Volume 120, №1 (February, March 2021) ARTnews

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The Battle for Baltimore + No Great Women Artists? + Letter from Beirut

EXAMINING MUSEUMS America’s art institutions in a time of uncertainty

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1 (detail), negative 1969; print 2008, Robert Kinmont. Gelatin silver print. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Robert Kinmont and Alexander and Bonin, New York. © Robert Kinmont. Text and design: © J. Paul Getty Trust

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

Contents

VOL. 120, NO. 1

FEATURES

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Hanging in the Badance What keeps American museums running—and how might the pandemic change that? AMY HAIMERL

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The Battde fsr Badtimsre Art sales rules were changed to help museums in the pandemic. But when Baltimore used the leeway to address inequities, all hell broke loose ANDREW RUSSETH

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Equity and Incdusisn fsr Add New roles take on increasing significance as museums move to diversify

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ON THE COVER Illustration by Carolina Rodriguez Fuenmayor

Banner Achievement Robert Pruitt’s Birth and Rebirth and Rebirth for “The Banner Project” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2019. The initiative was supported in part by MFA’s Learning and Community Engagement Division.

Photo Adam Reich/©Robert Pruitt 2019/Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

TESSA SOLOMON

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

Contents DEPARTMENTS

8 10 14

Editor’s Letter and Contributors

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The Big Picture Best Practices Virginia Jaramillo Draws a Line MAXIMILÍANO DURÓN

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INSIGHTS Letter from Beirut R AY YA B A D R A N

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Time Machine

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Questionnaire: Wendy Red Star

80

Retrospective: Of Princes and Millionaires

ANDREW RUSSETH

Perspectives How a fellowship at CalArts could be a model for art schools in need of change CHARLES GAINES

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An Open Book Nine volumes to add to your collection

Last view from the window (2020) by Lara Tabet, a photographer from Lebanon.

ALEX GREENBERGER

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Mapping the Art World No Great Women Artists? ALEX GREENBERGER

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Touchstones Bobby Berk, Juicy J, and others tell us about artworks that inspired them A N DY B AT TA G L I A

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The ARTnews Accord Rita Gonzalez & Mari Carmen Ramirez in conversation MAXIMILÍANO DURÓN

Case Study Two artists’ transformation of the Five Oaks Museum may provide a blueprint for larger institutions

Nick Cave’s Until, an installation at MASS MoCA in 2016 beloved by singer-songwriter and Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy.

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CLAIRE VOON

VOL. 120, NO. 1 ARTnews, ISSN 0004-3273, is published quarterly by Art Media, LLC, 475 Fifth Avenue, PMC, New York, NY, 10017. ©2021 Art Media, LLC. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: send address changes to ARTnews, P.O. Box 37941, Boone, IA 50037, please allow six weeks for change. Subscription customer service is available by phone: 800-284-4625, outside the US call 515-248-7680. ARTnews® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Photo James Prinz.

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PAUL GEORGES, Nudes in the Landscape, 1982. Oil on canvas

M  A F P

CONTRIBUTORS

Wherefore Museums? Faced with pandemic-related shutdowns that cut off the spigot on earned revenue and led to layoffs and furloughs, as well as demands for racial and social equity that forced tough internal reckonings, American museums are among the bastions of culture that were rocked the hardest in 2020. And none of it is finished.

RAYYA BADRAN

AMY HAIMERL

is a writer, translator, and educator based in Beirut. Her writing and translation work has featured in various local and international publications. She has been teaching contemporary art and sound studies at the department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut since 2014. She is currently a guesteditor of The Derivative, a publication launched by the Beirut Art Center, and hosts a bimonthly show on Radio alHara.

is an independent journalist who covers small business and the economy for the New York Times and other publications. She is also an editor-inresidence at Michigan State University and the author of Detroit Hustle, a memoir of moving from Brooklyn to the Motor City. She is the founder of the Shady Ladies Literary Society, which curates conversations with women writers, bartenders, artists, and scientists. She lives in Detroit with her husband and a country band of critters: Hank (The Tank) Williams, June Carter Cat, and Willie (The Overlord) Nelson.

In this issue, we take a 360-degree view of the challenges facing American museums. In a close examination of museum finances, Amy Haimerl asks directors the fundamental question behind everything that goes on in their institutions: How do you pay for it? In “The Battle for Baltimore,” Andrew Russeth looks at how one museum got caught in the crosshairs of the deaccessioning debate. And Tessa Solomon surveys significant moves that some museums are making in an effort to diversify in terms of internal staffing and the audiences they serve. Museums do not exist in a vacuum—they are very much part of the wider culture of the art world, and that culture has a well-documented pipeline problem. Also in this issue, Charles Gaines, an artist and longtime professor at the California Institute of the Arts, writes about how, after trying for many years, he was able to create a fellowship for artists of color and persuade philanthropists to provide matching funds so that the program can continue.

CLAIRE VOON is an arts journalist and critic currently living in Chicago. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Brooklyn Rail, the Art Newspaper, New York, Artsy, and Garage. She was formerly an assistant editor at Chicago Magazine and a staff writer at Hyperallergic.

Finally, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of an essay that shook the art world when it appeared in ARTnews in 1971: “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” by the late art historian Linda Nochlin. The article, which helped put artists like Artemisia Gentileschi and Rosa Bonheur on the map, still serves as a model for how to create change: ask a seemingly naive question, and answer it with a stab to the heart of a discipline.

CORRECTION

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An article in the ARTnews Winter 2020/2021 issue (“The Deciders”) about Nigel Freeman, director of the African-American Fine Art department at Swann Auction Galleries, misstated the provenance of Norman Lewis’s painting Cathedral (1950), which is now in the collection of Tate Modern. Freeman brought the painting to auction in 2015 from a Vermont family estate, not the Lewis family estate.

Illustrations by Denise Nestor.

EDITOR'S LETTER + CONTRIBUTORS ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

Editor’s Letter

O N

V I E W

E X H I B I T I O N S

P A L M

A L S O

B E A C H

A V A I L A B L E

O N L I N E

Henriette sur les roches à Antibes | 1922 | oil on canvas | 15 x 18 1/8 in.

HENRI(1869MATISSE - 1954 ) F I N D L AY GA L L E R I E S 165 w o rt h av e n u e , pa l m b e a c h , f l o r i d a 33480 · (561) 655 2090 32 e a s t 57 t h s t r e e t , 2 n d f l o o r , n e w y o r k , n e w y o r k 10022 · (212) 421 5390 view our gallery online | www. findlaygalleries. com Copyright © 2021, Findlay Galleries, All rights reserved.

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

THE BIG PICTURE

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Remains of the Day This past November, archaeologists digging some 40 feet down in three different shafts in the city of the dead beneath Saqqara, Egypt, unearthed more than 100 painted wooden coffins that were still sealed and intact—along with funerary masks, canopic jars, and statues. Mostafa Waziry, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, called the findings dating back to the Late and Ptolemaic Periods (664–30 b.c.e.) “the biggest discovery in 2020.” At a press conference showing off the newly found objects, officials spoke of the promise of more discoveries to come, as ancient Egypt continues to captivate contemporary minds.

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AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

G A L L E R Y

1 2 0 2 KATHERINE FILICE

THE LINE BETWEEN YOU AND ME JANUARY 2-MARCH 6, 2021

Burning Sage in Hopeful Prayer, 2020

7363 MONTEREY STREET GILROY, CA 95020 408.206.0018 [email protected]

VIEW ONLINE @ARTSY @ARTNET WWW.GALLERY1202.COM

Book Preview p. 20

Mapping the Art World p. 22

The ARTnews Accord p. 32

Case Study: Five Oaks Museum p. 38

p. 22

Deborah Kass’s Orange Disaster (Linda Nochlin), a painting made in 1997 in tribute to the art historian and author of the seminal essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

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©Deborah Kass 2020/Courtesy Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

ART TALK

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

Perspectives: CalArts Fellowship p. 17

BEST PRACTICES / VIRGINIA JARAMILLO

Line ’Em Up Artist Virginia Jaramillo with her painting Site No. 3 51.1789 N, 1.8262 W (2018), from her “Foundations” series.

BEST PRACTICES

Virginia Jaramillo Draws a Line In fer 80s, tfe artist’s abstractions are finally coming into focus

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V

IRGINIA JARAMILLO’S abstract paontongs are energozed by a somple premose: “How can I draw on the voewer? How can the artwork hold theor attentoon?” For her most recent body of work, Jaramollo os delvong onto what ot moght look loke to take a scoentofoc proncople and transpose ot to canvas, whoch she saod os connected to her lofelong fasconatoon woth scoence foctoon—“I could just let my mond wander”—and her years as a kod on the 1940s and ’50s perusong the Reader’s Digest column “Towards More Pocturesque Speech,” whoch was “folled woth such colorful language that ot made you vosualoze these words.” There os nothong loteral about Jaramollo’s approach to scoence. “Sometomes when I hear of a scoentofoc theory, I can vosualoze ot, but not on the scoentofoc way,” she saod. “I vosualoze ot on an aesthetoc way, wothon an aesthetoc context, whoch has nothong to do woth the theory otself, but ot’s how I see ot.”

Speakong woth ARTnews on November voa Zoom from her studoo, a structure attached to her home on Hampton Bays, New York, Jaramollo was nearly fonoshed woth a 12-footwode paontong called Quantum Entanglement, whoch takes ots name from the complex scoentofoc theory dealong woth a phenomenon on whoch two partocles become onextrocably lonked. The paontong os mostly black, woth some 40 sharp lones on reds and ponks, yellows and oranges, loght and dark blues, and greens and purples crosscrossong the canvas multople tomes over. At eother end are hazy bursts of color meant to represent the lonked partocles. “There’s a communocatoon there, no matter what the dostance os, and that’s what I vosualoze, all these lones are lones of communocatoon,” Jaramollo saod. Ultomately, she plans to dosplay Quantum Entanglement opposote a somolar soze, overwhelmongly whote paontong that she refers to as ots soster, and alongsode fove smaller paontongs that vosualoze braon waves.

AT AGE 81, JARAMILLO IS SEEING a resurgence of onterest on her work. Her forst-ever solo museum exhobotoon opened at the Menol Collectoon on Houston last year, a show of eoght paontongs datong from 1969 to 1974, from her “Curvolonear” seroes. It was whole she was creatong those paontongs that she had her greatest art-world exposure. She was oncluded on the Whotney Annual on 1972. The prevoous year, she was the only woman, and the only Latona, to be oncluded on “The De Luxe Show” supported by the Menol Collectoon, one of the forst racoally ontegrated exhobotoons on the U.S. Despote that, on the years that followed, her work was under-known to much of the maonstream art world, whoch Jaramollo attrobutes to the fact that she was a Mexocan-Amerocan woman, and was marroed to an Afrocan-Amerocan man. Her current survey at the Menol was tomed to take place on the 50th annoversary of “The De Luxe Show.” It’s the latest on a seroes of accolades that has come late on

Photo Stan Narten/Courtesy Hales, London and New York.

BY MA XI M I L ÍAN O D U RÓ N

BEST PRACTICES / VIRGINIA JARAMILLO ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

life. Her art has been included in acclaimed group exhibitions like “Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980,” at the Hammer Museum in 2011 and the traveling show “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” which opened at Tate Modern in 2017. In November, she was one of the winners of the annual Anonymous Was a Woman grant of $25,000, which goes to women artists over 40 as a boost to ensure they keep producing. Jaramillo wanted to be an artist for as long as she can remember. She spent her childhood in East Los Angeles drawing, re-creating images she found in magazines. “It wasn’t something that I even thought about—it was innate,” she recalled. “Even in school, I was always called Leonarda,” a reference to the Renaissance master. During high school, she and a select few other students were invited to spend some Saturdays at the studio of Charles

and Ray Eames to watch their short films, like Blacktop: A Story of the Washing of a School Play Yard (1952) and Powers of Ten (1968). “Those are films that even today stay with me because it was a different way of seeing,” Jaramillo said. “It was my introduction to a philosophy of seeing—the way of seeing form and structure and the way of form following function and being true to the form.” After graduating from L.A.’s Manual

Arts High School (whose esteemed alumni also include Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston), Jaramillo achieved the kind of success that young artists dream of. When she was just 18, in 1959, one of her paintings was exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of its “Annual” series. The attention didn’t do much to impress her. “I said, ‘Oh wow, now I’m really big-time,’” she recalled of that time with a laugh. “And no one could tell me anything.

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Courtesy Matthew Jeffrey Abrams (2).

Abstract Annex Jaramillo’s studio in Hampton Bays, New York, which is attached to her home, includes two workstations, filled with art supplies, as well as the multiple paintings she was at work on in 2018.

BEST PRACTICES / VIRGINIA JARAMILLO

I’ve always known I had it.” Jaramillo describes her early work as exploratory, experiments in doing things to canvas—like melting crayons, dousing them with India ink, scratching the surfaces—to see what would happen. Even as she was learning from the Eameses, she began to explore Japanese woodcuts and a related aesthetic philosophy, called ma, which she would ultimately channel into “The Curvilinear Paintings,” her best-known series. “Ma is everywhere, in every space,” she said. “It’s looking at the negative space between objects—and that negative space is as important as the object itself—or even a line. I started eliminating everything from my canvas and doing just the line. How can I make this one line appear—how important is this line? Is that line as important as the negative space around it, or is the negative space around the line equally important, or even more important?” It was around this time, in the mid-1960s, that Jaramillo’s husband, Daniel LaRue Johnson (1938–2017), who was also an artist, won a Guggenheim fellowship, which allowed the couple and their two children to move to Paris for a year. “We were told constantly, ‘If you’re really an artist, you have to go to Paris to see the light. The light is different there,’” Jaramillo recalled. “And we said, ‘What?’— here we are in California—‘What do you mean the light is different? We have a lot of light here.’ ‘No,’ they said, ‘there’s something magical about the light. You’ll see.’ So we

went to Paris to see the light.” Her year in Paris proved influential. “Oh, it changed my entire way of thinking,” Jaramillo said. She felt connected to the history of the city, and Europe more broadly, in particular the Gothic architecture. “The thing I realized was that in creating a painting, it’s about the journey of the completion of the painting.” She doubled down on her commitment to a processbased focus on abstraction, even when it came to priming the canvases and sanding them down herself. (She has never worked with assistants and has no plans to do so any time soon. “Until I need them I won’t get them,” she said, with a chuckle.) In the late ’60s, Jaramillo began work on her “Curvilinear,” or “Line,” paintings, each of which features a single line, or sometimes two or three, against a monochrome background. In Green Dawn, completed in 1970, a wisp of yellow paint animates an emerald-green canvas. To look at them, you might think their execution was straightforward, but in fact they are the result of an extended process. Jaramillo would sit in front of an 8-by-10 pad and make 20 sketches of a single line before settling on one that would be suitable to star in a painting. “As simple as they were, they were the most complex because it’s hard to get to simplicity right away,” Jaramillo said. “That’s one of the hardest things to achieve. Sometimes, it would take weeks just to get that line the way I wanted. It had to be

right—it had to flow like a strand of hair.” In the series that came next, her “Stained” paintings, Jaramillo took that simplicity even further, making acrylics and oil paints behave like watercolors, the various shades bleeding into one another on the canvas. “I had gone to such a degree of elimination of the pictorial plane that even the line began to disappear—everything just kind of melted and floated,” she said. “That’s when I saw that there was nothing holding this plane together, yet it existed. Why does it still really captivate?” The flow of color that she saw in her “Stained” paintings led her in the late ’70s and early ’80s to begin making paper by hand, fusing strands of linen with pigment to compose blocklike shapes that would then be pressed together into a sheet. Her years spent learning how to make paper also allowed her to “step back and assess where I was going as an artist and how to use those methodologies to further what I wanted to say as a painter.” As she enters her ninth decade, Jaramillo insists she has not paid much mind to the years when her art was not receiving as much attention as it could have. “I was just doing the work,” she said. “This is the truth, I never think about it—I’ve never let that hold me back. The system is geared for a minority person, especially an artist, to fail. There are so many blocks, so many hindrances and prejudices, that you have to keep going.”

