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| ISBN-13: | 9780822374893 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/28/2016 |
| Series: | Art History Publication Initiative |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 360 |
| File size: | 16 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Art History Publication Initiative
Read an Excerpt
Mounting Frustration
The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power
By Susan E. Cahan
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7489-3
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 past. The early years of the Studio Museum embody the range and complexity of concepts of racial discourse of the mid- to late 1960s, from desegregation and equality to freedom and liberation. The museum was a cipher for the hopes and aspirations of integrationists that was quickly converted by separatists into the country's first, and eventually foremost, museum of African American art.
Betty Blayton, a painter, educator, and key figure in the creation of the Studio Museum, moved to New York City in the summer of 1960. Born in Newport News and raised in Williamsburg, Virginia, she had attended Syracuse University with her tuition fully paid by the State of Virginia, as the state was still segregated and there was no African American college in Virginia that had an accredited arts program. In 1959, she graduated with a degree in art, spent a short time in Washington, DC, then went to St. Thomas, where she taught high school art for a year. After her arrival in New York, she started looking for an artists' community, and soon she started taking classes at the Art Students League with Charles Alston.
Blayton also studied education and psychology at City College of New York, where Kenneth B. Clark was teaching. Clark, the social psychologist whose research conducted with his wife Mamie Phipps Clark was instrumental in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision, was in the process of developing an empowerment program for teenagers living in Harlem. In 1962 Clark was commissioned by the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime and the City of New York to study the conditions of the lives of teenagers. From 1962 to 1964 he headed a team of researchers who studied manifestations of juvenile delinquency — from dereliction to criminal behavior — as a symptom of the larger problems of poverty and racial discrimination. Clark believed that juvenile delinquency would persist until the larger problems of financial insecurity and social and political disaffection were addressed. Blayton heard about the project and immediately identified with its goals. She signed on to help write the proposal for the arts and culture program directed by the musician Julian Euell (fig. 1.2).
In 1964 Euell invited Blayton to a gathering of the Spiral group to meet two other artists who were going to teach in his program, Norman Lewis and James Yeargens. The Spiral group had formed in 1963 to discuss ways that artists could participate in the civil rights struggle and cultivate a culture of mutual support. Talking with the members of the Spiral group heightened Blayton's consciousness of discrimination in the art world, not only because of the artists' political engagement but because of the personal sting of their stories: "When I first met the Spiral group they were talking about the problems with their galleries, of the lack of galleries. I have always been a proactive kind of person; when I saw this gorgeous work I was just amazed they were having problems. Romy [Bearden] and Norman [Lewis] weren't that much older than my father. How could they be doing this work all this time and I never heard of them? I was enraged."
In April 1964 Kenneth Clark delivered to the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency his report, "Youth in the Ghetto: A Study of the Consequences of Powerlessness and a Blueprint for Change." The report proposed a program called Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, known as HARYOU, that would bring seven thousand young people in Harlem into a network of job training, educational, social, and arts activities. Unlike the social programs in which participants received services from professionals who were not from the community, Clark's action-oriented vision was to organize a large group of Harlem residents, young and old, who were "disciplined and politically sensitive" to gain the power to reverse the conditions of poverty themselves. "Otherwise," he wrote, "these vast and wide-ranging programs of reform would only amount to benevolence from outside the community, vulnerable to control and abuse, and tending to encourage further dependency." Clark wrote that HARYOU seeks to engender "an increasing sense of pride, confidence, and initiative in the youth themselves." The program received $1 million in federal funds, and the City of New York allocated $3.5 million from its federal antipoverty program funds. An additional $500,000 was paid by the Department of Labor to train and place the program's workers. All participants — teachers and students — would receive stipends.
Between HARYOU's planning and implementation stages, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell introduced his own initiative, Associated Community Team (ACT), which received equivalent funding without conducting a planning study. According to sociologist Noel Cazenave, ACT's funding was part of a quid pro quo deal between Powell and the Kennedy administration intended to secure the congressman's support for another program of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Under political pressure, in 1964 the two organizations merged to form HARYOU-ACT. Clark withdrew from the organization and immediately began developing a framework for assessing the effectiveness of community action programs, a model increasingly favored by private foundations and policy makers.
