What is American anyway?

Finally, museums are catching up to their peers in academia on the subject of "what does it mean to be an American?" Two articles in this past Sunday's New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/arts/design/12johnson.html and http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/arts/design/12loos.html bring to light efforts by the MFA, Boston and the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery to address this subject through curatorial action. Mind you, these are not spry and nimble institutions but behomoths that don't take chances with their publics. We know that a seachange has occurred when the curatorial staff has secured the approval of the director and major stakeholders in the institution to take a new inclusive approach to exhibitions and collections.

The MFA's new American wing now embraces art of the Americas. Think NAFTA: America includes all of North America, Central America, and South America. How cool is that? At first I thought this was a question of semantics. Museums call their non-North American collections "Art of the Americas" encoding the idea that what you will see will not be from North America. The MFA has moved beyond that to suggest that North American art should not be viewed in a vacuum but in the context of other art in its hemisphere. I did not necessarily get the sense from the article that the curators were going to stage interventions by mixing the arts--comparing a silver piece by Paul Revere to a silver works from post-Colonial Brazil--but maybe we will be in for a surprise. This may just be the beginning of a new vision for that institution.

Hide/Seek at the Portrait Gallery is a step way out on a limb for the Smithsonian. Never mind that Queer Studies has been a legitimate program of study in many universities. One of the organizers of the exhibition expressed his frustration with New York museums to address straighforwardly the issue of sexuality in art exhibitions. Let's be clear: I think museums (contemporary, primarily) have candidly taken on straight sexuality. Homosexuality has followed the military vein of "don't ask, don't tell" figuring that most visitors can guess. The Francis Bacon exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art featured a photographic essay of Bacon's lovers and explicit discussion of the influence these relationships had on Bacon and his work. Hide/Seek takes as its premise homosexuality and homoeroticism as providing a different view on life from those who are not gay. Such an exhibition can be fraught: is there such thing as a gay gaze (pun intended) and does gay also incorporate lesbian. Not sure because the article only mentions male artists. Looking forward to hearing what the critics and audience have to say about this one. Stay tuned....