Courtesy Matthew Jeffrey Abrams (2).

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ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

Artist’s Wares In Jaramillo’s studio are a line of dozens of paint brushes of varying sizes (left) and an animal skull inside a box with a mirror (right).

PERSPECTIVES / CALARTS FELLOWSHIP

PERSPECTIVES

Diversifying the Academy How a fellowship at CalArts could be a model for art schools in need of change BY C HAR L E S G AI N E S

I WAS BORN DURING THE JIM CROW era of legalized discrimination and experienced the subsequent social changes created by the civil rights movement. I saw

racial separateness shift from a de jure to a de facto system of discriminatory practices. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, America became very accomplished at preserving practices that discriminated against Black people without relying on laws. This was aided by an interpretation of the Bill of Rights, particularly the First Amendment, that disabled the idea of racial equality by setting the rights of one group against the rights of another. This allowed forms of segregation that were immune to laws prohibiting discrimination. For example, the Supreme Court in 2007 advanced an interpretation of equal protection that allowed for segregated schools if those schools were not intentionally segregated. In the decision for this case, which challenged race-conscious desegregation plans, Chief Justice John

Lesson Learned The Main Suilding at CalArts, where Charles Gaines has taught since 1989.

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Photo: Scott Groller/Courtesy CalArts.

possibly have predicted. Sadly, for me, the imbalance I encountered at CalArts represented my lived experience as a Black person in America. Because of hindrances I experienced as a young person, I learned early on that I lived in a country made up of two societies, one privileged (white) and the other underprivileged (people of color). Life in America for Blacks was a never-ending struggle for equal access; entrenched racism informed my expectations. Although the imbalance I saw wasn’t surprising, I never lost the feeling that it was wrong.

ARTnews / FESRUARY/MARCH 2021

I

F YOU WANT TO DIVERSIFY THE art world, you need to begin by diversifying the art schools. During my 30 years teaching at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), the absence of race-based scholarships made that goal impossible. Minority applicants were less likely to be able to attend an expensive private art school without scholarship support, and we lost many applicants primarily because we were unable to provide sufficient financial aid. In the early 1990s, I had my biggest recruitment disappointment: losing Kara Walker to the Rhode Island School of Design. I don’t know if she would ultimately have attended CalArts, but because we did not have competitive scholarships, we took ourselves out of the running. Had we provided help, we could easily have diversified the program many years ago. So earlier this year, colleagues and created a limited program to begin fundraising for a larger program dedicated to bringing in Black and Latinx graduate students. At CalArts, lack of diversity is a serious problem. When I began teaching there in 1989, two Black students could be counted in the graduate program of about 45. During my time at the school, the number of MFA graduates who self-identified as Black is just 35. It’s notable how many of the few Black students we have taught went on to have important careers, among them Lyle Ashton Harris, Gary Simmons, Henry Taylor, Mark Bradford, Rodney McMillian, Kira Lynn Harris, Lauren Halsey, and Edgar Arceneaux. They overperformed in relation to their white peers and diversified the art world to a greater extent than I could

PERSPECTIVES / CALARTS FELLOWSHIP ARTnews / FESRUARY/MARCH 2021

Roberts wrote, “Where segregation is created in a de facto manner (not created by government policy), it would violate the Constitution to take racially explicit steps to reverse it.” The principle was that equality cannot be enforced by removing the rights of one group for the sake of another. This ruling did not recognize the concept of institutional racism or the fact that institutional racism is itself a product of human intention. Founded in 1961, CalArts, like almost all schools, was and still is segregated. The argument I have heard over and over in my quest to create diversity was that, if benefits were given to one group at the expense of another, equal protection would effectively be denied. The problem with this interpretation of the Bill of Rights is that it protects practices that are discriminatory by setting up policies that

institutionalize segregation and render illegal policy solutions that are designed to desegregate—such as race-conscious distribution of scholarships. Proving intent is difficult in a culture that has normalized white supremacy. White supremacy exists where there are individuals and institutions that privilege white people, de facto or de jure. Institutional racism is a tool of white supremacy. Accordingly, de facto discrimination is ironically protected by equal protection laws. Critiques of white supremacy allow us to identify institutionally racist practices, but it is difficult to demonstrate to whites that institutional culture protective of discriminatory practices against Blacks is inherently white supremacist—and that one’s support of those practices is in fact evidence of racist intent.

I DEAL DAILY WITH WHITE supremacy—the belief in the natural superiority of the white race—mostly through institutional racism. Many whites believe that there are more options available for Blacks to overcome underrepresentation than actually exist, that what happens to a Black person is a result of personal choices. Here is how that belief manifested itself in my struggle to create minority scholarships: the need for financial assistance for minorities was obvious to liberal-minded people, and I received a lot of verbal support for my efforts over the years—but I received no money. And not only no money, but no interest in even trying to raise money. There were a couple of reasons for this. The first was the fear of reverse discrimination as defined by the Supreme Court: that if you are to have race-based

Courtesy Charles Gaines.

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Class Act Charles Gaines teaching at CalArts in 1992.

Photo: Stephanie Zollshan/Associated Press.

15 percent would be considered a sign of a lowering standard. When I created the fellowship program for CalArts, I was inspired by artist and filmmaker Cauleen Smith, who joined our faculty almost two years ago with a personal mandate to create a minority scholarship. (Before she came on, I was joined in this by other faculty such as Sam Durant and Matthew Shenoda, now at RISD.) Smith took up the mantle and worked very hard at it,

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solutions, you need to prove that they would benefit not just Blacks but all of society. (I have never understood why “the benefit of all” has to be a legal standard, except as a backstop to protect white people if Black people suddenly assumed power.) Furthermore, many people continued to believe in an inverse relationship between the percentage of minority students in an art program and its standards: any increase on that 10 or

ARTnews / FESRUARY/MARCH 2021

“I deal daily with white supremacy, mostly through institutional racism.”

discovering the same resistance that I had experienced. Her diligence challenged me. I collaborated with her to create a proposal where I would fund the program directly for two years, but with the caveat that CalArts would find matching funds. For reasons I don’t fully understand, we began to see considerable support after years of inaction. Ravi Rajan, who became CalArts president in 2017, took the unusual step to use his office to spearhead support. Art collectors Jill and Peter Kraus immediately stepped forward with matching funds (Jill is a CalArts board member), and that was followed closely by a major matching contribution from David Kordansky, whose namesake gallery in Los Angeles has undertaken its own project of diversification. (Kordansky was one of my students and mentees at CalArts.) Because of this list of supporters, we are now able to provide at least four scholarships over two years—as part of what the school decided to officially name the Charles Gaines Fellowship. In addition, we are seeing success in our effort to make the fellowship program permanent by creating an endowment. The present political moment is playing a major part in our ability to find support. There is increased recognition that white supremacy and institutional racism exist as destructive forces in our society, and I have to credit the work of activist movements like Black Lives Matter, Color of Change, and the Equal Justice initiative—to name just a few—for the work they have done in raising awareness. But I am not naive enough to think that white supremacy has become an anachronism, especially in the art world. The resistance to diversification is alive, as institutions like schools and museums mishandle one social conflict after another. All we can do is continue to take steps, however small, in the right direction.

PERSPECTIVES / CALARTS FELLOWSHIP

New School Kids gaze through glass windows in the 2019 MASS MoCA exhibition “We Already Have What We Need” by Cauleen Smith, who helped seed change at CalArts when she began teaching there in 2018.

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

An Open Book Nine volumes to add to your collection this winter C O M P I L E D BY AL E X G R E E N B E RG E R

Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants

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(Crown, $27.49) George W. Bush His paintings now having the seal of approval from preeminent critic Jerry Saltz, George W. Bush has gone back to the easel and produced a new series devoted to immigrants, a subject the former U.S. President calls “perhaps the most American of issues.”

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

The Van Gogh Sisters (Thames & Hudson, $39.95) Willem-Jan Verlinden You’ve no doubt heard of Vincent van Gogh’s brother Theo, his art dealer and confidant, but did you know he had three sisters? Art historian Willem-Jan Verlinden has plumbed the lives of Ana, Lies, and Wil, partly in an effort to better understand Vincent’s childhood.

Donald Judd: October Files (MIT Press, $24.95/$60) Eds. Annie Ochmanek and Alex Kitnick The Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective of the formidable Minimalist may be over, but Donald Judd fever burns on with this anthology, which gathers essays about him by a range of luminaries from art historian Rosalind Krauss to artist Robert Smithson.

Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Raiders, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy (University of Chicago Press, $35/$105) Fiona Ereenland Along with countless cultural riches handed down through the centuries, Italy is known for its art police and its legacy of recovering looted antiquities that have ended up in collections around the world. But what if that force had a hidden agenda? Art historian Fiona Greenland explores the political factors that led to the Italian art police’s rise.

Art Is a Tyrant: The Unconventional Life of Rosa Bonheur (Icon Books, $39.95) Catherine Hewitt Nineteenth-century French painter Rosa Bonheur was celebrated during her lifetime, but nearly forgotten by the time feminist art historian Linda Nochlin spotlighted her in a famed 1971 essay in ARTnews. At last, Bonheur—who was also an animal rights advocate avant la lettre—is getting the full-length biography treatment.

Dark Toys: Surrealism and the Culture of Childhood

(Penguin Press, $28) Alexander Nemerov

(Yale University Press, $50) David Hopkins

Two years ago, Frankenthaler’s life came into greater focus when she was one of five female artist protagonists in Mary Gabriel’s book Ninth Street Women. This incisive biography zooms in further, tracing her rise in a maledominated art world.

From unsettling rocking horses painted by Leonora Carrington to mixed-andmatched doll sculptures by Hans Bellmer, Surrealist art often engaged objects held precious during childhood. In this book, art historian David Hopkins considers why that might have been.

(Duke University Press, $26.95) Samantha A. Noël What brings together the runic sculptures of Wangechi Mutu, the tender prose of Maya Angelou, and the elegant performances of Josephine Baker? For art historian Samantha A. Noël, it’s “tropical aesthetics”—the subversive reclamation of space by Black artists.

Keith Haring (Laurence King, $17.99) Simon Doonan The style writer, Barneys window dresser, and selfdescribed bon vivant brings his unique perspective to Keith Haring’s life and work with this slim but informative tome featuring musings on the influence of Haring’s street art–inspired paintings of the 1980s. 21

Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York

Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism

Sophie TaeuberArp’s reputation as a preeminent Dadaist had been downplayed until Nochlin highlighted her as an artist whose femininity had little bearing on her art.

Artists

MAPPING THE ART WORLD / NO GREAT WOMEN ARTISTS? ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

‘Great Women’ at 50 Since is ran half a censury ago in ARTnews, Linda Nochlin’s landmark 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Greas Women Arsisss?” has changed she discipline of ars hissory. Nochlin rigorously and passionasely picked apars she conceps of greasness, and looked as she social condisions underlying she reasons why so few women were looked as as massers. Since iss publicasion, new generasions of feminiss scholars, curasors, and arsisss have emerged—some of shem direcsly under Nochlin’s suselage. To soass she essay’s 50sh anniversary, ARTnews mapped iss vass influence.

Helen Frankenthaler’s large, ambitious abstract canvases never got as much attention as Jackson Pollock’s and Barnett Newman’s. Nochlin wondered why in her essay.

“Women Artists: 1550–1950,” a 1977 show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that Nochlin co-curated with Ann Sutherland Harris, is now considered a landmark survey.

Though she drew praise from contemporaries such as Eugène Delacroix, Rosa Bonheur had been all but left out of art history until Nochlin wrote a full section on her in her essay.

Berthe Morisot was considered a lesser Impressionist until Nochlin dropped her name in the essay, putting her on track to gaining wider recognition.

“Global Feminisms,” which Nochlin curated with Maura Reilly for the Brooklyn Museum in 2007, expanded the iconic 1971 essay to include key figures from Africa and Asia.

BY AL E X G R E E N B E RG E R

“It was a way of putting into words the frustrations that so many women in the art world were feeling.” —Aruna D’Souza, critic

Nochlin was a guiding light for “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” an essential survey of feminist art at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.

Nochlin’s influence was evident in “Women of Abstract Expressionism,” a pivotal 2016 show at the Denver Art Museum that positioned Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, and other women artists at the level of their male colleagues.

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Shows

Neoclassical painter Angelica Kauffman was one of her day’s most famous portraitists, yet she was nearly forgotten until a mention in Nochlin’s essay.

Aruna D’Souza, whom Nochlin advised on her dissertation, is of one today’s foremost art critics. She is now at work on an anthology of Nochlin’s writings about modernism.

Four decades after Nochlin’s essay, historian Michele Wallace published an essay riffing on its title: “Why Are There No Great Black Artists?: The Problem of Visuality in African American Culture.”

Nochlin was memorialized in 1997 by one of her feminist admirers, artist Deborah Kass, who painted the art historian’s portrait in the manner of one of Warhol’s disaster pictures.

For the Guerrilla Girls, an artist collective whose members forcefully protest gender inequities in the art world, Nochlin’s essay was a touchstone when they formed in the ’80s.

E. Carmen Ramos, a curator of Latino art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, remarked that Nochlin was a “paradigm shifter” upon the historian’s death in 2017.

“Her seminal essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Woman Artists?’ was a thunderbolt that forever altered the course of art history.”

The Whole World

Nochlin met haute couture in 2017, when Dior models walked the runway wearing striped T-shirts emblazoned with the title of her essay, and distributed a copy of it during the fashion show.

In 2010, the esteemed food writer Charlotte Druckman wrote an essay about the lack of well-known female chefs. Its title: “Why Have There Been No Great Women Chefs?”

This year, Thames & Hudson is releasing an entire book focused on “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” to mark the essay’s 50th anniversary.

“Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” was included in a celebrated Nochlin anthology compiled by curator Maura Reilly in 2015.

Artemisia Gentileschi, a Baroque painter known for her vivid portrayals of sexual violence against women, became a symbol for the #MeToo movement decades after Nochlin’s essay.

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clockwise from upper left Taeuber-Arp: ©Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Courtesy Hauser & Wirth/Photo Nic Alu; Kauffman: johan10 - stock.adobe. com; Bonheur: The Horse Fair, 1852–55. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art; Morisot: The Cradle, 1872. ©RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay); Frankenthaler: Mountains and Sea, 1952. ©2021 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Nochlin: Adam Husted; Pollock: ©Griselda Pollock/Antony Bryant; Reilly: Rochelle S. Paris; D’Souza: Dana Hoey; Wallace: Stacy Long; Kass: Grace Rosselli; Guerrilla Girls: Peter Steffen/picture-alliance/ dpa/AP Images; Ramos: Ross Whitaker/Courtesy Smithsonian Museum; Dior: Courtesy Dior; Druckman: Melanie Dunea; New book: Courtesy Thames & Hudson; Gentileschi: AP Photo/ Andrew Medichini; “Global Feminisms”: Christine Gant/Brooklyn Museum; “Abstract Expressionism”: Elaine de Kooning, Bullfight, 1959. ©Elaine de Kooning Trust; “Wack!”: Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art/Brian Forrest; “Women Artists”: ©Museum Associates/LACMA.

—Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

During the ’80s, Nochlin’s influence was already starting to be felt when art historian Griselda Pollock began addressing the role women played in shaping modern art.

MAPPING THE ART WORLD / NO GREAT WOMEN ARTISTS?

People

Linda Nochlin

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

TOUCHSTONES

That One Artwork… . . . that inspired creativity of all kinds—as told to ARTnews BY A N DY B AT TA G L I A

musician

William Parker Jazz bassist, creator of 10-CD box set Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World

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Bob Thompson, Inferno (1963) When we were kids we would buy an LP and there’d be a painting on the coverO and we would look for a couple of days before even listening. We would discuss the painting and then slowly get into the music. I got hip to Bob Thompson through a record by Steve LacyO and Archie Shepp and Amiri Baraka had spoken about him. He was part of the downtown East Village scene: In that period you could go to a cafe and Bob Thompson could be thereO or Jackson Pollock or Allen Ginsberg or Cecil Taylor or even Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. For meO that was always a great tree of inspiration.

©Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLCO New YorkO NY. Opposite: ©Deana LawsonO Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co.O New York; David Kordansky GalleryO Los Angeles.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S BY D E N I S E N E S T O R

Moses Sumney Musician, creator of albums including Græ

Deana Lawson, The Garden, Gemena, DR Congo (2015) The firut time I uaw thiu photograph wau at a Deana Lawuon exhibit at the Underground Muueum in Lou Angeleu. It utopped me in my tracku and really took my breath away. There’u uomething that Deana doeu with intimacy—uhe takeu theue uubjectu who I imagine are not modelu but juut kind of everyday people and extractu beauty from them and their uurroundingu in a way that iu autoniuhing. Thiu we can imagine au a kind of allegory of the Garden of Eden. It upeaku a lot about hiutory and our preuent moment. And I like that there’u a lot of intellectualizing you can do with thiu image if you want to, but on a gut level, it’u aluo juut gorgeouu. It really pullu at the heartutringu.

TOUCHSTONES / THAT ONE ARTWORK. . .

musician

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021 25

TOUCHSTONES / THAT ONE ARTWORK. . .

Maria DeCotis

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Comedian/actress/writer, master Twitter impersonator of NY Governor Andrew Cuomo

Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Beheading Holofernes (1612–13) What’s striking about this painting to me is the fact that the women are physically dominating the man. You can really see the struggle and the movement—the energy running through their bodies—in a way you don’t usually see in this story. Many painters have painted it, but this is such a different perspective, with Artemisia Gentileschi as a woman. It’s by someone of the same gender as the figure who actually did the beheading, whereas other depictions you see by men are either before the beheading or after, when they’re just holding the head. This one is directly involved in the action of doing it. Her personal history was inspiring to me because she had a rape trial going on for years. This is like rape: the physical action of someone holding you down and restraining you to the point where you have no power. Seeing those roles reversed is really striking and powerful.

Courtesy Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples.

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

comedian

Jeff Tweedy Singer/songwriter, member of Wilco, creator of new solo album Love Is the King

TOUCHSTONES / THAT ONE ARTWORK. . .

musician

Nick Cave, Until (2016)

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Courtesy MASS MoCA, Massachusetts (2).

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

I saw Until at MASS MoCA, and I just love Nick Cave. He works with humanscale emotions but his art is always way bigger-scale than what people normally do with those emotions. It inspired me to expand my thinking about what I could do with space, on a stage or just musically. His work consistently makes me feel like I need to think bigger. And it’s always such a beautiful world to enter into. With this piece it was like you were floating into some constellation. There were elements of nostalgia, and there was a part in the middle room where you climbed a ladder that was kind of like going up to heaven—and heaven for him, it seemed, was the safety and security of the kitsch and nostalgia of his grandmother’s living room. All of it was human in scale, but it was presented more like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

TOUCHSTONES / THAT ONE ARTWORK. . . ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

Bobby Berk

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Interior designer, star of Netflix series Queer Eye

Roy Lichtenstein, Non-Objective I (1964) This reminds me of architecture. I love straight lines. I don’t like a lot of curves—I don’t like a lot of craziness. The most beautiful architecture is very clean, straight, horizontal, vertical. And what’s always intrigued me about Roy Lichtenstein’s work is his use of dots to create shading that normally you would not really see. I like his take on Mondrian, with the shadowing he used in his Pop art parodies. He took something that was simple and turned it into something that is very simple but still impactful.

©Estate of Roy Lichtenstein.

designer

Un musée Ville de Genève geneve.ch

I WANT YOU AT MAH WALK ON THE WATER 28 JANUARY–27 JUNE 2021

With the generous support of

Fondation Genevoise de Bienfaisance Valeria Rossi di Montelera

TOUCHSTONES / THAT ONE ARTWORK. . .

musician

Thurston Moore

Radieux Radio is a lyricist I collaborate with and a visual artist as well. This painting was a gift, from a nude photograph of me being gazed upon while I was sleeping. It was kind of intense to see it at first because I’ve never had anybody paint a photo of me in the altogether like that—in my birthday suit, so to speak. But it’s certainly not explicit. There’s a dignity to it. It of reminded me of when Iggy Pop posed nude for a painting class for the artist Jeremy Deller. Iggy is known for his raw power, his physicality. I don’t think I’m really known for my physicality—except for being tall and maybe, to some degree, my hair.

Courtesy the artist.

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ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

Musician, former member of Sonic Youth, creator of solo album By the Fire

Radieux Radio, Reclining boy (nude), no date

TOUCHSTONES / THAT ONE ARTWORK. . . ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

Juicy J Rapper/producer, member of Three 6 Mafia, creator of new solo album The Hustle Continues

Cody Hudson, environmental graphics for Hall of Flowers (2019) Cody Hudson is doing his thing. His colors—he’s straight to the point. I love people who have a great imagination and get straight to the point, so you don’t have to sit there and figure it out. It’s clean, it’s dope—the dude is a genius. I didn’t go to Hall of Flowers [a leading trade show for the cannabis industry], but somebody connected me with him and showed me some of his stuff, and I was just blown away. I love art. As a kid growing up in Memphis, I used to win drawing contests. When I was 8 or 9 years old, I drew this picture of Elvis but Black—Black Elvis. I’ve still got it.

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Photo: Mikel Roberts/Courtesy the artist.

musician

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

ACCORD

Making Space Rita Gonzalez and Mari Carmen Ramirez talk new buildings, new audiences, and supporting Latin American and Latinx art BY MA XI M I L ÍAN O D U RÓ N

ARTnews: The coronavirus pandemic has forced museums to connect with their audiences and community digitally, in ways never seen before. As curators, has this digital global reach impacted or changed the way in which you think about building or installing an exhibition?

build the museum’s Latin American art department and has grown its collection to 800 works, including key pieces by Lygia Clark, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Gego, Hélio Oiticica, Joaquín Torres-García, and Cildo Meireles, as well as Luis Jiménez, Daniel Joseph Martínez, and Teresa Margolles. Among the important exhibitions she has co-curated are “Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America” (2004) and “Home—So Different, So Appealing” (2017). Gonzalez and Ramirez joined ARTnews in October for a videoconference to discuss issues facing museum curators during the pandemic, the new buildings at their institutions, and the importance of Latin American and Latinx art.

Rita Gonzalez: I don’t think that has changed the way I think or work, but it has impacted our travel and what we are exposed to. In the past, we would be on the road much more, looking at biennials and artist studios, taking groups to different places, and also getting to see domestically what our sister

[and] brother institutions are doing, so I imagine I would have been in Houston to see the opening of the MFA’s new building, and now I’m not. That impacts what I’m seeing and what I’m thinking for the future, and it’s been stifling, I have to say. There is only so much you can keep up on in the virtual

Illustrations: Scott Chambers.

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RITA GONZALEZ IS THE HEAD OF contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She joined the museum in 2004 and has curated influential exhibitions there, including “Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement” (in 2008), “Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972– 1987” (2011), and “A Universal History of Infamy” (2017). She has also made important acquisitions of Latinx art for the museum’s permanent collection, including pieces by Laura Aguilar and rafa esparza. Mari Carmen Ramirez is a curator of Latin American art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and director of the museum’s research arm, the International Center for the Arts of the Americas. She was hired in 2001 to

have been critical for our fields, because they involve assembling works that have never been seen in the United States before that come from many different lenders, collections, and institutions from many different countries. We will have to wait and see, but I think that one of the effects of this is going to be forcing our institutions to focus more on the local. I think we are both at institutions that like to think of themselves as global institutions, and we spend a lot of time looking to expand our purview and to bring artists from far-flung places to show in L.A. or Houston, but I think that this situation is also going to force us to look at local artists, and to reinvent the relationships of art museums to our local communities, be they Latinx, African American, Asian, or Muslim. ARTnews: Both of your institutions have major building projects in the works. At the MFA Houston, the new Kinder building will see Latin American and Latinx art get its first dedicated, permanent collection galleries. Mari Carmen, how does this

Ramirez: The collections of design and craft, photography, prints and drawings, and Latin American and Latinx art are the fastestgrowing aspect of the museum. In 2003 we received a huge bequest from Caroline Wiess Law, who was one of our major patrons, and that translated into a very hefty acquisitions fund for 20th-century and 21st-century art, so the collection has been growing exponentially since then. But we have never had permanent galleries for these categories. We have been forced to show our collections on a rotating basis, basically treat them as temporary exhibitions. The new building is going to provide a space for these collections. For me, this represents the culmination of the project of building the museum’s collection of Latin American and Latinx art. I know LACMA has had in the past galleries dedicated to Latin American and Latinx art but there are really very few museums in the United States that have that kind of dedicated space. Gonzalez: Houston and Los Angeles are really kindred spirits in so many ways. In Los Angeles you have the emergence of an encyclopedic museum in the mid-20th century—it’s a latecomer in terms of the United States’ history of general museums. So there’s a parallel between its history and the development of artistic communities in Los Angeles. Things have really shifted,

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From top: Courtesy MFA Houston; Courtesy Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner/The Boundary.

Ahead of the Curve Rendering of LACMA’s forthcoming Geffen Galleries building, designed by Peter Zumthor.

The 2004 exhibition, cocurated by Ramirez and Héctor Olea at the MFA Houston, included 67 artists working in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and Venezuela between 1920 and 1970.

building signal to the public what will be the future of the museum?

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

Mari Carmen Ramirez: This situation has really circumscribed us to the screen and to digital studio visits, but it is still not the same thing as being in front of the work or visiting in person. So that is certainly a limitation. In the field that I work in, Latin American art, I worry about the implications. We are suffering here in the United States, but the countries in Latin America are going to suffer even more and are already suffering. The possibility of building partnerships or continuing and consolidating partnerships with institutions down there is going to be impacted. [And the same with] the possibility of doing large-scale exhibitions like “Inverted Utopias” or any of these big exhibitions that

“Inverted Utopias”

ACCORD / RITA GONZALEZ & MARI CARMEN RAMIREZ

world. I mean, it’s great to see images of the galleries online but it’s not the same, and the kinds of conversations that we would have had if I’d gone to Houston or New York aren’t the same, and that affects the research and the trajectory of exhibitions. But I will say that because of Covid, in terms of an economic turnaround, it’s going to take years, and in that time, I think we are all being pushed to reassess the permanent collection. We are going to go really deep into our institutional histories, really deep into the kind of conversations we can have with our collections. We hope to go deep into acquisitions and really assess the gaps that need to be filled.

ACCORD / RITA GONZALEZ & MARI CARMEN RAMIREZ

especially in the last five years, in terms of how departments are losing that sense of these little fiefdoms. The ways in which we can work together across departments and collections have really expanded. That is going to be a part of what drives how we’ll work together for the Zumthor building, or the Geffen Galleries, as they’re called. We already have over 200 proposals that we’ve worked on together, so it’s going to be a process of going through all of these. The space is one floor, so it’s about a lateral version of art history, not entering through one particular vantage point but through this notion of multiple trajectories and parallel tracks. I am optimistic about the richness and complexity. I think you will see both a continuity of certain traditions and an opportunity to innovate and put things in proximity that probably would not have been in proximity before. The Zumthor building wasn’t made with only modern and contemporary art in mind. It will encompass the vastness of the collections, so the role of the contemporary will be intermittent, woven throughout. Those first few years of establishing the Geffen Galleries is going to be very heavy on the collection, especially leading up to the 2028 Olympics. Ramirez: One aspect that I want to underscore about the art world here in the United States is the sense that everything that happens in the art world is basically about New York and not about other places. I think that has given major museums like LACMA and Houston a certain latitude and

flexibility to really focus on other collecting areas. One of the things that we realized when we started making presentations for the Kinder building was that photography, prints and drawings, Latin American art, and 20th-century design and craft were areas that really came into their own in the 1970s. These did not exist as collecting areas, so it says something about the institution that [it] focused on areas that still had possibilities of development in terms of making very large, important accessions. As Rita said, these are young institutions in comparison to other encyclopedic museums in the States. When I started, the museum’s identity was still not fully defined, so Latin American art could bring something special to that identity. The fact that we’ve been able to build such an ambitious collection in such a short time speaks to that ambition to really place the museum in a strategic position of leadership. ARTnews: How will the collection be displayed in the Kinder building? What are you most excited about displaying there? Ramirez: It’s been a very long process and it was at times very difficult to navigate between doing something that was, from a curatorial point of view, very innovative, but at the same time, revealing, giving people a sense of what we’ve collected and how we collected it because they had seen only different fragments of it. The solution was to have a building with three floors: on the second floor we have dedicated galleries by department, and on the first and third floors we have thematic shows as well as a series

of commissions that were done especially for the building. On the second floor, I decided to focus the whole presentation on constructivism in Latin America, which encompasses the Lerner collection, a significant part of which is being shown, and also work we have collected by Joaquín Torres-García and the School of the South. Avant-Garde Art After years in Europe, Joaquín Torres-García returned to Uruguay in 1934 and founded the School of the South, an art school that became influential in the region.

On the third floor we have a gallery where Gego is the leading artist. I presented to my colleagues 30 works by Gego, and they responded with works from their collections that dialogue with Gego. It’s a beautiful gallery that has everything from jewelry to furniture to work by Ruth Asawa [and ] Josef Albers. Then we have another gallery about color and light, where artists like Carlos Cruz-Diez and Hélio Oiticica have leading roles in dialoguing with Albers, Hans Hofmann, and Kenneth Noland. We are showing the strengths of the collection and the strengths of some very important historic movements in Latin America, but at the same time, we’re placing Latin American and Latinx artists in dialogue with European and American artists. I think that that’s also something that we can do here in Houston that perhaps other museums cannot really do as easily or with the same flexibility.

Top Row: LACMA: Courtesy Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner/The Boundary (3); Torres-García: AP/Richard Drew.

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ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

Level Playing Field LACMA’s planned Geffen Galleries building will have one level to show its holdings from various departments together, where varied art-historical periods and styles are sure to bump up against each other.

