Mounting Frustration the Art Museum in the Age of B

Mounting Frustration: The Fine art Museum in the Age of Blackness Ability, by Susan E. Cahan.Durham, NC: Knuckles Academy Press, 2016. 360 pages.

WHEN THE EXHIBITION "Art AIDS America" was on view terminal wintertime at the Tacoma Fine art Museum in Washington, blackness activists decried the paltry number of blackness artists in the show: five out of 107, a low pct that registered as wildly incommensurate to the unduly high rate of HIV infection and AIDS-related deaths among African Americans. On December 17, the Tacoma Activeness Collective staged a die-in: Protesters lay downwardly on the ground in the museum, ruby signs affixed to their chests that read STOP ERASING Black PEOPLE. The die-in as a strategy was widely mobilized past AIDS activists in the 1980s and '90s and has been used in contempo #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations. At the Tacoma museum, the die-in created a dialogue between histories of past demonstrations and the urgencies of present concerns, with bodies—most of them black—on the museum floor, defiantly horizontal against the backdrop of a flowery Jim Hodges curtain.

The Tacoma Action Commonage wanted not merely to call attention to the lack of African American artists in the Tacoma incarnation of "Art AIDS America" but besides to pressure cocurators Jonathan David Katz and Rock Hushka to expand the checklist to include more black artists when the show traveled. The collective also issued a serial of demands to counteract structural exclusions in the art globe. They called for increased hiring of black staff at all levels of the museum hierarchy and demanded that current employees undergo training in undoing institutional racism. During an interview with organizers and artists Charhys Bailey and Christopher Paul Jordan, in which they declared their concern that the show was "thirty years behind" and wondered when they might see an exhibition "exploring the story of the prevalence of HIV in blackness America," Hushka responded: "Yous'll have to wait for the next 1." This line, then redolent of patronizing pacification and broken promises, became the championship of Bailey and Hashemite kingdom of jordan's published text on the website Mail Disobedience.

More than art past blackness artists on the museum walls, more black staff, more blackness curators, more blackness trustees—though these calls have been persistently sounded, sometimes quite loudly, for decades, art institutions seem to turn their collective attending to questions of racial injustice just intermittently and reactively rather than systematically. Isaac Julien's tour-de-force picture show Looking for Langston, 1989, includes a reflection on the efflorescence and burdensome demise of the Harlem Renaissance, glossing words by the titular poet Langston Hughes: "By the end of the '20s, Negroes were no longer in vogue. Patrons plant other uses for their money. Sophisticated New Yorkers turned to Noël Coward and colored artists and writers began to go hungry. History: the smiler with the knife under the cloak." This concluding line, repurposed from Chaucer and spoken in the voice-over by cultural-studies pioneer Stuart Hall, acknowledges the lacerating edge of adaptation and deferral: You'll have to wait for the next one.

"Throughout the twentieth century there accept been waves of abundant involvement in African American art interposed with periods of dormancy," asserts Susan E. Cahan in her meticulously researched book Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power. If these moments of renewed involvement take non led to widespread modify, Cahan writes, it is because "the fine art world has been peculiarly resistant to racial equality." Cahan grounds her arguments in several case studies of contested moments in which race and racism inside New York art institutions were brought to the fore, including the opening of the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1968 (which some perceived to exist a "colonialist" cultural incursion into Harlem); the exhibition "Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Uppercase of Black America, 1900–1968" at the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art in 1969 (which failed to include the work of African American artists); and the "Contemporary Black Artists in America" show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971 (which was undertaken without pregnant consultation with any African American curator or art historian and was understood by many black artists to exist a wrongheaded, and marginalizing, exercise in essentialism and tokenism). Her detailed account of the Museum of Mod Art'due south unwitting role as lightning rod for debates about racial exclusion includes analyses of the cantankerous-racial organizing efforts of blackness and Puerto Rican artists (especially Tom Lloyd, Faith Ringgold, and Raphael Montañez Ortiz), an examination of MoMA'southward installations of the works of Romare Bearden and Richard Hunt, and a cogent take on its infamous "Primitivism" show of 1984–85. Building on previous scholarship such as art historian Bridget R. Cooks'south Exhibiting Black: African Americans and the American Art Museum (2011), Cahan's study focuses on New York, for, as she writes, information technology is a site "dense with culturally, financially, and politically powerful individuals, and these individuals exercised asymmetric influence within the museum globe."

Mounting Frustration also examines some of the probing debates undertaken by blackness artists in the 1960s and '70s about the coherence (both political and aesthetic) of the rubric of "black art" given that artists worked across and then many different styles and had divergent relationships to their own identifications around blackness. Indeed, the interrogation of this terminology continues to be relevant today: The fact that the biracial creative person Nayland Blake was initially neglected in the count of black artists in "Fine art AIDS America" (several early objections do not list him alongside Derek Jackson, Kia Labeija, Glenn Ligon, and Kalup Linzy) demonstrates some of the faultiness of a demographic approach and raises questions about misrecognitions and illegibilities.

