Exhibitions

Aside from the maltreatment of its beautiful historic building, which I wrote about here nearly three weeks ago, something else is deeply wrong with the new incarnation of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum: the display and the contextualization of the objects in the displays simply don’t measure up to minimal standards. To be sure, visually they are often attractive. But frequently they are very dumbed down, witless and perhaps even misleading.

I think the museum’s leadership meant well; I really do. But I think they misjudged their task and perhaps their audience. As last time, when I posted pictures of current displays within the historic rooms, I will let you judge for yourself.

Here are four wall labels (apologies for the tilted pictures–I shot them with my phone and sometimes it was difficult, given the other people in the galleries, to stand in place where I could get a direct shot) about elements of design. They set the scene for displays on the second floor.

They are not in the order in which the galleries proceed–but then again, the galleries can be entered, as I recall, from at least two points, so I don’t think the labels were necessarily intended to be read sequentially.

The displays themselves are a jumble; the objects are not arranged
chronologically or relationally. I am guessing that the objects in the cases were chosen simply to illustrate a theme–to show many objects that have, for example, patterns. It’s all very simple.

For evidence of these simple thematic displays you can see the pictures at the bottom of this post.

I know museums of all stripes are dealing with visitors, particularly younger visitors, whose education is substandard. Many, many public schools–and some private ones, I’d bet–have meager offerings in art or design.

But the definitions I’ve posted here don’t provide much enlightenment. Is “a vocabulary of repetition, reflection and rotation” a clear definition of “Pattern” or is it jargon? And btw, designers do not “create an infinite variety of patterns”–they merely have the potential to do so.

You, dear reader, can find your own examples of imprecise or misleading language in these labels.

As for the themes on view, yes, you can see texture–or pattern, line, etc.–in some displays. But what else do you learn when a 1604 engraved English shoehorn is placed near an 1886 book of patterns open to an “Egyptian” page? Or a 2007 poster hung next to an 18th century Greek cushion cover? I don’t know.

When I visited The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky at the Metropolitan Museum on Saturday afternoon, I was prepared to be delighted–and I was, in more ways than one.

The Nelson-Atkins Museum, which co-curated the show with the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris, had primed me for how beautiful it was going to be, sending along the catalogue as evidence when the show opened in Kansas City last fall. At the Met, the exhibit lived up to my great expectations.

So many of these objects are stunningly beautiful.

But from the very first one in the Met’s installation, I noticed that something was different about this exhibit. For what I think is the first time in the museum’s history, the Met has labeled these works as by artists, rather that using what has become tradition in most art museum for Native American works–merely identifying the tribe from which the object comes.

So when you see the “ghost dance dress” at the top of this post, you will see in the label I have posted below that it was made by “Southern Arapaho artists” in Oklahoma. No, we do not know their names, but identifying the piece as by artists acknowledges it as a work of art, rather than an enthographic piece.

You may recall that I wrote a Page One Arts & Leisure section article about this for The New York Times in 2011, when the Denver Art Museum was leading the way.

The nut paragraph said:

Art museums have collected American Indian objects for decades, but, like natural history and anthropology museums, they have tended to treat them as ethnographic pieces, illustrative of a culture. Wall labels have generally steered clear even of the “anonymous” designation commonly used for Western artworks of unknown authorship and in cases where Indian artists left signature marks — as Chilkat weavers of the Pacific Northwest long have, for example — this evidence has often been ignored.

Later, the article read:

“Recognizing that Native American art was made by individuals, not tribes, and labeling it accordingly, is a practice that is long overdue,” said Dan L. Monroe, executive director of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., which has a large Indian collection and has made some attempts to identify individual artists since the mid-1990s.

And, explaining how Bill Holm, a pioneer in trying to identify the hand that created many anonymous Native American works was thinking about the problem:

Just as the creator of an altarpiece in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence is called the “Saint Cecilia Master,” the maker of a 19th-century Haida chief’s beautifully carved chair in the Field Museum in Chicago is the “Master of the Chicago Settee.”

In my 2011 article, I reported that many museums were not updating their collections to reflect this new trend because it costs a lot to make and install new labels. So, on Saturday, I went downstairs at the Met to see what was happening in its Native American galleries.

No change: In the case of wonderful items I show at right, five carry tribe labels–Arakara, Crow, Yangton, Teton and Brule Sioux. Only the tobacco bag is attributed to an artist, Joyce Growing Thunder Fogarty–and that is because it’s modern, dating to 1977, and we actually know the name of the maker.

And that, as I wrote, maybe a matter of costs.

Still, I was so pleased with the Plains exhibit and the new labeling that when I ran into a friend that day at the Met, I told her about it. Her immediate response, which she walked back after I explained my enthusiasm for the change, was “political correctness.”

I don’t agree. I often call out political correctness when I see it (cf. the last two paragraphs here). To me, this is about recognizing something as an object worthy of being in an art museum, as an individual object of artistry by an artist or artisan, and not as a representation of a culture, just as Dan Monroe said above.

Here are links to my previous posts on this subject, here, here and here.

I know some people do not think that Native American utilitarian objects, such as the ghost dance dress or a shirt are art–largely because they are utilitarian. I do not want this post to start that argument again–no one will profit from restating positions that have been stated so many times before, to no avail. Let’s agree to disagree.

Photo Credits:  © Judith H. Dobrzynski