Despite this political jockeying and, in subsequent years, the program's financial problems, HARYOU-ACT gave thousands of teenagers life-changing opportunities. The Arts and Culture section enabled students to write plays, perform drama and dance, make music, and produce films. Program participant Janet Henry (fig. 1.3) recalls, "There was a place to practice. There was a place to meet other people who thought of themselves as artists, and to work with adults who worked as artists." The Arts and Culture program consisted of six divisions: Graphics and Plastics; Commercial Art; Fashion; Journalism; Film and Sound; and Photography.
It was open by application to teenagers who lived in Harlem; candidates had to demonstrate both an aptitude and an interest in art. Some, like Henry, who would later become a professional artist and administrator at the New York State Council on the Arts, attended the city's specialty arts high schools. During the summer, the students worked with HARYOU-ACT five days a week, learning art techniques in all media, making individual studio-based work, and collaborating on group projects, such as mosaics and vest pocket sculpture parks. These small parks were urban oases created in unused building lots through a city program promoted by New York City mayor John V. Lindsay and parks commissioner Thomas P. F. Hoving. During the academic year, the students came to HARYOU-ACT after school. They not only created art; they also had opportunities to interact with working artists. Henry recalls that on one very special occasion Romare Bearden gave a lecture for students in the Arts and Culture program, about a hundred in all.
Blayton taught in HARYOU-ACT for two years, from 1964 through 1966. As an extension of the program, she began sending her students downtown to view works of art at the Museum of Modern Art at 11 West Fifty-Third Street. She soon discovered that when the teenagers arrived at the museum, they were turned away, refused entrance by the museum's security guards. Blayton contacted her friend Frank O'Hara, the poet, who was the museum's associate curator of painting and sculpture, and he, along with public relations director Elizabeth Shaw, saw to it that the students were admitted. According to Blayton, before the students set out for the museum, she would call and alert Shaw, who would then see that the guards didn't "give them a hard time." Eventually Shaw and O'Hara arranged for admission passes.
After a while the students began to see MoMA as a place of their own. Henry recalls, "I'd take my sisters and cousins too, because they gave us free passes. Going to the Museum of Modern Art was one of the things we'd do, as a bunch of teenage girls." She remembers Picasso's She-Goat as one of their favorite pieces: "We liked the pregnant goat, the She-Goat. ... In fact, when our church had a boat outing and docked over on the West Side in midtown, my mother drove us across town and I made her go down Fifty-Fourth Street so we could see the goat in the museum's courtyard. ... It became a kind of family event." During these years, Henry doesn't recall seeing other people of color visiting the museum.
Frank Donnelly, a member of the Museum of Modern Art's Junior Council and a social worker with the Citizens Committee for Children (CCC) in Harlem, saw potential for a closer relationship with HARYOU-ACT. The CCC was a children's advocacy and service organization that had a constituency of supporters in the arts, including some art world luminaries, such as Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, and Thomas Hess, the editor of Art News. According to Blayton: "MoMA was interested in finding out what they could do for the cause that everyone was so anxiously pursuing. And they came up to Harlem, to HARYOU, to see if there was some way that MoMA, through the Junior Council, could be of service to the art department. ... I met with them and told them I thought it would be very interesting to have the teenagers who were involved come down to the museum on Saturdays and have rap sessions about the museum's collection."
MoMA's Junior Council had been formed in 1949 for younger members of the museum's inner circle of supporters as an in-house training ground for trustees, a "peaceable cutting garden out of which ornamental blossoms might be plucked to replenish the bouquet." The members of the Junior Council undertook projects that extended the reach of the museum, such as producing Christmas cards and an annual calendar illustrated with works from the collection. Their most ambitious initiative was the Art Lending Service, through which commercial galleries would loan works to the museum, which in turn could be borrowed by museum members.
For over a year, between 1965 and 1966, the curator of the museum's Art Lending Service, Campbell Wylly, met with the group of fifteen or so students every month. Sometimes he invited artists, such as Claes Oldenburg, Robert Indiana, and Jim Dine (fig. 1.4). Often the conversations were attended by members of the Museum's Junior Council who, according to Blayton, wanted to hear what these young people had to say: "Teenagers in Harlem are very sophisticated, on the surface. For a lot of the Junior Council members, who came out of very sheltered environments, these teenagers were extremely interesting."
With their students now "regulars" at MoMA, Blayton and Donnelly began talking about the fact that there was no museum in the students' own neighborhood. As President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty became a social ethos as well as a public policy goal, large, established arts institutions became targets of criticism as hoarders of financial resources. Neighborhood museums, or what would be called "community-based," "culturally specific," or "culturally grounded" museums, were conceived to redistribute the financial wealth and validate a broader spectrum of cultural experiences. The HARYOU-ACT teens were enlisted to talk with social groups and church groups to gauge support in the community for such a venture. Henry, one of the students who canvassed the neighborhood, has recalled that she was "held up as an example of the kind of person the place would be good for."
