Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power (Art History Publication Initiative) - Hardcover

Cahan, Susan E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822358972 ISBN 13: 9780822358978

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2016

Synopsis

Prior to 1967 fewer than a dozen museum exhibitions had featured the work of African American artists. And by the time the civil rights movement reached the American art museum, it had already crested: the first public demonstrations to integrate museums occurred in late 1968, twenty years after the desegregation of the military and fourteen years after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. In Mounting Frustration Susan E. Cahan investigates the strategies African American artists and museum professionals employed as they wrangled over access to and the direction of New York City's elite museums. Drawing on numerous interviews with artists and analyses of internal museum documents, Cahan gives a detailed and at times surprising picture of the institutional and social forces that both drove and inhibited racial justice in New York's museums.

Cahan focuses on high-profile and wildly contested exhibitions that attempted to integrate African American culture and art into museums, each of which ignited debate, dissension, and protest. The Metropolitan Museum's 1969 exhibition Harlem on My Mind was supposed to represent the neighborhood, but it failed to include the work of the black artists living and working there. While the Whitney's 1971 exhibition Contemporary Black Artists in America featured black artists, it was heavily criticized for being haphazard and not representative. The Whitney show revealed the consequences of museums' failure to hire African American curators, or even white curators who possessed knowledge of black art. Cahan also recounts the long history of the Museum of Modern Art's institutional ambivalence toward contemporary artists of color, which reached its zenith in its 1984 exhibition "Primitivism" in Twentieth Century Art. Representing modern art as a white European and American creation that was influenced by the "primitive" art of people of color, the show only served to further devalue and cordon off African American art.

In addressing the racial politics of New York's art world, Cahan shows how aesthetic ideas reflected the underlying structural racism and inequalities that African American artists faced. These inequalities are still felt in America's museums, as many fundamental racial hierarchies remain intact: art by people of color is still often shown in marginal spaces; one-person exhibitions are the preferred method of showing the work of minority artists, as they provide curators a way to avoid engaging with the problems of complicated, interlocking histories; and whiteness is still often viewed as the norm. The ongoing process of integrating museums, Cahan demonstrates, is far broader than overcoming past exclusions.

About this title

About the Author

Susan E. Cahan is Dean, Tyler School of Art at Temple University, the editor of I Remember Heaven: Jim Hodges and Andy Warhol, and the coeditor of Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education. She has directed programs at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Peter Norton Family Foundation.

Art History Publication Initiative

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Mounting Frustration

The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power

By Susan E. Cahan

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5897-8

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
1 Electronic Refractions II at the Studio Museum in Harlem, 
2 Harlem on My Mind at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 
3 Contemporary Black Artists in America at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 
4 Romare Bearden: The Prevalence of Ritual and The Sculpture of Richard Hunt at the Museum of Modern Art, 
Epilogue, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Electronic Refractions II at the Studio Museum in Harlem

On September 25, 1968, the New York Times reported the grand opening of a new art museum: "White-gloved waiters plowed through the milling crowds with trays of drink and hors d'oeuvres. Friends greeted friends with little cries and social pecks on the cheek. The air conditioning broke down, and a drunk lurched against a programed sculpture, smashing part of its protective glass. 'This is as normal a museum opening as I've seen,' Thomas P.F. Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sighed as he mopped his sweaty brow with a handkerchief." And why wouldn't this opening be "normal"? This was the opening of the Studio Museum in Harlem, the first museum in the United States founded to show the work of African Americans alongside artists of all other backgrounds, and in 1968, this wasn't the norm.

The Studio Museum had been conceived three years earlier, in 1965, by an interracial group of artists and educators together with several philanthropists, art collectors, a social worker, and two aspiring politicians (fig. 1.1). The institution grew out of alliances that cut across racial lines at a time when the hope of eradicating racial inequality through integration had powerful currency. At the grand opening of the Studio Museum on that September evening, its director, Charles Inniss, said he hoped the museum would be a place for good black artists to exhibit, a place where black people would be able to see each other's work, "But more than that we want to be a ground where the black and white art worlds can really meet." And meet they did, but not in the way Inniss had hoped. The members of the founding board were condemned by local arts activists as introducing an "alien culture" into Harlem, and a leadership change in 1969 brought a new vision based on black nationalism that continued until the mid-'70s.

When the Studio Museum was conceived in 1965, interracial partnerships appeared to hold the promise of disrupting patterns of de facto segregation in the New York art world. But by the time the Studio Museum opened in 1968, Black Power had become the dominant unifying theme for movement to the next stage in the struggle for racial equality, an understanding among African Americans that "they, independent of whites, can achieve liberation by the creation and maintenance of black institutions that serve the best interests of black people."

The creation of culturally specific museums was a significant institutional expression of a new racial order that reflected a belief in culture as a means of affirming the existence of those groups that had historically controlled "no means of production, no land mass," and in the 1960s little "meaningful participation in formal public politics." If the historical mission of the American museum was to preserve the past, the culturally grounded museum was designed to broaden the American notion of its p

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822358972
• ISBN 13: 9780822358978
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 360