I really didn't have an idea of what to expect: I have visited many museums here in New York as a nerdy personal visitor but also through my training as a museum studies scholar. The fact that the SMH had been left out of our curriculum puzzled me, as we did make an attempt to visit other small community museums like El Museo del Barrio, the MocA: Museum of Chinese in America, and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. (The other noteworthy exception was the Museum of the City of New York.)
As the museum opens at noon, I was one of the first visitors. The entry into the exhibition part of the museum is through unmarked white doors leading out of the lobby which was a little confusing but the staff pointed me in the right direction. The name of the museum aptly describes the exhibition space: a large white room, with a open central part and two open levels nearby. There were also works down a short flight of stairs in the basement.
Other than Chris Ofili and James VanderZee, I didn't recognize any of the artists, which made me a little ashamed: the two artists I did know were part of major exhibitionary controversies, Ofili for his depiction of the Virgin Mary in Sensation at the Brooklyn a few years back with its legendary elephant dung and the ensuing religious fracas and VanderZee for his documentary photographs of Harlem in the Met's catastrophic entry into race politics with its 1969 Harlem on My Mind.
I was intrigued by the work of Saya Woolfalk, whose drawings are inspired, human, creative, fun, and nonlinear - including "No Placean Anatomy." I also appreciated Frederick Brown's "Stagger Lee in Concert," a painting with the words "I am not from Brooklyn" carved into its thick paint. Ellen Gallagher's installation "DeLuxe," which also reappears on the front of the current museum catalog, is at once playful and sinister with its multiplicity of textures and gouged out eyes, white almonds (see below). I also appreciated the local highlight area in the foyer, which showcases artists photographs of Harlem and their interpretations thereof. Visitors are even invited to take a free souvenir postcard.
The work that most resonated with me was Howardena Pindell's video, "Free, White & 21." I am not sure if I can accurately articulate how deeply this work spoke to me, and made me want to literally sit on the wooden floor in front of the video and just stay and weep. Pindell talks to the camera directly, relating her experiences of discrimination: a teacher who wouldn't put the A student Pindell into an honors class because a less deserving white student might benefit more, a job interview where Pindell witnessed white candidates being given clear and respectful instructions about what positions were actually available and the candidates of color being told nothing was available, a pastor who made sexual advances at a wedding, a Maine woman who stared at Pindell while eating...she intersperses these accounts with footage of a woman with strikingly white makeup, black sunglasses, and a blonde wig (presumably Pindell, according to the museum label) commenting back, "You must be paranoid. No one I know has had this happen to them...you really must be paranoid," and "You need to do things our way, with our symbols, or we simply won't validate them."
There was a feeling in my stomach akin to the feeling I got when I read Native Son for the first time and then looked at the copyright information, nauseous and humiliated that our country, so prideful of our freedom and our ability to lead the world's democracies, had changed so little in 60 years that Wright's words in 1940 were fully believable today. The work (works! both Wright's and Pindell's) are honest in their simplicity and factual nature, but ferocious and heart-rending in the depiction of how pervasive and shameless white privilege is. Pindell broke my heart. My only hope is that other hearts will be broken in going to the museum and seeing this, and from our brokenness we could, as a community - or a nation - or at least person-to-person - build a new, respectful, open, equal place, together.
The Studio Museum's website is here. They are open Wednesday - Sunday.
Some other resources that I know about, but by no means an exhaustive list:
Patricia Raybon My First White Friend
Paula Rothenberg White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism
Richard Wright Native Son
No comments:
Post a Comment