Ramirez: It sounds like that building will give you the flexibility for those kinds of intersections between older art and modern and contemporary art. In our case, we’ll still be divided by the buildings, so we’re not trying to mix Old Masters with modern and contemporary, but I think it should also be on the table because those are the ways of reenvisioning all these narratives. ARTnews: You have both been instrumental in expanding your museums’ collections through acquisitions. What has been your approach regarding what to add, which gaps to fill, where to go deeper?

Ramirez: You also have decorative arts and design, which are also areas that have never really been considered on the same plane as painting and sculpture. In everything we have been doing for the Kinder building, particularly the third floor, they are completely integrated. It was a very hard push to have this kind of interdisciplinary integration.

Gonzalez: The proposals are still in development but there will be, I think, as Mari Carmen described, some consistent units in terms of the strengths of LACMA, like the art of ancient Americas or a focused space on the colonial Latin American collection that [curator of Latin American art] Ilona Katzew has been building. There will be things that are quite concrete that will be expected as showcases of the collections, but the course visitors take in terms of the architecture and

Gonzalez: This is the sort of double duty that Mari Carmen has had to do and that we’ve tried to do too: you have to make the case to the donors, to the public, before you even get to the possibility of an acquisition. You have to do the years of research and the presentation, the scholarly publication, because you have to establish that importance. At LACMA,

Pacific Standard Time is an initiative launched by the Getty Fvundativn in 2002 that suppvrts research and exhibitivns related tv underknvwn and vverlvvked art frvm Svuthern Califvrnia.

scholarship, to be able to represent the diversity of the history of art-making in Los Angeles. We have had to, little by little, take advantage of these exhibitions and other collector events to educate the collectors to be able to support these acquisitions, because these are often outside the canon. Ramirez: Exhibitions in our area of Latin American and Latinx art have been fundamental. That’s one of the reasons why I was expressing earlier my concern about our ability to continue to do exhibitions like this for the next few years, because these are fields that don’t have a market here, don’t have a collecting base; we’re the institutions that are introducing these new values, and we are doing it through exhibitions and carefully researched catalogues that establish a market for these artists. This is a fundamental role that institutions like LACMA and the MFAH play. ARTnews: Both of your curatorial work has placed Latin American and Latinx artists in conversation and dialogue. Recently, there has been criticism regarding this. Can you talk about your approach to this and why it makes sense for the work you do? Ramirez: Right now, Latin American art and Latinx art are seen as separate fields, and there are vociferous proponents of keeping it that way. I am not one of them. Since we began this program here in Houston, we took a hemispheric approach to this art. We see Latin American and Latinx art as sharing some basic and fundamental features, and to me, that is the agenda for the future. You are

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PST: Cvurtesy Getty Fvundativn.

ARTnews: Rita, that interdisciplinary integration seems to be the goal of the Geffen Galleries when the Zumthor building opens, correct?

The criteria that I established at the time was to collect art that was pushing the limits, that was in the avant-garde tradition, and to focus on paradigmatic works that would tell that story. My approach has been to have exhibitions serve as a matrix for building the collection, like with “Inverted Utopias.” One of the things that was interesting about “Inverted Utopias” is that we presented so much art that was really important, but had no market here in the United States. We were able to acquire a lot of those works because we were ahead of the curve, and the prices were really amazing. We bet on artists that have no market here in the United States, but because we have a research center, the International Center for the Arts of the Americas, we knew that these artists were really important in their countries and for the development of Latin American art or sometimes even modernism in general.

Hidden Histories

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

Gonzalez: You cannot overemphasize how truly significant and groundbreaking it will be to have that, because for so many years, Mari Carmen, you had to face this notion that Latin American art was “derivative of” or “secondary to.” So, to have the primacy of Gego in that space and then have that constellation sort of emanating from Gego is going to be really marvelous, but also so significant to the museological space and to art history. I can’t wait to see it.

Ramirez: In my case, I was invited to establish the Latin American department in 2001, so, at that point, we were starting completely from scratch. The museum had throughout the years acquired works of Latin American art, but without any kind of systematic effort to build the collection. There is significant representation of Latin American photographers in the collection, because Ann Tucker, who was our maverick curator of photography for almost 30 years, traveled in Latin America and bought a number of photographs. In terms of everything else, this was an overwhelming task in many ways, trying to build a collection, because you have over 20 countries as well as the Latino population.

acquisitions have come after important scholarly exhibitions. Before I was here, “The Road to Aztlan” was a groundbreaking exhibition that Virginia Fields and Victor Zamudio-Taylor did to establish an argument about transhistoricity, about the importance of indigeneity for the Chicano Art Movement, and to look at the links between contemporary Mexican art and Latinx art. That was established in their argumentation, and after that we were slowly able to acquire works. Or Lynn Zelevansky’s “Beyond Geometry,” where she was able to slowly bring in works by Cildo Meireles and Hélio Oiticica and others to globalize the history of conceptual art. With “Phantom Sightings,” we laid the groundwork for a generation of Chicano artists that emerged in the ’80s and ’90s, and then we were able to acquire a lot. And then both PSTs [Pacific Standard Time exhibition initiatives] funded so much new

ACCORD / RITA GONZALEZ & MARI CARMEN RAMIREZ

the layout of the building will provide these collisions or adjacencies that we wouldn’t have had in the days of a Beaux-Arts building with different wings. Now, you’ll have these parallel and contingent presentations.

ACCORD / RITA GONZALEZ & MARI CARMEN RAMIREZ

and I explcred in the retrcspective cf Ascc and why we included the interface that they had with Nc Grupc cr the ccnceptual art grcups in Mexicc City cr the ccnnecticns that they had—because they were all invclved in ccrrespcndence art—sc they were ccmmunicating with artists in Uruguay and Tckyc. There was this assumpticn that scmecne like Rupert Garcia was nct aware cf Third Wcrld struggles in Vietnam cr in Cuba, but he was. There is a glcbal dimensicn tc Chicanc/Latinc art, just as there was ccmmunicaticn amcng Puertc Rican artists and Califcrnia Chicanc artists. I wculd never just dc a Latinx-art-fcr-Latinx-art’s-sake type cf apprcach. It has tc be grcunded, and we have tc be mindful cf cur curatcrial methcdclcgy. I think that Marcela Guerrerc’s presentaticn at the Whitney was incredible Curatorial Visions

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

In 2018 Marcela Guerrero’s “Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art” surveyed how emerging Latinx artists are influenced by the art of Indigenous peoples in Latin America.

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New Digs In November, the MFA Houston opened its newest space, the Kinder building, as seen in an aerial view (top). Above, the dedicated galleries for the Latin American art department.

dealing cbvicusly with very hetercgenecus and extremely diverse ccmmunities and there is a disparity between thcse twc ccmmunities. Over the past twc decades, Latin American art has emerged as a market phencmencn, and it’s in the prccess cf beccming mainstream. That is nct the case fcr Latinx art. It dcesn’t have a large ccllectcr base, cr a strcng instituticnal base, cr a market, but I think it will get there. Our rcle is tc explcre the many affinities between these twc grcups and the many differences, and bring the twc grcups tcgether, because the reality is that the field cf Latinx art is ccmpletely different frcm hcw it was in the 1960s and ’70s. It is a ccmmunity that has explcded expcnentially.

The artists are intermingling and we dcn’t kncw what is gcing tc ccme cut cf that. It is cur rcle as instituticns tc suppcrt that and tc investigate it, tc gc deep intc it by displaying it, by creating publicaticns, by inviting artists, withcut necessarily breaking it dcwn intc twc separate areas. Gonzalez: I think it’s a failure cf mainstream art criticism and the mainstream art wcrld in general, nct tc ackncwledge the transculturalism within the Latinx experience. There has been an assumpticn that these are hyper-lccalized identities and that they weren’t in ccntact with cr influencing cr influenced by a glcbal netwcrk. That is scmething that C. Ondine Chavcya

Ramirez: We went thrcugh this experience at the Institute cf Classical Architecture & Art when we built up its archive. We had teams in different cities thrcughcut Latin America and the U.S., and at the early stages cf the prcject, we used tc dc these annual ccnferences where we wculd bring all the researchers tcgether. We wculd have, fcr instance, a team in Chile whc were trying tc track dcwn artists whc had left Chile because cf the dictatcrship and fled tc the United States, and cur team in L.A. wculd realize that thcse Chilean artists were part cf a graphic arts ccllective in L.A. The histcry cf cclcnialism, the histcry cf racism, the histcry cf Cathclicism, the Spanish language—there are a number cf things that unite these twc grcups and I think that the effcrts tc separate them have tc dc mcre with pclitical strategies than with the actual reality cf the way that the twc intermingle. ARTnews: I think it alsc has tc dc with this sense cf specificity and feeling cf erasure. And hcw there can be invisibility and a need tc carve cut space, similar tc what ycu have dcne with Latin American art cver the past 20 years in Hcustcn. Ramirez: Latinx art still lacks instituticnal suppcrt. I am hcpeful that scme cf the displays here in Hcustcn, where we are gcing tc have Latinx artists next tc American and Eurcpean artists, will bring attenticn tc that. But we need mcre instituticns that

MFA Houston: ©Richard Barnes/Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2); Guerrero: Courtesy Marcela Guerrero.

and really pushed buttcns, because it was lccking at discussicns cf indigeneity in the Americas. We cculd really see these relaticnships between disparate artistic practices, but thrcugh adjcining ccnceptual interests.

institutional practices, and lead museums to reinvent themselves. I think that both Batin American and Batinx art have been thought of as a kind of added value to museums. But it is not just an added value. These communities are transforming these museums’ cities, their states, their regions, and the country itself. The white population is decreasing in the United

States. It is already the minority in many places. And it is all these other diverse and complex communities that are going to be the audiences in the future. For encyclopedic museums in particular, there is an urgent need to reimagine who they are, their function, their objectives in relation to these communities. Ultimately, it’s about the survival of the institution.

ACCORD / RITA GONZALEZ & MARI CARMEN RAMIREZ

show the artists and showcase them. The problem is that Batinx art doesn’t have an infrastructure. There are very few museums that are actually doing this work. It’s like a vicious cycle of the chicken and the egg because if you don’t have that visibility, then you don’t have a market, then you don’t have exhibitions—and we went through that with Batin American art. Many people want to say that Batin American art has already made it. I don’t think that is true at all. That is true for a few select artists who are part of the global circuit, but not for the majority of artists in Batin America. And if you open up any textbook of 20th-century art or 21st-century art, you will find no Batin American artists, or, maybe just Bygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Wifredo Bam, and that’s it. ARTnews: Rita, how do you see the position of Batinx art within the global contemporary?

Engulfing Environments Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Cromosaturación MFAH (Paris 1965/Houston 2017) in the MFA Houston’s new Kinder building.

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Dávila: Courtesy Duke University Press; Kosice: ©Museo Kosice, Buenos Aires; Cruz-Diez: Photo Thomas Dubrock/Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Celestial Bodies Among the historically significant works by Latin American artists that Ramirez has acquired for the MFA Houston is Gyula Kosice’s La ciudad hidroespacial (The Hydrospatial City), 1946–72.

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

Gonzalez: As Mari Carmen was saying, there need to be more institutions that are carving out a space and making a platform for Batinx artists. It can’t just be Houston, Miami, and B.A., because the truth of the matter is that Batinos are in every state and every region. Ramirez: They are everywhere—and they are here to stay. Gonzalez: Exactly. I am hopeful too because I think the philanthropic foundations are starting to address this, and with that kind of solidity of support, we will be able to get more recognition and more support for individual artists. Pilar Tompkins Rivas and I were the curators of the special commissions at Frieze B.A. [in February 2020], and we really wanted to give it primacy. When you walked to the back lot of Paramount, the first thing you saw was the work of Gabriella Sanchez. There is this book that has just come out by Arlene Dávila, which offers an interesting Required Reading Published in August, Arlene Dávila’s Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics explores the reasons why Latinx art and artists have been and continue to be invisible on the art market.

sociological, anecdotal perspective—a muchneeded perspective because it is based on the many conversations that she’s had, and you get the sense that people have shared things with her that they might not have shared in public forums, so you are kind of privy to these backdoor conversations where collectors are telling her what they really think. This kind of airing is important because now we know what we are up against. This year, the Black Bives Matter movement has really pushed commercial art galleries to address issues of social justice and diversity in their programs. Ramirez: I think we are at the point of no return. It should definitely transform gallery practices, curatorial practices, and

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

Dance Party Right, museum guests learned the steps to an Aztec dance with Huehca Omeyocan dancers at a free family event at Five Oaks Museum in 2019.

CASE STUDY

What’s in a Name? A lot, as it turns out. Two artists’ renaming and transformation of a small museum may provide a blueprint for larger institutions BY C L AI R E VO O N

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T WAS THE MUSEUM’S cornerstone display: a long-term exhibit on the history of the Indigenous Kalapuya, the original inhabitants of large swaths of land in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. For more than 15 years, “This Kalapuya Land,” at the Washington County Museum in Portland, presented a distorted narrative that was criticized for trafficking in stereotype, sugarcoating settlercolonialism, and treating Native life as past. “It wasn’t made for people in the tribe but for their white audience, for people obsessed with pioneer culture,” Steph Littlebird Fogel (Grande Ronde, Kalapuya), an artist and writer, said. “It was completely outdated and problematic.” The same might have been said of the museum itself—now known as the Five Oaks Museum—just two years ago. Founded in 1956 as a history museum to showcase artifacts of pioneers collected by their descendants, it remained stuck in the 20th century despite having expanded its focus, subjects of more recent shows being as various as the Hubble Space Telescope and steampunk art. Its website was unnavigable, its technology was ancient, and most troublingly, it struggled to attract nonwhite visitors. By the spring of 2019, the small museum was on the brink of closure, caught in a maelstrom of high leadership

turnover and clashing agendas. “The institution was facing, essentially, total failure,” Molly Alloy, the museum’s community engagement coordinator at the time, said. “It had reached a critical point where everything had to be done differently.” That May, after the Washington County Museum director officially resigned in lieu of termination, the board appointed Alloy and then-education director Nathanael Andreini—the only full-time staffers, both of whom are also artists—as codirectors. “We shared a kind of absurd vision of what the institution really could be for the community and for the museum field,” Alloy said. “We had a year to come up with this new way of being that was responsive to the community, about being imaginative in fusing genres like art and history, and empowering the staff.” One of the pair’s first actions was to invite Fogel in as a guest curator to

overhaul and critique “This Kalapuya Land.” Working with scholar and Grand Ronde tribal member David G. Lewis, Fogel directly annotated wall text, introduced contemporary art by 17 Native artists, and gave the display a new name: “This IS Kalapuyan Land.” The title doubled as acknowledgment of Indigenous presence and sovereignty across time. Changing displays to address historically ignored narratives is nothing new: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for one, has invited Native artists and historians to write additional didactics for certain works in its American Wing. But Five Oaks’s reform ran deeper. As a whole, “This IS Kalapuyan Land” heralded the start of a new chapter of institutional unlearning and rethinking. On January 1, 2020, Five Oaks Museum relaunched with a new look and a new name that connected it to a nearby historic site of trees where Kalapuya once gathered.

“The institution was facing, essentially, total failure.”