Though retrospective in nature, Mounting Frustrations implicitly—and crucially—asks, How will these categories, and these histories, continue to be rewritten, elaborated, and revisited? The structural realities of inequality and the dynamic nature of identity structure set the stage for a condition of perpetual contestation, 1 that volition be especially trackable through several upcoming projects. An exhibition opening at Tate Mod next year, titled "Soul of a Nation: Art in the Historic period of Blackness Power," will explore "how the category 'Black Art' was defined, rejected, and redefined" in the US betwixt 1963 and 1983, through the work of such artists equally Norman Lewis, Lorraine O'Grady, and Betye Saar. (I quote from the press release, with its proposition of both stabilization and destabilization.) The subtitles of both Cahan'due south book and the Tate show, curated by Mark Godfrey and Zoe Whitley, invoke the "historic period of Black Power," placing African American cultural production in direct dialogue with political efforts to challenge racism in a country where the face of power was distinctly and undeniably white. Fifty-fifty every bit increasing numbers of smart, committed curators of color (Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, Thelma Golden, Christine Y. Kim, Thomas Lax, Yasmin Ramírez, Franklin Sirmans, Yesomi Umolu, and many others) have risen to prominent positions in art institutions beyond the U.s.a., museums continue to be shaped by a by and large white elite.

Recognizing that the names on the walls, no less than the art on display, might have an touch on on who felt invited to visit the museum, some members of the Art Workers' Coalition and the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in the late 1960s and early '70s unsuccessfully advocated for a special fly of MoMA to exist named after Martin Luther King Jr. The MLK wing was ideally envisioned as a space reserved for art by black and Puerto Rican artists, and the invocation of a crusader for social justice in its very architecture was meant to betoken an institutional welcome to many audiences. Though the proposed cordoning-off of this art from the rest of the collection struck some every bit a kind of ghettoization, others embraced it as a necessary recentering. "If our art is not to be mixed with the art of whites, well, and so be it! Give u.s. our own wing," exhorted Ringgold in 1969. This April, the museum did announce plans for a new wing: Information technology will be named for patron David Geffen, a condition of his $100 million gift.

What are the productive tensions inherent in exhibitions that use classifications such as "black art" as their primary framing device or as cardinal to their organizational logic? Do they offer upward an assertive and needed model by placing constellations of subjects of color in relation to i another, refusing to take white artists act equally comparators or standard-bearers? Or do they flatten artists' own multiple axes of identification and elide important distinctions in modes of artistic production? Cuban-American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, for 1, reportedly chafed at having his work billed equally "Latin American." And despite the objections of some female artists who argue that the all-woman prove reduces their contributions to products of their gender—and despite the intensifying erosion of commonage confidence about the stability of the categories of "man" and "woman"—the format is seeing a resurgence that rivals that of 2007 (the year of shows such as "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution" and "Global Feminisms") with major projects such as Hauser Wirth & Schimmel's "Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016" (curated past Paul Schimmel and Jenni Sorkin), on view at the Los Angeles gallery through September 4, and "Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985" (curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta), opening in 2017 at UCLA's Hammer Museum equally part of the Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative.

Important piece of work on the consolidation of—and resistance to—the label "black art," in particular, is on the horizon, including a book by consulting MoMA curator Darby English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press), which discusses abstraction by black artists in shows launched at the Whitney and at lesser-known venues such as a theater in the Fifth Ward district of Houston. Fine art historian Krista Thompson is working on a monograph on Tom Lloyd's electric-lite sculptures, and emerging scholar J. V. Decemvirale is pursuing avant-garde research into the Blackness Culture Festival, an event organized in 1968 by African American museum guards at the Los Angeles Canton Museum of Art that included an after-hours counter-exhibition of African art.

As Mounting Frustration persuasively establishes, major museums in the US have historically done a deplorable job of representing black artists, other artists of color, and women artists, who are tokenized past ever-churning cycles of commemoration and dismissal—what Cahan calls "waves"—in office because large fine art institutions are not only dependent on but impregnated with the ideology of the ruling class that funds them. The material and economical basis of these structural problems around race, gender, and representation cannot be ignored. Just every bit a wave can buoy you up, information technology tin can also suck yous out to bounding main; perchance it'due south best to get out of the water birthday. Is information technology possible that museums will go increasingly irrelevant as spaces for critical fine art? Many artists are turning to other avenues to circulate their work, including culling or contained spaces and, increasingly, online. Queer black artist Ajuan Grand. Mance, for example, in her project 1001 Black Men: An Online Sketchbook, 2010–, uses social media as the main outlet for her vivid, expert portraits of African American men; although she has shown in galleries and art institutions (and welcomes such attentions), she is not reliant on a museum to evidence her work.

What volition the checklist look like for the next iteration of "Fine art AIDS America"? I'd like to suggest one work for inclusion. It is an epitome that speaks volumes about the relevance of AIDS for contemporary art and nearly the museum equally a fraught space for public dialogue most racism: a photo of the Tacoma Action Collective die-in.

Julia Bryan-Wilson is an Associate Professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Source: https://www.artforum.com/print/201606/susan-e-cahan-s-mounting-frustration-the-art-museum-in-the-age-of-black-power-60081

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