Like the rest of Humanity, those responsible for National Gallery of Washington they thought they should come out of the pandemic better. So when the jewel in the crown of art in the Federal Capital reopened its doors in the spring of 2021, closed for a long year, they set themselves the goal of diversifying their discourse. The museum, like the rest of the centers in the country, had suddenly woken up in the era of Black Lives Matter with a pile of pending racial tasks.
Among other measures, they hired Kanitra Fletcher as Associate Curator of African American and African Diaspora Art. She is in charge of ensuring the representation of the black creation in the venerable institution. She is also the curator of the show’s American tour Afro-Atlantic Histories, coming from the São Paulo Museum of Art, where it was an event in 2018. The stop in Washington comes to an end this weekend as a critical and public success: according to National Gallery estimates, it has hosted about 140,000 visitors, which makes it “one of the most interesting has generated in recent years” .
Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman and the first non-white person to reach such a height in the United States, could contribute to this. In her visit to the exhibition she celebrated the “historic occasion”. “And it is precisely because this is a story that is rarely heard in our schools or exhibited in our museums,” she told the director of the institution, Kaywin Feldman, the first woman to lead the ship in its eight decades of history. This exhibition is the first project entirely his since he took office in 2019.
The proposal aims to rethink the history of the diaspora of slaves and its social and cultural consequences through 130 works of art and documents from the 17th century to yesterday from the African, American and European continents.
In São Paulo, the exhibition was broader. Part of Fletcher’s work, which comes from the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, where the show stopped before, was to adapt it to the circumstances of each place. “In Washington, for example, we have given special prominence to the works that were in our collection, and that, in some cases, have been acquired in recent times with the idea of making the National Gallery more diverse,” explains the police officer in a telephone conversation. Among them, the sculpture power figure (2017), by Puerto Rican Daniel Lind-Ramos, and the piece Ntozahke II, (Parktown) (2016), photographic mural from a digital archive by Zanele Muholi, a self-portrait that has made the South African artist a ubiquitous presence in the city these months.
Both entered this year in a permanent collection in which 92% of the pieces had, as calculated New York Times in May 2021, the signature of a man, and 97% was the work of an artist, male or female, white. “There is a lot of work to be done,” explains Fletcher, “to make the museum do justice to its national appellation.” And not only that one: the home of the White House is a majority black city, as fans of the funk group Funkadelic, authors of the song, know Chocolate City. This is how Washington was known in the 1970s, when it had a 70% African-American population. Today, according to 2020 census data, that percentage has fallen to 40.91%, due to gentrification, among other reasons. Around 11.26% of its 689,000 inhabitants are Hispanic, and 4.81% Asian.
Fletcher is especially proud that the exhibition has occupied a space in the West Wing, in the museum’s old building, which dates back to 1937 and houses the jewels of the collection, an astonishing succession of masterpieces up to the 19th century, including leonardos, vermeers, coins Y murillos First class. Such an exhibition would normally have been destined for the East Wing, where modern and contemporary art awaits (and Rothkos, boilers Y barnett newmans also take away the hiccups), sheltered by the exquisite extension by I. M Pei, which made museography history when it opened in 1978.
A Place to Call Home (Africa America Reflection), a six-foot-high stainless-steel map by American artist Hank Willis Thomas, another recent purchase, welcomes visitors to Afro Atlantic-Stories and to a continent in which Africa and North America are united at the height of Panama. In that same room, the plan of a slave ship from 1789 establishes the tone of a discourse of the proposal, in which everything, the times and the media, is mixed, and contemporary art coexists with the Creole canvases of the 18th century and the paintings of African-American modernists such as Alma Thomas, Jacob Lawrence or Aaron Daniels.
The result offers a transnational vision of the American black experience complementary to the readings of the recently inaugurated National Museum of African American History and Culturethe only Smithsonian institution (they are all free) in which the visitor has to reserve to guarantee access, and at 1619 Project, which proposes to delay the beginning of the history of the United States from 1776 to the arrival of the first slave at Point Fort (Virginia), about 300 kilometers from the National Gallery. The exhibition that is now closing in Washington offers arguments to reconsider that too.
All the culture that goes with you awaits you here.
subscribe
very original version
All the information about premieres, reviews and summer films in the weekly Cinema bulletin
SIGN UP
#show #National #Gallery #country #represents