Portland to take the position, leaving her curatorial job at a museum in Los Angeles. “I knew I’d never find a museum like Five Oaks there,” she added. “I have worked at museums run by well-intentioned

white women, by bad-intentioned white men, by leaders who like to represent the community but have no museum expertise. Now I work at a museum where the directors have experience, and care about the

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IN A YEAR IN WHICH ART MUSEUMS around the United States have been forced to reckon with the reality that systemic inequities are lodged in their structures, Five Oaks’s metamorphosis offers a picture of what real institutional reimagining can look like regarding diversity, access, and inclusion. “Radical is the correct word,” said Mariah Berlanga-Shevchuk, who last year became the museum’s first cultural resources manager. She had moved to

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

Dance Photo: Mario Gallucci. Museum Photo: Victoria Sundell/Courtesy Five Oaks Museum.

CASE STUDY / FIVE OAKS MUSEUM

On the Ground Leut, the museum, situated on unceded Kalapuyan land.

It embraced a new mission (the words “Moving history forward” crown its “About” page) and diversified its board. It has steadily infused its programming with art, mounting “Gender Euphoria,” a show of contemporary trans and genderqueer artists and, most recently, “DISplace,” an exhibition of artwork that represents generations of Hawaiian life in the Pacific Northwest. With these changes, not only has the museum’s audience rapidly diversified (the museum is closed during the pandemic but has seen clear shifts on social media) but its membership has increased tenfold since 2019. Furthermore, its five-person staff operates in a workplace committed to equity—one that provides them with family health care and incremental raises to address existing pay gaps.

CASE STUDY / FIVE OAKS MUSEUM

staff being their whole selves. The board actually listens to us. It has been radically different, in an extremely nourishing and generative way.” Five Oaks Museum’s achievements stem, in part, from a considered structuring of its budget around five values: body, land, truth, justice, and community. “These very humane values—versus institutional values that keep people at an academic arm’s length—are intentionally infused, line by line, into the budget,” Andreini said. Nearly half the $485,900 annual operating budget is funded by Washington County, which owns the museum’s collection and archives, the rest coming from grants, donor contributions, admission ($5 for adults), and other revenue. “Somebody asked how we managed to do so much with so little,” Andreini said. “All we did was make choices. Anybody empowered to make choices ostensibly has the power to make choices that are kind.” When the pandemic forced the museum to close, the codirectors followed through on planned raises even as they reduced staff’s weekly hours.

Also crucial to the museum’s model is the belief that it can better serve its community by flexing as little institutional power as possible. The codirectors, who are both white, view their collaborative leadership as one way to break down traditional hierarchies. “We did not enter into this with a desire to hold power,” Alloy said. “We see our success criteria as decentering the directorship and the museum’s authoritative voice, and leveling hierarchies to create more access and more voice for people.” A similar structure exists at the board level, with members voting last fall to replace the president and vice president positions with cochairs. “We’re figuring out a way that’s more collaborative, where people who might not be experienced in the museum or board world can be mentored,” Five Oaks board secretary Ameena Djanga, who joined last spring, said. “One thing I like is, we are so diverse in age, socioeconomic status, professional experience. It brings different perspectives and helps us understand the landscape of who lives here.”

Five Oaks also has a guest curator program in lieu of a permanent curator position (previous curators had departed, leaving the role empty). The strategy is simple: “Divest, divest, divest,” Alloy said. “It’s about trusting the community, knowing they have important stories to tell and rich competencies around how to tell them. And it only follows that they will draw people in.” Guest curators are chosen through an open call for proposals for two annual exhibition slots, and a panel of community members reviews applications. So far, the process has yielded explorations of long sidelined narratives, as in the ongoing “DISplace.” Five Oaks’s current guest curators, Kanani Miyamoto, an artist and arts educator, and artist Lehuauakea, used their term to cast an even wider net for artists by holding their own open call, the results of which represent diverse Hawaiian voices, from elementary school–age children to elders, who address notions of displacement and diaspora in wide-ranging media. “Molly and Nathanael are radically

Photo: Mario Gallucci/Courtesy Five Oaks Museum.

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021 40

New Face Forward In 2019, Five Oaks Museum’s first guest-curated exhibition, “This IS Kalapuyan Land,” marked a turning point in the institution’s approach to presenting Indigenous culture.

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

In the Cards Above, Don Bailey’s Everyone’s a Winner, Too, featured in “This IS Kalapuyan Land.” Right, Five Oaks Museum codirectors Molly Alloy and Nathanael Andreini.

were doing. Having those three things is going to be less likely for a lot of institutions around the country.” What’s most unusual, Wilkening added, is the museum’s “huge pivot” away from white-centered history in such a short time. “And they are fortunate that they’re in a community that embraces that. There’s a lot of communities in this

country that aren’t there yet.” Fogel, the inaugural guest curator, acknowledged that, with “This IS Kalapuyan Land,” the new codirectors could very well have alienated their audience from the start. “But they took a risk in opening themselves to feedback,” she added. “They realize that the world is moving in a different direction.”

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Artwork Photo: Mario Gallucci/Courtesy Five Oaks Museum. Photo of Co-Directors: Mario Gallucci/Courtesy Five Oaks Museum.

CASE STUDY / FIVE OAKS MUSEUM

reforming how the institution grants agency to Black, Indigenous, and people of color to hold space for their communities,” Lehuauakea said. “We had freedom to bring in voices that may not have ever had this platform. A lot of submissions came from people who never had any institutional engagement.” The museum is dismantling barriers to access in other ways. It has invited students from Portland Community College, whose campus it shares, to visit and critique three of its past exhibits (many wanted to see more exhibits focused on Indigenous peoples). Education programs became free last fall to embrace an agenda of equal opportunity over revenue creation. On its Instagram account, biweekly takeovers by community members flood the platform with myriad voices. “I think that changes the idea of who participates in history, who is part of history today,” Five Oaks learning coordinator Victoria Sundell said. Internally, the museum has avoided traditional hiring practices such as requiring higher degrees or years of industry experience. Its guest curators and resulting staff, though small, are diverse in race, age, and perspective. “I’m 24, and I don’t have a degree in museum studies, but the directors place a lot of trust in me,” Sundell said. “At a different museum, I would be fighting to have my voice heard.” Similarly, although Berlanga-Shevchuk has never previously worked in archives, she is in charge of managing the museum’s collection. One challenge she faces is making it more representative and respectful of diverse communities. In addition to removing objects that no longer serve the museum’s mission, editing offensive descriptions, and reinterpreting objects, Berlanga-Shevchuk is working with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde’s cultural resources manager on the potential repatriation of Indigenous materials—mostly baskets, bowls, and arrowheads. “The deaccessioning work is one of the large ways that we’re trying to decolonize this museum,” she said. “At the same time, it’s impossible to decolonize museums. They are inherently colonial structures.” Does Five Oaks—a small regional institution born out of unusual circumstances—present a scalable model for art museums that are awakening to systemic issues? “Theoretically—absolutely. There’s a lot here museums could take on board and do within themselves and their own communities,” Susie Wilkening, an independent museum consultant said. “Realistically, it seems they had three magical things come together: Humble leadership, a willing and engaged board, and a community that embraced what they

SPENCER MUSEUM of ART CONNECTING ART, PEOPLE, AND IDEAS.

SPRING 2021 EXHIBITIONS

HEALING, KNOWING, SEEING THE BODY An exploration of how artists, scientists, healers, and others have come to understand the human body through time and across cultural contexts.   THE AORTA OF AN ARCHIVIST An immersive sound and video installation by Dario Robleto. spencerart.ku.edu / 785.864.4710 The University of Kansas 1301 Mississippi Street, Lawrence, KS

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HANGING IN THE BALANCE

THE BATTLE FOR BALTIMORE

EQUITY AND INCLUSION FOR ALL

What keeps museums running—and how might the pandemic change that? Read facts and findings from the ARTnews Museum Survey

Art sales rules were changed to help museums in crisis. But when Baltimore used the leeway to address inequities from the past, all hell broke loose

With pressing questions around staffing and audience engagement, new roles take on significance as museums move to diversify

BY A M Y H A I M E R L

BY A N D R E W R U S S E T H

BY T E S S A S O L O M O N

Turn the page for a look into issues facing art institutions in a time of change

50 American institutions included in the ARTnews Museum Survey Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Art Institute of Chicago; Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum; Cincinnati Art Museum; Cleveland Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Dayton Art Institute; Denver Art Museum; Detroit Institute of Arts; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; J. Paul Getty Museum; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; High Museum of Art; Newfields: A Place for Nature & the Arts; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Milwaukee Art Museum; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art; National Gallery of Art; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; New Orleans Museum of Art; North Carolina Museum of Art; Norton Museum of Art; Palm Springs Art Museum; Peabody-Essex Museum; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Philbrook Museum of Art; Phoenix Art Museum; Portland Art Museum; San Antonio Museum of Art; San Diego Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Saint Louis Art Museum; Seattle Art Museum; Speed Art Museum; Tampa Museum of Art; Toledo Museum of Art; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; Walker Art Center; Whitney Museum of American Art

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Illustration: Carolina Rodriguez Fuenmayor.

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

MUSEUMS UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

N I G N I HANG E C N A L A B E TH What keeps American museums running—and how might the pandemic change that?

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BY AMY HAI M E R L

That puts him in an enviable position, considering a recent report by the American Alliance of Museums, which suggested that one-third of the country’s museums could close permanently as a result of the pandemic. And some already have: Indianapolis Contemporary, for example, shut off its lights in April after nearly two decades. The coronavirus crisis has laid bare the many challenges of running an art museum in 2020. “Museums were already in a vice grip because they were expected to do more and more,” said András Szántó, a consultant to cultural institutions, and author of the recently published book The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues. “Meanwhile, sources of funding were topping out, the list of

“IT’S LITTLE MOVEMENTS, NOT THE BIG BOLD MOVE, THAT WILL GET US OUT OF IT—AN ACCUMULATION OF FORWARD STEPS, A LEVEL OF HOPEFULNESS.” – Brian Ferriso, director, Portland Art Museum, Oregon

A Rough Start Adam Levine became director of the Toledo Museum just in time to face the pandemic, after spending 18 months as director of the Cummer Museum in Jacksonville, Fla. (shown above).

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Photo: AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack.

Levine has kept his 227-person team intact and is hiring three new curators. He’s hoping that the twin benefits of more space and a lower cost of living will entice some top talent to the Buckeye State. “The pandemic made moving to the Midwest a very attractive proposition—and the museum sells itself,” he said. And while losses in earned revenue— money accumulated from admissions, restaurants, gift shops, parking, and other means—crippled other institutions, they haven’t had as significant an impact on the Toledo Museum of Art. Since the institution is free to the public, Levine doesn’t depend on people coming through the doors to make the budget. Still, he faces a painful—but manageable—$1.2 million loss in income.

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

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OR ADAM LEVINE, THE pandemic has been like living a never-ending string of Mondays. Before the coronavirus swept across the nation, shuttering everything in its path, the Toledo Museum of Art was closed to the public on Mondays so staff could rehang galleries and do repairs. It was a quiet time without the crowds, a little lonely even. And now, every day was just like that. “It was definitely weird,” Levine said. It was not the homecoming he’d envisioned. For the previous 18 months, Levine had helmed the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in Jacksonville, Florida, and he was excited to return to Toledo, where he had spent six years as the deputy director and curator of ancient art. His fiancée and their 7-year-old son hadn’t been able to join Levine in Florida, and he was ready to be reunited with them and his museum family. As one of the museum’s youngest-ever directors, at 34, had big plans for a listening tour, meeting with people over lunches, dinners, and drinks to talk about the institution’s future. The pandemic had other ideas. Instead of an easy transition out of one job into another one more familiar, Levine suddenly had to manage two different pandemic realities and community responses. By the time he officially started in Toledo in May, the museum had already been shuttered for nearly two months and it was not clear when it could reopen. Essential staff—such as maintenance and security workers—came in daily, as did Levine, but Zoom meetings replaced those lunches and cocktails. The halls were empty when they should have been filled with school tours. In the liminal space of endless “Mondays,” Levine liked to walk through the Classic Court—he did, after all, start his career in the Greek and Roman Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—and contemplate the statue of Tanwet-amani, a nine-foot-tall black granodiorite sculpture of a Nubian pharaoh from the 25th Dynasty. It’s become a sort of touchstone for his thinking about the museum’s mission. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what that object means and how we tell these stories,” Levine said. “The stone is black but so too is the pharaoh. The ruler of Egypt is a Black body. We have these diverse narratives embedded in history and the powerful move for museums is to make sure the global history we tell isn’t just modern and contemporary.” As far as pandemic-related challenges go, Levine knows he’s gotten off easy. Unlike the Met, which laid off 20 percent of its staff,

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THE MISSION OF THE AMERICAN art museum has been shifting almost since the earliest institutions—the PeabodyEssex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts; the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut—were conceived in the 19th century as collections of curiosities or educational institutes filled with plaster casts of European antiquities. When the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, opened in 1876, it did so with 50 cases of casts from Europe—and it even advised the founders of the Portland Art Museum to begin their collection the same way. The Oregon museum did so, buying its first collection—of nearly 100 such objects—for $10,000 in 1892.

Today, the MFA, Boston, has a collection of more than 500,000 objects—including original sculptures from ancient Greece and Rome, and Rembrandt’s Artist in His Studio. The link between the two eras is wealthy individuals and rising industrialists who wanted to display their treasures. Sometimes these benefactors bequeathed gifts to existing institutions, such as the MFA, but they often built new palaces of culture. In 1941, Andrew W. Mellon did both: he gifted President Franklin D. Roosevelt with the National Gallery, which he’d built and stocked. (Minus the gifting, that’s not so different from the private museums of today, such as Walmart heiress Alice Walton’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, or businessman Mitchell Rales’s Glenstone in Potomac, Maryland.) Until the end of World War II, most American museums remained in the business of collecting and storing art. There was no educational mission in the modern sense; they allowed students and scholars to study the collections, but there was no commitment to the public’s edification or thoughts about storytelling and whose stories were being told. “The museum’s prime responsibility was to its collections, not its visitors,” wrote Kenneth Hudson in his essay “The Museum Refuses to Stand Still” for a

Lean and Mean At the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, director Charles Venable’s goal is to have “fewer things and finer things.”

1998 issue of the academic journal Dædalus. That began to change in the 1960s. There was a sense that museums should do more than just warehouse art; they should do something with the great treasures of humanity. Or maybe that’s what was proffered to convince Congress to approve the first federal funding of American cultural institutions—by way of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. This wasn’t meant to be the European model of funding in which most of a museum’s operating budget would be covered by the government. Even in 1965—long before the culture wars—Congress was clear: these grants were for specific projects and not general operational support. From there, the conventional sense of museums’ mission started to creep. They began creating educational programing for the public and fighting for dollars to fund their new ideas. In the 1970s, “people-centric” became a buzzword in museum circles as directors started to see their future tied to visitors, not just collections. Hence, the blockbuster, the 1980s phenomenon designed to draw crowds and big admissions and gift shop dollars. Museums also started sending their collections to Japan for high licensing fees as a way to generate income.

Photo: AP Photo/AJ Mast.

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

unacceptable sources is getting longer, and the cost side is expanding.” Now, these institutions are struggling with the loss of revenue from having to close, but also from less obvious sources, such as the canceling of memberships, fundraising galas, and donor gifts. Meanwhile, museum staffs must still be paid, and art must still be cared for. Add to that a cultural reckoning over long-standing systemic racism and inequity, and museum directors are in a perfect storm of cultural and financial crisis. What is their purpose? Whom do they serve? And how do they pay for it?

that single source. The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, which had been unwisely spending down its endowment, teetered on the brink of bankruptcy and had to be saved by a matching grant from billionaire trustee Eli Broad. In the ensuing decade, markets have roared back—as have endowments—but the question of mission continues to nag at the edges, unsettled. What does it mean for museums to be responsive to their communities? Is it museums’ mission to provide an educational experience or meet changing demands for entertainment? How can museums be all things to all people? In the span of six decades, broadly speaking, museums have shifted from indifference to visitors to dreaming up ways to lure a broader base. And, once again, how do they pay for it all?