Donnelly brought in other members of MoMA's Junior Council, including Charles Cowles, the publisher of Artforum; Carter Burden, a candidate for the New York City Council whose father had been president of MoMA in the 1950s; J. Frederic Byers III, a collector and sponsor of the Bykert Gallery whose father-in-law, William S. Paley, would become the museum's president in 1968; and the collector Barbara Jakobson. Jakobson has recalled, "In terms of our involvement with the black community, this was something that we sought out more than they. I did not feel pressure upon the Museum, during those years, from the black community. It was much more something we felt we wanted to do." These individuals worked on the project outside their formal roles as members of MoMA's Junior Council. Still, before proceeding with the formation of a Studio Museum development board, they sought and received the approval of Bill Paley. Also enlisted to work on the project were Eleanor Holmes Norton, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who would go on to serve on the New York Human Rights Commission and the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission and would become a member of Congress in 1990; Theodore Gunn, an artist; and Robert Macbeth, director of the New Lafayette Theater. On March 13, 1967, artist Mahler Ryder became the executive secretary of the Committee to Form the Harlem Museum, Inc. Donnelly served as chairman.
Blayton asked Romare Bearden to join the board, but he refused, stating that the whites who were involved were there for their own gain. There is evidence to support this view. Carter Burden, for example, was campaigning for the post of New York City councilman in the Second District, which ran from Twenty-Second Street to 109th Street on the East Side of Manhattan, where he lost, and then in the newly rezoned District 4, which incorporated both the Upper East Side and Harlem from Fifty-Ninth Street to 131st Street and the East River to Fifth Avenue. There he eventually won. During Burden's 1969 campaign to win the District 4 primary election, he and his family were profiled in the New York Times: "For the last three years, [Burden] has tried to rid himself of an image as a socialite fop and to renounce his unofficial title of crown prince of fashion society. ... Mrs. Burden has stopped going to fashion shows, although she is still seen lunching at fashionable French restaurants. ... Mr. Burden has been listening, and learning, and taking private lessons in urban Puerto Rican Spanish." No doubt Burden's involvement in the Studio Museum starting in 1967 and his eventual ascent to the role of board chair in 1969 was part of this project to cultivate a more populist public image.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mounting Frustration by Susan E. Cahan. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations viiAcknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1. Electronic Refractions II at the Studio Museum in Harlem 13
2. Harlem on My Mind at the Metropolitan Museum of Art 31
3. Contemporary Back Artists in America at the Whitney Museum of American Art 109
4. Romare Bearden: The Prevalence of Ritual and The Sculpture of Richard Hunt at the Museum of Modern Art 171
Epilogue 253
Notes 269
Bibliography 319
Index 335
What People are Saying About This
"The history of cultural politics in America is one both of individual insights and collective initiatives, of attempts to grasp the meaning of deeply embedded social and economic inequalities, and the equally profound misunderstandings that have bedeviled most attempts to translate painfully slow changes in attitudes toward race and class into enduring changes in institutional structures. Susan E. Cahan's study of how American museums tried and largely failed to break this pattern in the 1960s and 1970s is a major contribution to the field of institutional critique. Unlike many, though, it is informed by a close analysis of personalities and events. It will be a touchstone both for scholars and those trying hard to avoid repeating mistakes of the past—especially those who were 'well-intentioned' but woefully inattentive to the harsh realities they sought to address."
"A long overdue, well-researched history, citing heroes and villains, of the struggle waged by artists of color to get their work recognized by the white art establishment. Naming names, recounting specific battles, and giving an accurate picture of the inner workings of a dismissive museum bureaucracy determined to guard its Eurocentric heritage, Susan E. Cahan has done a remarkable job of reporting on a conflict that, despite some hard-won victories for artists, still simmers."
"In this book, Susan E. Cahan illuminates a discourse over inclusion that took place all over the country, and not just in visual art, but even in opera and ballet where the very presence of the black body became an issue. Her analysis reveals the museums' duplicity, confusion, and attempts to serve only their own interests. The names of excluded artists repeated in this book are shocking, as are the indications that curators claimed to have not known of people like Jacob Lawrence. Mounting Frustration is a most welcome means of cracking the silence and complacency around the retrenchment since activists opened the discourse on who owns culture."