Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power

by Susan E. Cahan

Overview

In Mounting Frustration Susan E. Cahan uncovers the moment when the civil rights movement reached New York City's elite art galleries. Focusing on three controversial exhibitions that integrated African American culture and art, Cahan shows how the art world's racial politics is far more complicated than overcoming past exclusions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822371458
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	02/02/2018
Series:	Art History Publication Initiative
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	6.80(w) x 9.80(h) x 0.80(d)

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

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations  vii

Acknowledgments  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

My Confederate Kinfolk: A Twenty—First Century Freedwoman Discovers Her Roots - Thulani Davis

"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."

Robert Storr

"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."
 

Grace Glueck

"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."