WHERE DOES THE MONEY COME FROM?

47

How are art museums funded? The short answer is that wealthy people pay for them. Casual observers might think they make their living off admissions and exhibition fees and glasses of mediocre Chardonnay in the café. But that’s income that Dean Sobel, former director of the Clyfford Still Museum and the Aspen Art Museum, called “bus trips and bake sales” money. The real action is with patrons who write big annual contribution checks or

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

By the 1990s and 2000s, certain museums realized they needed an extra wow factor to draw visitors and donors. Some museums, like the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, upscaled their gift shops and cafés, bringing in chef partners, while others went on a building boom. Between 1999 and 2013, the number of museums with tax-exempt bonds—usually a sign of a construction project—nearly tripled, according to a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The Guggenheim Museum’s tourist-tantalizing, Frank Gehry–designed Bilbao branch is generally considered the starchitect building boom’s kickoff (price tag: $100 million). In 2004 the Museum of Modern Art got a brand-new building designed by Yoshio Taniguchi (price tag: $425 million). “If you could talk to someone from the 1960s and show them these gleaming museums with amenities,” Szántó said, “they would be astonished. It’s like everybody has a Ferrari.” The escalating demand for more, more, more rolled right through to 2008, when the financial crisis hit. Over two years, the stock market plummeted 50 percent and took museums’ endowments with it. What had been safe nest eggs that produced reliable income suddenly left museums scrambling to make ends meet. The Indianapolis Museum of Art’s endowment fell by $100 million, forcing then director Maxwell Anderson to lay off more than 110 people because 75 percent of his budget came from

fund museum endowments. There are four key areas of revenue— earned revenue, endowment income, contributions and fundraising, and government support—on which museums draw for their budget. Each one is a unique cocktail: Some mix equal parts, like a good negroni, while others are more singular, like a classic martini. Let’s look at the ingredients. In addition to the “bus trips and bake sales” money museums earn from people coming through the doors, earned revenue includes things like income from special events and museum rentals, parking fees, royalties, gift shop splurges, loans to other museums, and speaking honoraria. It is particularly appealing to directors because they control how it is spent. Before the pandemic, many consultants encouraged museums to find new ways of generating this type of income, whether that be curatorled trips or digital programming. “It’s the most valuable money you can find,” said Daniel Payne, managing principal at AEA Consulting, who has advised such clients as the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Dallas Museum of Art. But this money doesn’t come close to covering the costs of operating museums or running programs. Museums typically earn less than 10 percent of their annual budget from admissions unless they are in mega markets like New York City, where tourism drives ticket sales. The Guggenheim, for example, relies on admissions for more than one-third of its budget, which leaves it particularly vulnerable when the crowds can’t visit. “One of the devastating things about Covid is that institutions that pivoted to increase income based on tourism and admissions are hurt at a greater level because earned income has basically disappeared,” said Lial Jones, vice president and secretary of the Association of Art Museum Directors and director of the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. Despite that, Payne still recommends that clients focus on earned revenue—just more innovative sources than gate fees. “The challenge post-Covid is not to learn the wrong lesson even though earned revenue went to zero,” he said. The endowment is the nest egg that museums live off—if they’re lucky enough to have one. It is a collection of significant contributions that have been gifted, or endowed, to a museum, and are typically held in the form of securities and other investments. The money is designated to keep museums in business for the next 100 years, not necessarily to be raided for the crisis of any given moment. “Building endowment is slow and arduous,” said Baltimore Museum of Art director Christopher Bedford, who has helped grow the institution’s pot by nearly 40 percent

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

since he started in 2016. Still, he added, “it can sometimes feel you are raising millions and aren’t seeing dividends.” The generally accepted practice is for museums to draw no more than 5 percent annually from these investments so that, ideally, they live off the interest while the principal continues to grow. Beyond that, directors don’t have significant control over endowment funds because donors frequently earmark, or restrict, them for things like art purchases, collection care, or specific curatorial positions. That can leave a museum looking rich while struggling to make ends meet. The Guggenheim, for example, has an $85 million endowment compared to the

Met’s $3.3 billion or even Toledo’s $176 million purse. That means director Richard Armstrong has less to draw on and forces him to seek other streams, like earned revenue. “The museum’s endowment only provides about 5 percent of our annual operating budget, whereas some of our peers see upward of 20 percent plus,” he said. “The growth of our endowment is a continued area of focus for the museum.” And, of course, endowments grow—or fall—with the stock market. Since the pandemic, the key measure, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, hit record highs, swelling endowments even as earned revenue disappeared. Conversely, during the 2008 financial crisis, markets dragged

down endowments even as earned revenue stayed steady. But overall, “the beauty of the endowment is that it’s predictable,” Sobel said. Contributions and fundraising denotes money that comes in any amount, from small (annual museum memberships) to large (corporate gifts and donations from philanthropic foundations). Unlike endowments, this funding is typically unrestricted and can be used as needed. Museums with reserves of this unencumbered money have more flexibility in a downturn, so they spend a substantial part of their fundraising budget courting this largesse. Contributions raised at lavish annual galas, in particular, can be significant

In the fall of 2020, ARTnews surveyed 50 key collecting art museums across the United States that help shape the culture and market around art through their size, the significance of their collections, or their stature in the communities they serve. The institutions are distributed proportionally among five regions of the U.S., and are representative of the state of the American collecting art museum before the coronavirus pandemic swept over the world. We endeavored to study museums’ finances, collections, and staffing by means of public data, financial reports, questionnaires, and interviews with directors. The data collected and used in the graphs in these pages spans the fiscal years 2016 through 2019; throughout, we present averages over that period, rather than current-year figures, to smooth the data. For a list of the 50 museums surveyed, see page 43.

What is a museum’s single largest expense? Staff

$27

54%

MILLION

Average director salary with benefits and perks

Average amount museums spent annually, pre-Covid, on salaries and benefits

Percentage of museums surveyed that had layoffs or furloughs

$74,000 Average amount they spent per day

Top Paid Directors (Average of Salaries & Benefits, 2016–2019)

42%

Percentage of museums’ total average expenses attributed to salaries and benefits

TIMOTHY ROGERS Phoenix Art Museum (2020)

ADAM LEVINE KATHERINE LUBER Toledo Museum of Art Minneapolis Institute of Art (2020) (2020)

Longest-serving director: Marla Price, The Modern, Fort Worth (1992)

Largest Salary and Benefits Budgets $3 million

GLENN D. LOWRY MOMA

$1.6 million

MICHAEL GOVAN LACMA

220

201 M RICHARD ARMSTRONG

$1.2 million Guggenheim

KAYWIN FELDMAN

$1.2 million National Gallery

165

MILLION

5

$657,000

Number of directors who started their jobs in a pandemic

$551,000 per day

138 M* 132 M*

110

$378,000 per day

$362,000 per day

107 M

102 M

$293,000 per day

$279,000 per day

55

46 M ADAM WEINBERG

$1.2 million Whitney

0

$126,000 per day THE MET

GETTY CENTER

ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

48

* Includes both museum and research institute or school

Figures sourced from the ARTnews Museum Survey

NATIONAL GALLERY

MOMA

MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON

AND WHERE DOES IT GO? You can sum up the expense side of a museum’s balance sheet in two items: staff and collection care. On average, salaries and benefits account for between one-third and one-half of most art museums’ annual expenses. Before Covid-19 spurred layoffs, the Met spent an average of $200 million a year on staff costs, or about two-thirds of its annual operating revenue of approximately $300 million. The

Big Ticket The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum relies on admissions for more than one-third of its budget.

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Photo: Tupungato/stock.adobe.com.

about 15 percent of art museums’ annual budgets, according to the Association of Art Museum Directors. The primary conduits for federal support are the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. President Trump initially struck down any funding for the two endowments in the 2020 budget, but in the end, Congress approved $162.2 million for each. The federal stimulus bill known as the CARES Act also made available another $300 million in pandemic support. Most public support happens at the state and local level, but it varies widely by community. The art museum in Toledo, for example, receives no government funding. An hour away, voters in metro Detroit recently renewed a property tax that brings in approximately $26 million a year for the Detroit Institute of Arts—or nearly half its annual budget.

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

for some museums. “When I was at the Aspen Art Museum, that one night could fund one-third of our whole revenue stream,” Sobel said. Having access to a wealthy community— in particular wealthy board members—is critical in this category. They make big annual donations and can be tapped in times of economic distress. Brian Ferriso, director of the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, reached out to his board this summer as he faced furloughing or laying off more than 80 percent of his staff. One board member wrote a $400,000 check—enough to cover two weeks of payroll. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently raised $25 million in new giving to support an emergency fund. Not every museum can launch a fundraising campaign so quickly, however. The donors available to a museum depends to a good degree on dominant local industries and fortunes, which can be out of sync with audiences that are becoming more sensitive to the sources of museum funding. There is less appetite for money derived from certain industries, such as oil and gas— and pharmaceuticals, as the Sackler family’s failed reputation demonstrates. “There’s been a real purity test put in place about funding,” said Szántó, the consultant. As for government grants, even though government funding of American museums is paltry compared to European counterparts, there is some public support. In total, government funding accounts for

much smaller Toledo museum spends an average of $9 million a year on staff—half director Levine’s budget. With what’s left, museums have to pay for everything else—including the everincreasing costs (building maintenance, insurance, utilities, etc.) of warehousing ever-expanding collections. Charles Venable can put a precise price tag on that bill: $5.6 million per year to store and maintain the 55,000-object collection at Newfields: A Place for Nature & the Arts (formerly the Indianapolis Museum of Art). When he learned in 2018 that the museum needed to double its storage space at a cost of $12 million, Venable refused. Instead, he asked his team to put a letter grade, A through D, on each collection item and consider items to sell or transfer to other museums. In 2020 alone, Newfields has deaccessioned 2,400 objects, from small items, such as a facing for a woman’s coat and a set of Italian champagne glasses, to Henri Matisse’s Jeune fille assise, robe jaune, which sold at auction in October for nearly $1.1 million. “Our goal is to have fewer things and finer things,” Venable said. “We don’t want to stockpile.” Venable, like directors everywhere, is sleuthing out budget cuts. But they are hard to find because most costs are fixed—meaning they don’t go away, even during a global shutdown. Some of the finer points of Newfields’s maintenance may be

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

Where do museums get their money?

4

EARNED REVENUE: Admissions, concessions, museum shop sales, events, rentals, etc.

CONTRIBUTED INCOME: Membership dues, annual gifts, corporate donations, fundraising, etc.

ENDOWMENTS, INVESTMENTS & TRUSTS: The nest egg of permanent investments and gifts

GOVERNMENT FUNDING: Tax support, grants, and expenses, such as utilities and building costs

Primary Sources of Revenue

Museums with Significant Public Support (as % of average operating budget)

AVERAGE MIX OF OPERATING REVENUE

75

78%

20% 27%

50

10%

43%

35%

25

26%

43% Governuent Funding: 10% Earned Revenue: 20% Contributed Incoue: 27% Endowuents: 43%

21%

0

(Average, FYE 2016–2019)

NATIMNAL GALLERY

DETRMIT INSTITUTE MF ARTS

DENVER ART MUSEUM

BALTIMMRE MUSEUM MF ART

LACMA

Figures sourced from the ARTnews Museum Survey

“QUALITY IS FUNDAMENTALLY INCLUSIVE. IT’S THE MOST EGALITARIAN THING THERE IS.”

50

– Adam Levine, director, Toledo Museum of Art

deferred, but not the insurance bill. (Price tag: $400,000 per year.) And the museum’s 152 acres of gardens and grounds must be kept in shape for outdoor events that generate much-needed earned revenue. Travel, advertising, and legal budgets can be trimmed, for example, but the cuts don’t add up meaningfully compared to the cost of salaries and collection care. “You can’t reduce the costs of a major facility—especially ones that are taking

care of great works of human culture—even if your income drops to zero overnight,” said E. Andrew Taylor, professor of arts management at American University in Washington, D.C. That makes employees a target for cost cutting during downturns. Many curator positions are endowed, meaning the funds to pay that salary exist in perpetuity, so higherlevel staff are often protected. Meanwhile, in a public health crisis that closes museums,

some of the first staff to be cut are those on the frontlines, with lower wages and security. If the museums are closed for an extended period, security guards and visitor services, for example, no longer have jobs to do. In Baltimore, director Bedford is adamant that it won’t come to that. “I will cancel an exhibit before [I] fire a person,” he told me in November. “I don’t think we can have the pronounced mission statement that we do and not apply those principles to protecting those who are our family.” So far, he has been true to his word. But his growing endowment, plus strong fundraising, contributions, and government support, make it easier. Others aren’t as lucky: more than half of museums have laid off staff since March, according to the American Alliance of Museums. The Portland Art Museum is one of those institutions that had to make hard choices. Because the museum is nearly 40 percent dependent on earned revenue—mostly from a film center, theater, and facility rental— director Ferriso had significant layoffs. But he, too, wanted to think about the museum’s principles and family, even in hard times: “We looked at our layoffs through an equity lens and we made sure that we were retaining people of color,” he said.

GETTING THE RIGHT MIX To control their future, museum directors must control their revenue mix— and they are making very different choices based on their location, assets, history, and mission. “So much of what we do is hyper-local,” said Rand Suffolk, director of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. “The response is going to be very diverse, because there is so much about our organizations that is unique to us or the communities we serve.” And those differences go back, in some cases, to museums’ founding. The High was started in 1905 and didn’t receive its first major donation until 1949. In a city still developing at the time, the High didn’t have the advantage of deep-pocketed industry barons clamoring for a place to show off their wealth. As a result, it doesn’t have the same history of early endowments as other museums. What it does have is access to modern wealth in the form of corporate headquarters. Atlanta is home to 15 firms on the Fortune 500 list in 2020, including Home Depot, the Coca-Cola Co., and Delta Airlines. “Atlanta never had a Golden Age,” Suffolk said. “We’re not Toledo or Cleveland or Buffalo that had this Golden Age of industrialization. You’ll remember, Atlanta was burned down a couple of times. Those things are cumulative. That’s why you’ll see those vast disparities.” Indeed, the Cleveland Museum of Art is

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

in one of the country’s smaller markets, but it boasts one of the largest endowments, nearly $800 million. By comparison, the High’s endowment averages $132 million. That means Suffolk can draw only about $6 million a year for support compared to Cleveland’s potential $40 million. With all that in mind, Suffolk prioritizes an evenly balanced revenue mix to cover his nearly $20 million a year in expenses. He pulls 25 percent each from the endowment, earned revenue, contributed income, and membership dues. “I regret to inform you I am completely average,” he said, with a laugh. Suffolk has worked hard to get there. When he started at the High in 2015, the museum was more dependent on gate fees and other earned revenue. It was reliant on big blockbuster shows, such as “Dream Cars: Innovative Design, Visionary Ideas,” in 2014, that drive admissions and corporate sponsorships. But that model is “a little bit like heroin,” Suffolk said. “You get in this vicious cycle chasing one three-month brand after another.” So he moved toward capping costs and building the endowment and contributions. It has paid off in this crisis: Having that

$294

MILLION

Why do museums with large endowments lay off staff? Restricted funds

Aherage halue of surheyed museums’ endowments

Donors often earmark how their funds can be spent. So big nest eggs aren’t always available to save staff or plug budget holes.

