” explained Williams.

A Quiet Place is, as it sounds, a place of rest. Riva Helfond’s Sleeping Girl, Fatigued Black Woman (1937) is the best example of what this gallery might make you feel. “Audiences will have the opportunity to gaze into a dazzling Alma W. Thomas painting while being guided through a series of affirmations that centre rest and liberation in an audio spotlight by Tricia Hersey, to sit atop a luminous, richly coloured rug, designed in the early twentieth century by Anna Russell Jones and reproduced for this context,” shares Williams. The final stop is Witness—a fitting conclusion. The wall text here says, “This gallery is about seeing, but it is also about being seen.” The gallery is designed as a salon hang that boasts the breadth and depth of the Museum’s portrait holdings.

The experience of every work in the exhibition is what you make of it from your perspective, identity, principles and history. In the new American Art Galleries at the Brooklyn Museum, emotions and stories abound. The exhibition offers a new and radical lens through which to view American art—an evolution that aligns with the museum’s storied history. While Williams passionately speaks about the contemporary issues that the exhibition aims to bring visibility to, Toward Joy is a calm representation of a world in chaos, rather like reading a book. Some chapters leave you wanting more, there are chapters that are slow and there are chapters that keep you on your toes.