maeve: wednesday june 7th

On Wednesday, I came in a bit late because I had to take my friend to the hospital the night before, so I met everyone at lunch. We discussed the metanarrative of the museum and the African galleries before moving to the library for our weekly meeting. Monique, Lara, Isabella and I began the process of developing our visitor study methodology, going over the differences we might see if we interviewed within Imagine Africa vs somewhere else in the museum. We planned to pilot a five-minute interview on Thursday, asking visitors fairly simple questions like "what brought you to the Penn Museum today," "have you had a chance to see any of the African exhibits," and "what were your thoughts." We'll be testing a handful of different ways to extract more thoughts from people on what they'd like to see in the future and how this exhibit compares to their expectations. We hope to make use of the intro wall as an interesting prompt.
At 3, Alex gave us a tour of the archives exhibit with a bit of a skew towards the African collections. The bulk of the initial collection was given to the museum by Arthur Donaldson Smith, who'd collected objects in East Africa--and that's about as specific as their information on those objects gets. Alex attributed the initial difficulties of collecting in Africa to the lack of a U.S. colonial foothold on the continent. It was interesting to see that the original exhibit had included the stuffed heads of a bunch of African animals. Alex also gave us some more background on the "Gentleman's Agreement" among the Philadelphia museums, which ended up giving the Penn the best deal of objects they could have jurisdiction over. Interestingly, most of the archives attached to objects traded between Philadelphia museums were left in the museum they came from, so a lot of the information is very scattered. I'm very interested in looking into the "14 Eyes in a Museum Storeroom" exhibit from the 1940s, where the museum brought in artists and scholars to create connections with objects they chose. The African galleries have certainly undergone a lot of dramatic changes, though I think they look more like the 1913 exhibit than the Crownover exhibitions of the 60s and 70s. Alex complained that the museum has downsized the amount of text in their exhibits, which amused me because that was definitely one of the main critiques the people at the art museum seemed to have about the anthropological approach and Isabella and I have noted that this museum seems to be lacking in information in places.
Unable to access a computer at home, I decided to do some more readings and save my outstanding blog posts for Thursday, when I'd be able to use the museum library computers. I read the introduction and first chapter of Exhibiting Blackness; "African Americans Enter the Art Museum" and "Negro Art in the Modern Art Museum." The introductory chapter put into words a lot of the things Monique and I were discussing with Summer and Dani last summer: "regardless of the intentions of the curators, exhibitions of art by African Americans are often perceived through a limiting "either/or" paradigm: through a lens of either anthropological study or aesthetic value. African American artists still face an art world in which the exhibition and reception of their work can depend upon proof of their value as artists despite their racial identity" (2). Of course, the situation of African Americans is different from Africans, but the museums in Philadelphia have so far continued this limited understanding of the interplay of identity and aesthetic. The author discusses the history of exhibiting art by black artists, the "New Negro" movement as spearheaded by Alain Locke, and the devaluation of both ancient African sculptures and modern African-American artworks. Displaying works by African-American artists produced a lot of anxieties in the white people controlling the art world, as "the exhibition of artworks by African Americans in art museums transgresses traditionally acceptable forms of power, aesthetics, and social order, not due to any features of the works of art, but because the definitions of what is "beautiful, natural, and legitimate" have excluded African Americans" (7). African-American art was justified through connections with pre-modern cultures, often exhibited alongside ancient sculptures as though there was a direct trajectory. This reminded me of how Creative Africa was a jumble of ancient sculptures juxtaposed with contemporary photography, architecture, and fashion, without much connection drawn among the exhibits or the artists.
In the first chapter (the second one that I read, because of the introduction), the author analyzes two different exhibits of Negro Art and discusses the phenomenon of shows of entirely African-American artists. She mentions how one of the exhibits was located in the foyer of the National Gallery of Art when it toured, and "it was separated by its informal placement from the exhibition galleries, and its art was signified as unequal and lesser" (21). While the PMA had a number of reasons for putting Creative Africa in the Perelman building, it's telling that their big African art exhibition didn't happen in the main building but in a side location which fewer visitors are aware of. The MOMA's first exhibition of a Negro artist (the author doesn't explain her usage of different terms for African Americans, but she appeared to be using negro where the artists had self-identified as such? let me know what the appropriate wording is) focused on his "innocence," untrained "primitiveness," and so on, infantalizing him and his artistic ability. In researching the press surrounding Creative Africa, I think I'll also look into the history of ArtSplash, because the PMA's decision to directly associate African art with juvenile, kid-friendly activities can't be overlooked. Cooks discusses the Harmon Foundation extensively, explaining how their mission of achieving racial parity through art exhibitions failed. Her analysis of their failures was very reminiscent of some of the things we've discussed as being flawed about Creative Africa and the African galleries at the Penn: "Instead of individual Negro artists being introduced through the appropriate aesthetic styles and iconographic concerns that reflected the diversity of their art, the artists were promoted as a group based on a racial difference that maintained their status as separate from the art world, even as they were included in it" (22). I remember the visiting photographer last summer being asked something about "African" photography and cringing at the assumption that an entire continent would benefit from a single solution. One of the exhibits was slightly more successful in that the museum had reached out to local organizations to ask them what they wanted from the museum, something the PMA needs to be better at (though Damien's project is taking similar steps). This exhibit, and Locke's entire "New Negro" movement, suffered from a "preference for an expectation of Negro artists demonstrating racial difference in their art" (39), an attitude that persists today.

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