HOW MUCH ARE ENDOWMENTS RESTRICTED*?

61% 19%

Permanently 61% Temporarily 20% Unrestricted 19% 20% *Aherage of restrictions on the endowments of all museums surheyed

THE BIG 4 ENDOWMENTS IN SURVEY ($1B OR ABOVE) The Met $3 billion

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston $1.2 billion

Art Institute of Chicago $1.1 billion

MoMA $1 billion

LARGEST ENDOWMENTS IN SURVEY, BELOW $1B Cleveland Museum of Art

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

National Gallery of Art

Philadelphia Museum of Art

$764 million

$617 million

$554 million

$464 million

Phoenix Art Museum

Dayton Institute of Art

Palm Springs Art Museum

$27 million

$22 million

$21 million

SMALLEST ENDOWMENTS IN SURVEY

$21 million

$440 million

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

$20 million

*All data is based on the aherage halue of endowments, FYE2016 –FYE2019

51

Figures sourced from the ARTnews Museum Survey

Pérez Art Museum Miami

Peabody Essex Museum

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

more balanced mix not so dependent on admissions allowed Suffolk to contain layoffs to five members of the education team even as corporate giving and memberships have declined. and the annual wine-auction fundraiser. which went virtual this year. made just half what was expected. That doesn’t make it the perfect business model. just the one that is working for the High in Atlanta at this moment. “You don’t need to replicate the same model in every place.” Szántó said. “If you are going to be more community focused. then you are going to be more specific to your location and situation. We will see this on a global basis as well. You don’t have to transplant a German-style shiny glass palace museum to West Africa. You can do something quite different.” In Indianapolis. Venable is doing just that: He’s betting on growing earned revenue. not just endowments. and giving visitors experiences like harvest festivals and beer gardens. not just exhibits. He sees a revenue mix of 50 percent from endowment and 50 percent from earned and contributed income as the way forward for one of the country’s largest encyclopedic art museums—at 660.000 square feet plus 150 acres of grounds—in one of the smaller metropolitan areas. with just 2 million people. “We’ve taken the strategy that it’s great

“IT’S RIGHT FOR MUSEUMS TO BE FREE BECAUSE YOU RADICALLY DEMOCRATIZE ACCESS TO ELITE CULTURE. THAT’S A LINCHPIN TO WHAT WE’RE DOING.” i Christopher Bedford, director, Baltimore Museum of Art

to build endowments. but you become trapped when that money gets scarce.” Venable said. He also remembers the pain of relying heavily on an endowment. When he arrived at the museum in 2012. he had to retrench a museum that was still reeling from the financial crisis. The previous director made deep staff cuts. but Venable realized it

wasn’t enough. He made the hard choice to lay off another two dozen people. It is an experience he wants never to repeat. Venable began studying changing consumer preferences and crunching the numbers on running the museum. He decided the way forward was to bring entertainment. not just capital A art. to the museum grounds. Attendance had held

How much do museums spend on art? $6.1 M (on average) HOW THAT COMPARES TO ARTWORK RECENTLY SOLD AT AUCTION Jean-Michel Basquiat Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump $100 million Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Pierreuse $9,062,000 Andy Warhol Small Campbell’s Soup Can (Chili Beef) $6,065,000 Claude Monet Champ de tulipes près de Leyde $3,990,000 Sarah Sze S urprise Ending $737,500

5 BIGGEST SPENDERS

$92 million Getty Center

$65 million

52

Average number of objects in collection Figures sourced from the ARTnews Museum Survey

LARGEST COLLECTIONS

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

$38 million Museum of Modern Art

$27 million Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

177,000

TOP 5

$21 million Art Institute of Chicago

$17 million National Gallery of Art *Does not include the value of gifts or promised gifts

2 million objects The Met 1.8 million Peabody Essex Museum 1.5 million Brooklyn Museum 500,000 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

297K

10.6 million

1 million

Banksy (artist) @banksy

Whitney Museum of American Art @whitneymuseum

Klaus Biesenbach (museum director) @KlausBiesenbach

966K

112K

5.2 million MoMA @themuseumofmodernart

3.7 million Metropolitan Museum of Art @metmuseum

3.2 million KAWS (artist) @kaws

2.5 million Guggenheim @guggenheim

2.2 million Takashi Murakami (artist) @takahaskipom

1.3 million Gagosian (gallery) @gagosian

1.3 million Sotheby’s (auction house) @sothebys

Brooklyn Museum @brooklynmuseum

Detroit Institute of Arts @diadetroit

893K

109K

Christie’s (auction house) @christiesinc

Pérez Art Museum Miami @pamm

780K

76.9K Portland Art Museum @portlandartmuseum

ARTnews @artnews

40.8K

589K MOCA, Los Angeles @moca

Baltimore Museum of Art @baltimoremuseumofart

40.2K

447K National Gallery of Art @ngadc

New Orleans Museum of Art @neworleansmuseumofart

40.2K

404K Jeff Koons (artist) @jeffkoons

Newfields @newfieldstoday

32.8K

397K Museum of Fine Arts, Boston @mfaboston

Toledo Museum of Art @toledomuseum

1.2 million Frida Kahlo (artist) @fridakahlo

Green text indicates museums

Figures sourced from the ARTnews Museum Survey

Keeping the Lights On The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently raised $25 million in new giving to support an emergency fund.

LOOK TO THE FUTURE As art museums look to the future, some will focus on building their endowments and reducing their dependency on admissions to ensure stability. Others, perhaps with

stronger endowments, may look to new earned income opportunities. More still are considering what the future of memberships might look like as younger audiences resist joining. Others, like Bedford in Baltimore and Venable in Indianapolis, are looking at how they most want to engage their

53

Photo: susanne2688/stock.adobe.com.

Where do museums stack up as art world Instagram influencers?

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

steady for years at about 650,000, and Venable needed a way to move that needle toward his goal of 600,000 and make the museum relevant to more Hoosiers’ lives. He considered big blockbuster shows, like a Van Gogh extravaganza, but he said those exhibits can cost upward of $6 million to host. By comparison, adding a culinary director, making the sculpture garden a selfie-magnet, and adding community events is significantly cheaper—and brings in more money. “To me as, a sector, we’re going to have to become much more flexible and willing to meet individuals where they are if we want robust institutions 20 years from now,” Venable said. “We’ve been worried about water bottles in the museum for years and now we’re going to allow cocktails.” There has been significant criticism of his path, and critics have called him all but a modern-day P. T. Barnum. They say his harvest festivals and beer gardens and new 60,000-square-foot digital art space, LUME, are dumbing down the institution. But from where he’s sitting, Venable said he feels vindicated. He’s dropped reliance on the endowment to 60 percent from 75 percent while also cutting debt obligations by almost half and weathering the pandemic without laying off staff. His budget is balanced, thanks to an endowment once again healthy, and nearly $6 million in earned revenue this year, mostly from outdoor attractions such as the annual harvest festival and Winterlights exhibit on the grounds. “I must admit that now that people want to be outdoors, having our large gardens has been useful during Covid,” Venable said when we spoke in November. He also implemented what is known inside the museum as the Ring of Defense: a plan of action in case of financial crisis. The board of directors and senior staff preapproved the document long before Covid hit, and it gave them a road map for action from cutting travel and programs to pinpointing when things are so dire they’d cut staff, and in what order. Venable credits his preparedness planning to the Corning Museum of Glass, which introduced him to the Ring of Defense idea when he was a board member there, and to his small-business-owner father. He remembers sitting at the dinner table listening as the family discussed sales and customers and budgets. “I always joke that the things they didn’t teach me in an 800-level art history class are legendary,” Venable said. “But all those family lessons are very applicable to art museums. It’s a different product, but it’s still people needing to be motivated to embrace your brand and what you want to give them.

museum,” said Szántó. For most museums, one legacy of the pandemic will be a growing focus on digital experiences. Many institutions already had plans in the works, but Co”id-19 accelerated the rollout. The New Orleans Museum of Art, for example, rebuilt its website in one day to focus on newly created ”irtual tours, curator

“THE MUSEUM FIELD IS LOOKING AT ITS MANDATE AND APPROACH IN NEW WAYS. WE ARE EVOLVING FROM AN OBJECT-CENTRIC INSTITUTION TO A PEOPLE-CENTRIC INSTITUTION.”

54

– Susan Taylor, director, New Orleans Museum of Art

The Gift That Keeps on Giving The endowment is the nest egg that sustains museums. The Pérez Art Museum Miami has an endowment of $21 million.

talks, and more. In April, it generated 7,000 hours of ”iewing on its YouTube channel— and it wants to keep growing those numbers as a way to reach wider audiences. Director Susan Taylor, like others, would like the digital offerings to e”entually produce new income to offset losses in fundraising and other areas. Museum directors are dreaming up big ideas— ticketed ”irtual tours through the collection, pri”ate Zoom meetings with a curator, li”estreamed artwork creation—but for now, most are keeping their offerings free as a way to remind museumgoers that their belo”ed institutions are still there. “I think this experience made us more nimble and more responsi”e,” Taylor said. “We’”e been able to mo”e into other realms of deli”ery, and that will only become more important. I think what’s interesting is that the museum is meant to be … a center of cultural acti”ity, a place where people come and ha”e a number of different experiences.” Another potential upside to the many downsides of the pandemic is that limited budgets and digital tools may mean greater access to what has been secreted away in storage. Instead of turning to large tra”eling exhibits that come with hefty price tags to host, directors may increasingly look to their collections for online and in-person exhibits. “We may finally see more of what’s in the basement,” Sobel said. “It could be a

Photo: Robin Hill.

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

communities as a way forward. Their ideas— from bringing entertainment to hallowed halls to deaccessioning artwork to di”ersify collections—might ha”e seemed fringe in another era. “One interesting legacy of the pandemic is that we may see some new discussions around what can be done to sustain the

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

Do admissions fees support museums? Not really

$15

$14

$12

$10

2 MUSEUMS

6 MUSEUMS

2 MUSEUMS

1 MUSEUM

3 MUSEUMS

charge this

charge this

charge this

charges this

charge this

$5

$0

Suggested Donations

1 MUSEUM

13 MUSEUMS

4 MUSEUMS

charge this

charge this

charge this

Top 5

*Museums with free admission for local residents were categorized under their nonresident admissions charge

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MOST VISITED MUSEUMS IN SURVEY

Metropolitan Museum of Art 7 million National Gallery of Art 4.6 million Museum of Modern Art 2.8 million Getty Museum 1.9 million Art Institute of Chicago 1.6 million

Average admissions revenue lost per day during Covid closures

PERCENTAGE OF MUSEUMS SURVEYED THAT CHARGE AN ADMISSION FEE

$24,600

$16

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

2 MUSEUMS charge this

$34,000

2 MUSEUMS charge this

Whitney Museum of American Art

4 MUSEUMS charge this

$50,400

1 MUSEUM charges this

Art Institute of Chicago

9 MUSEUMS charge this

$52,000

$18

Guggenheim Museum

$19

$78,600

$20

Museum of Modern Art

$23

$122,000

$25

Metropolitan Museum of Art

WHAT MUSEUMS CHARGE*

*Does not include special exhibit fees

*Average annual attendance, FYE2016–2019

$44.6 MILLION

The Met’s average annual earnings from admission fees

Figures sourced from the ARTnews Museum Survey

support. Overall fundraising didn’t dry up as patrons lined up to keep the lights on. And outdoor events flourished. But if the pandemic drags on deep into 2021, that may leave everyone exhausted and overwhelmed. And as more communities went back into lockdown at the end of the year, forcing more closures, museums became even more vulnerable. “The longer-term impacts will be

processed more fully in 2021,” Taylor said. “In 2020 we had stimulus money. We had the goodwill of the community. 2021 will be a different kind of year. Our priorities are maintaining financial stability and making sure that we are keyed up for 2022. Right now, we’re at a pause.” Additional reporting by Rebecca Kaebnick and Allia McDowell.

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lot of fun to bring [art] out of storage and recontextualize it. Only good could come from making our collections better known.” But even as there is a search for silver linings, 2021 still looms large for most directors. This year was devastating in so many ways, but there was public support for the nation’s cultural institutions. Movements like #SaveOurMuseums gained traction to lobby Congress for more

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 202v

The Battle

Gutter credits

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Museums were given leeway to sell art because of the pandemic. But when the Baltimore Museum of Art used the opening to address inequities, all hell broke loose. What’s next on the deaccessioning front?

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Gutter Courtesy credits the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

of Baltimore

BY AN D R EW RU S S E T H

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021 58

“M

USEUM directors, as a convention, learn art history in the classroom, and they learn economic management in practice,” Christopher Bedford, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, said .y phone in mid-Octo.er. “The .ig revelation, for me, is that my greatest act of creativity is now an economic one, as opposed to a conventionally defined creative one.” It was a whirlwind moment for Bedford. In a few days, two works from the museum’s collection were set to hit the .lock at Sothe.y’s in New York—its only Clyfford Still and Brice Marden paintings—and the auction house was offering Andy Warhol’s Last Supper (1986) privately. The sales were estimated to net $65 million. His plan was to plow a.out $55 million into an endowment that would generate $2.5 million a year to cover collection care. That would allow him to put the same amount toward salary increases ($13.50 per hour to $20 for guards, for one), extended hours, and other initiatives. The remaining $10 million would go toward a more diverse collection. Even for a museum with a ro.ust endowment of around $140 million, it would .e a huge injection of capital.

During the coronavirus lockdown, Bedford had .een mulling how to make “equity, diversity and inclusion, and justice lived experiences within the museum,” he said. In the pandemic’s early days, as the economy tanked and museum leaders .raced for .udget shortfalls, the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) had loosened its restrictions on selling art. Bedford .elieved that the museum could make huge strides selling just those three works. But very quickly, opponents of the sale—including former BMA .oard mem.ers and staffers—were gaining traction. Bedford’s goals were admira.le, they said, .ut he was .etraying the museum field. It is the jo. of museums to protect art. Patrons and artists would think twice a.out donating art, or money, if they .elieved that works in the collection could .ecome a funding stream at a director’s whim. Accusations of impropriety were made, with some asking the Maryland attorney general to investigate. The BMA was now “the leading poster child for art collection carelessness,” wrote Christopher Knight, the Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic, who has long condemned major museum sales. “What we are doing is not for everyone, including the Christopher Knights of

the world,” Bedford said. “There is a pressing, pressing, pressing need for change within institutions in this country, .ecause we have .een failing in our mission of providing the right kind of service.” He was .lunt: “We’ve kept our walls so high and so elite, that we’ve failed democratically.” Bedford’s plan was aggressive, .ut it was not necessarily apostasy. In 2018 he had sold seven paintings .y white men already well represented in the BMA collection—Ro.ert Rauschen.erg, Kenneth Noland, and Warhol, among them—raising $16.2 million to diversify its holdings. Major pieces .y Jack Whitten, Wangechi Mutu, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and others took their place. The AAMD had paved the way for his latest move .y suspending its sanctions against museums that sell art for purposes other than acquisitions. The suspension meant that museums could use income from funds esta.lished .y selling art for “direct care” of their collections, as each defined that phrase. The AAMD framed its actions as recognition that the financial disruption caused .y the pandemic could .e so severe that museums might need to take extraordinary measures. Baltimore was not financially strained, .ut speaking with

Mitro Hood.

