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What the Barnes Foundation offered in terms of artwork could be described as sensory overload. Room after room of enrapturing beauty, or death, or solitude, or comfort. I needed to take a break at one point to stop the rushing from room to room, and appreciate the gallery one room, one wall, one painting at a time.
after returning to bryn mawr from dc, i had an interesting conversation with rosa about our experiences at the new national museum of african american history and culture. we talked about what pleased us at the museum and what disappointed us. rosa voiced a concern for the politic of the museum. she pointed out that there was almost no text about mass incarceration and presented a linear narrative of progress. she's right. the content at the nmaahc is not particularly radical. it doesn't make a push for the abolishment of prisons or police forces, both things that she and i and many other people see as important to black liberation.
First off, I'm sorry for this post taking so long. I hope my lateness doesn't discredit my appreciation for the trip and presence in the museum.
I found this text to be both critical and informative. Even the title Primitive Art in Civilized Spaces suggest a tone that erases the beauty, depth, and vitality of so many cultures in the face of Western/European ideals and perspective. However, Sally Price’s writing offered a framework that constructively questions these structures. Firstly, Price begins with discussing themes of ownership and responsibility.
The NMAAHC is a project of U.S. nationalism which is in conflict with sensibilities of the ways many define and recreate blackness. The new Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture rises from slave ships to the mothership, an ascendant course that oversimplifies a narrative of subjugation and injustice that is eventually redeemed by blues, funk, and hip-hop. The lowest-level galleries which depicted the slave trade and the Middle Passage are narrow and confining. The galleries opened up to an expansive entrance for the struggle for liberty and justice, which evidently continues today.
Content warning: deaths of Emmett Till and people I knew
I am still in awe of the NMAAHC. I just wish I had more time in it, time to regroup with classmates and talk about what we found, to experience the museum together. There were parts of the museum that I didn’t get to see at all or barely looked at because I was in a hurry. Rushing is not a good way to move through a museum and I think it’s absolutely not the way this museum intended visitors to move through it. I think the deliberation in the curation and artistry is quite obvious at the NMAAHC and it deserves to be savored, slowly and carefully. With time for reflection.
below I have supplied a few articles that reflect on various features of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I have tried to find articles that address the unique architecture, curatorial choices and a few opening day recounts. Hopefully these are helpful to get us thinking about this unique display of American history that puts the Black experience at the forefront and how we can present the material we are grappling with for our exhibition to come.
For those interested int he architecture and design of the building:
i feel like i'm in a participant-observer situation. i am here to learn, but i tune out the presenters and watch audience members instead. i watch the elderly Black woman run her hand over the skills in the Morton collection which are placed at the front of the auditorium // i watch what a (college student?) girl chooses to jot down in her notes // i watch slide after slide show the same theme of decrepit "African" children in tattered clothes with relation to sickle cell anemia, then malaria, then ... // i watch an Indian girl, a Penn senior, who is presenting read a bunch of definitions about biomedicine from a powerpoint // i watch how she was sandwiched by two white women presenters // i don't see much more after that
Today in class someone mentioned that the audience at Nora Chipaumire's performance was largely white, and that she had addressed this, calling for more diversity and saying her piece was primarily meant for a black audience. I was reminded of my final for a class I took last semester, Writing About Theater - I had written about the political power of the poerforming arts and their inaccessibility in a lot of different ways. I thought I would post part of what I had written, including information from the NEA about why only certain people go to plays/dance performances/etc.
As early as the 16th century, anthropologists and artists alike brought a colonial agenda to the images they produced of the Khoikhoi people, whom they labeled “Hottentots.” While the Khoikhoi people were initially constructed through visual representations as naked, animalistic savages in need of guardianship, European artists faced the “dilemma” of representing the “Hottentot” in a manner that effectively displayed a lack of civilization without simultaneously presenting innocence.