Whirlwind Conditions Baltimore Museum of Art director Christopher Bedford’s plan to raise $65 million for inclusion initiatives by selling Andy Warhol’s Last Supper (1986), shown on previous spread, along with two other paintings, put the museum at the center of a vigorous industry-wide debate about deaccessioning.

Courtesy MIT Press. Photo: John Berens/©Jack Whitten Estate/Courtesy the Jack Whitten Estate and Hauser & Wirth.

collections.” Thanks to Covid, she could act without fearing AAMD sanctions, which forbid peers from loaning works to penalized museums, rendering them pariahs. At Christie’s fall auctions and through one private transaction, Brooklyn sold off more than 20 works, by Lucas Cranach the Elder (for $5.1 million), Claude Monet, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, raising more than half of its goal of $40 million; additional sales are planned. After being invested, according to the museum’s calculations, that final figure would provide the roughly $2 million it needs annually for collection care. “Some institutions don’t have budget problems,” Pasternak said. “They have giant endowments. That’s not the case

Subject Matter Martin Gammon’s book, published in 2018 by the MIT Press, charts a 400year history of museums selling their holdings. Below, Jack Whitten’s 9.11.01 (2006) was acquired by the BMA using funds raised by selling work by Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, and others.

“There is a pressing, pressing, pressing need for change in institutions, because we have been failing in our mission.’’ 59

WHILE THEY TEND NOT TO advertise it widely, museums regularly part with work for all sorts of reasons, and use any proceeds to buy art that they want. There may be a redundancy—if curators acquire a finer print of the same photograph, the lesser one goes. (This is generally uncontroversial.) Material once accepted as a gift may not relate to its actual mission, like a shrunken monkey head that found its way into one museum of American art. (Ditto.) Or curators may decide an artist is over-represented, or unimportant, and do some pruning. (More controversial, potentially.) Deaccessioning has also been used to reorient museums entirely, which is when the controversy level can shoot up. In the 1960s, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis began selling 19th-century art amassed by its founder, Thomas Barlow Walker, so that it could focus on buying contemporary art. There were complaints, but it is now recognized as a leader in that field. There are also less heartening tales. In the United States, after the Second World War, some university institutions “sold off masterpieces left and right” while reconceiving their collections “and it wasn’t a very good plan,” said Martin Gammon, an art adviser and former director at Bonhams auction house. His 2018 book Deaccessioning and Its Discontents (MIT) charts a history of the practice in England from the 1600s forward. The rules of the AAMD stipulate that funds from a museum’s art sales can go only toward the acquisition of more art: their so-called permanent collections must not be monetized to cover other expenses. “We hold these collections in trust for the public,” said Brent R. Benjamin, who has served as AAMD president since 2019, and who is director of the St. Louis Art Museum in Missouri. The bureaucratic rules that undergird this state of affairs are wonky, but their effects are profound. The Financial Accounting Standards Board, which sets accounting rules for organizations public, private, and nonprofit, says that museums do not need to list the value of their artworks in their financial documents. It issued that decision in the early 1990s, after museum leaders argued

that appraisals were pointless since they preserve art, they don’t sell it to operate. That arrangement rankles some outside the museum world. “You can’t just pretend you don’t have assets entrusted with you,” said Michael O’Hare, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He’s called for museums to be required to value their art, “so then we can ask, Are you doing a good job with this stuff we gave you?” Last April, Benjamin announced the AAMD’s dramatic shift: for two years, it would suspend sanctions for some rulebreaking. Because museums were facing revenue drops—they were unable to sell tickets, and the stock-market drop could hamper donors—they could use income from deaccessioning funds for collection care. Anne Pasternak, director of the Brooklyn Museum, had been hoping for that signal. A year earlier, FASB ruled that deaccessioning proceeds could fund “direct care,” aligning with the policy of the American Alliance of Museums, which accredits U.S. museums of all kinds. (Meaning: a dinosaur museum can sell a T-rex skeleton to help conserve a brontosaurus.) Pasternak said that around that time, “I started to have a conversation with my board, and my curators, and leadership team, about how great it would be if we could create a fund to, in perpetuity, take care of the

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

the New York Times, AAMD executive director Christine Anagnos said the move was allowed. “They are using the money that was once used for direct collection care to invest in a range of equity initiatives essential to [the museum’s] mission,” she said. And as Bedford was defending his sale against mounting opposition, the Brooklyn Museum was pursuing its own major campaign of sales.

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

for the Brooklyn Museum. It’s never been the case for the Brooklyn Museum.” U.S. museums received about 22 percent of their revenue from endowments in 2017, on average, according to the AAMD; during the 2017–18 fiscal year, the Brooklyn Museum took in only about 11.5 percent from that source. Historically in New York, people have not been as philanthropic toward non-Manhattan institutions, Pasternak said. Stocks recovered soon after the AAMD’s decision, though, and the wealthy seemed to be thriving. Critics like Knight and Tyler Green were asking, Why can’t the trustees step up now? Her board has been generous, Pasternak said. “We’re public institutions. Why is it that a handful of people are expected to carry the burden of a public institution that they didn’t create?” She did not mince words about another challenge: “We don’t have donors who want to endow conservation positions.” About four hours Upstate, in Syracuse, New York, the Everson Museum’s chair, an art adviser named Jessica Arb Danial, echoed that sentiment. “I just don’t know that many rich people that want to support the arts right now,” she said, when pressed about the responsibilities of trustees. “We don’t have a huge collecting base here, nor do we have billionaire trustees on our board,” Everson director

Elizabeth Dunbar said. When Dunbar joined the museum in 2014, she began deaccessioning work deemed superfluous, like that monkey head, to add art by women and artists of color. But her resources were limited—the Everson’s acquisitions endowment provided only about $30,000 annually—and she wanted to do more while guaranteeing conservation work. When the AAMD put a moratorium on its sanctions in April, Danial said, “We thought, well, wow, this is actually something we never thought would happen. Maybe we can look into this.” Their focus turned to Jackson Pollock’s Red Composition (1946), the second drip painting he ever made. Danial had heard that, during a period of financial turmoil, a trustee had once “kind of flippantly said, ‘You know, you should sell that Jackson Pollock.’ ” A recent capital campaign had lined up $17 million, but much of it would not reach the museum until patrons died. Here was a work that could make a comparable difference. The board voted to sell. In September, the Everson sent the small Pollock to Christie’s. It was a tough decision, Danial said, but she saw it as “a pawn in a game of moving our business forward.” The backlash was swift. In his Wall Street Journal column, Terry Teachout lamented that the painting—“the most important in the Everson” and the

Everson’s “sole destination piece”—might “never again be seen by the public.” “People make pilgrimages from around the world to see two things at the Everson,” Dunbar said, “Adelaide Robineau’s Scarab Vase and our building”—I. M. Pei’s first art museum. “No one comes to see the Pollock.” If it was so important, she asked, why had it never been requested for a major Pollock retrospective? The work hammered for its low estimate, $12 million. “I’m certainly getting lots of emails from galleries and artists who think I have $12 million to deal out right now to buy anything and everything,” Dunbar said. “But you know, it’s going into an endowment.” It will provide about $500,000 a year, to be divided as museum leadership sees fit between acquisitions and direct care—a potentially solid sum for art-buying, but not a jaw-dropping one, given the cost of some emerging art. Time-tested blue-chip art has shot up in price too, which is making these decisions appealing, however fractious. When the Pollock was donated to the Everson in 1991, it was appraised at just $800,000—about $1.53 million in today’s dollars. “It does happen to be the most valuable piece in the collection,” Dunbar said, “so in one fell swoop, we can make sweeping change.” Given Pollock’s mythical status, it “signifies to communities of color and to women artists that the myth of the white male

Photo: Jonathan Dorado/Courtesy the Brooklyn Museum. Cranach: Courtesy Christie’s Images Ltd.

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Moving Out The Brooklyn Museum was the home of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Lucretia (ca. 16th century), at right, until the painting sold at Christie’s for $5.1 million.

IN A MUSEUM INDUSTRY WHERE conformity usually reigns, competing ideas about collection management are suddenly playing out in public. Even as Pasternak saw through her own vigorous deaccessioning plan to support collection care, she emphasized her red lines. She would not sell work by living artists, and she said, “the big issue is that you just don’t sell the crown jewels.” Some have accused Bedford of doing just that by trying to part with the Clyfford Still, which was donated by the artist, a local who was notoriously tightfisted with his work; the Marden, by an artist who remains active and revered at age 82; and a Warhol that is important to his late work. (Intriguingly, funds from a Mark Rothko painting deaccessioned in the 1980s had gone toward the Warhol.) Bedford’s plan has pushed the envelope. While the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art sold a Rothko for $50.1 million to diversify its collection in 2019 (squarely within AAMD rules), most

of Baltimore’s proceeds would go toward direct care, freeing up money for those salary increases and inclusion efforts. Its success or failure will likely have a seismic effect on the field. Laurence Eisenstein, a former BMA trustee leading opposition to the sales, said, if they go through, “I think there is some risk that these kinds of deaccessions will start running rampant.” Eisenstein, a lawyer, supported Bedford in his earlier round of sales in pursuit of collection diversity. “That seemed like a rational way to accomplish that goal,” he said. But the museum has been well funded, he argued, its budgets have been increasing, and these new disposals cut too deeply. He believes collectors will ask, “Should I donate work to the museum, given what seems to be a somewhat cavalier attitude toward deaccessioning?” The ensuing uproar has been rancorous—and bizarre. After two former BMA chairs, Charles Newhall III and Stiles Colwill, said they had canceled a total of $50 million in pledges to protest Bedford’s leadership (the latter, apparently a full year ago), the BMA’s current board chair, Clair Zamoiski Segal, told the Washington Post that there was actually no record of their promises. Newhall shot back that the bequests had been noted in board minutes, telling the

A Big Splash Jackson Pollock’s Red Composition (1946), which the Everson Museum sold for a hammer price of $12 million in October.

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Courtesy Christie’s Images Ltd.

ensure a museum’s existence, it can be tempting to flout the rules. As Gold put it, referring to the AAMD’s code of ethics, “What’s unethical about using the proceeds from one painting to pay people fairly, or to address social injustice?”

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

genius is under scrutiny.” Amid the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, there’s “a perfect storm of self-analysis, self-examination at museums, and all of a sudden, you wonder, How does this painting fit into all that?” said the lawyer Mark S. Gold, who advised the Everson on its deaccessioning. (He emphasized he was describing the general atmosphere, rather than specific cases he has worked on.) Gold is a divisive figure in the field, having helped steer one of the most controversial sell-offs of late, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. In 2018, after court fights, the Berkshire Museum there sold 22 of its most valuable artworks, including a Norman Rockwell donated by the artist, for more than $50 million, to fund renovations and build an endowment. Critics charged trustees with gross mismanagement, and the AAMD imposed sanctions—to no avail. The Berkshire board argued that it faced a daunting balance sheet. Given current economic turmoil, others may reach a similar conclusion. “I definitely think there’s going to be an uptick on the need to sell, unfortunately,” said Allison Whiting, Christie’s director of museum services. She added, “It is not the kind of selling that we like to see museums do. It’s sad and it’s scary.” And relying on the market can be risky. When the Delaware Art Museum (DAM) sold art in 2014 to retire debt from a 2005 expansion project, a William Holman Hunt with a low estimate of $8.4 million hammered at Christie’s for a paltry $4.25 million. The museum was able to pay its creditors by selling an Andrew Wyeth, an Alexander Calder, and a Winslow Homer. It avoided depleting its endowment, but it was a disappointment. The AAMD imposed sanctions on the DAM, and the American Alliance of Museums withdrew its accreditation. “It was a dark, painful time,” said Molly Giordano, DAM interim executive director. “But it kept us alive, it kept us functioning.” Giordano argued that the museum became more focused on serving its local community during the national uproar, and that the larger museum world needs to grapple with the strain some small museums are under. “I’m not advocating for deaccessioning for funding general operating,” she said. “But there’s an openness and dialogue we need to all have about business models that work.” When selling a few artworks might prevent job cuts, or

paper, “Tuat’s wuat tuey are doing about everytuing. Tuey are denying everytuing. Tuey lie.” Tuis mucu, at least, is clear: uuge amounts of money, and core principles, are at stake in many of tuese battles. “Altuougu tue de-accessioning ‘virus’ is deeply depressing, it doesn’t altogetuer surprise me,” art scuolar David Anfam said in an email. Anfam, wuo opposes tue Baltimore sales, believes tuat museums are in a state of crisis about tueir roles. “To put it crudely,” ue said, “are tuey treasure uouses for tue elite or community centers? Doubtless, tue answer lies between tue two extremes. Tue dilemma is, wuere?” Tue meanings of words like trust, democracy, and access are being contested. Teacuout slammed tue Everson sale on tue grounds tuat an art museum is “a public trust. In return for its special tax status and similar privileges, it is expected to treat its uoldings witu tuat fact firmly in mind.” But wuo is included in tuat trust wuen museum audiences, executives, and boards are disproportionately wuite and upper class? In an interview, fari nzinga, an art uistorian wuo uas conducted researcu on tue AAMD’s conception of tue mission of museums (sue spells uer name in lowercase), proposed “broadening tue definition of public trust beyond simply object stewardsuip. By clinging to tuis narrow definition of tue purpose of tue museum, wuat it’s supposed to be, and wuo it’s supposed

to be for, it’s damaging to tue museum sector, and tuey’re uemorruaging talent.” A former New Orleans Museum of Art staffer, sue is a member of Dismantle NOMA, wuicu uas called on tue museum to address systemic racism, and a visiting professor at Kalamazoo College in Micuigan. Wuile supporting sales aimed at improving collection diversity, nzinga said, “I would even uave skepticism about wuose art is going to replace tue deaccessioned works. If it is going to be tue same uigu-profile uandful of black and people-of-color artists tuat get all tue museum suows, are tuey even really uelping anybody out?” For years, Micuael O’Hare, tue Berkeley professor, uas also called for museums to alter tueir approacu. “Museums are a public good,” ue said in an interview. “We give tuem special financial privileges and tax-free buildings and wuatnot. And tueir job is to maximize engagement witu art and optimize engagement witu art.” His prescription: reverse FASB’s position and make tue AAMD’s cuanges permanent. Force museums to value tueir art on tueir balance sueets, tuen ask tuem tougu questions about wuat tuey suow, wuat sits in storage, and wuat tuey could sell—peruaps witu a preference for otuer museums—to uire more employees, pay tuem better, and promote better engagement witu art. Sucu a position is anatuema to tuose in tue museum field, not least because tuey

Photo: Gillian Jones/The Berkshire Eagle via Associated Press.

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Vocal Opposition Protesters take issue with the Berkshire Museum’s plan to sell 21 of its most valuable artworks, including a Norman Rockwell donated by the artist himself.

see tueir role as more tuan just facilitating art appreciation. Tuey study and ferry it turougu time as tastes and values cuange. “One generation’s idea of a ‘masterpiece’ may become anotuer’s redundant object, and vice-versa,” said Anfam, wuo is senior consulting director at Denver’s Clyfford Still Museum. Tue AAMD’s Benjamin said museums represent “an incredibly democratic opportunity for all of us—for free, or for a relatively nominal fee—to experience works of art tuat, in a different time, or a different place, we migut never uave been able to see.” O’Hare is not some wild-eyed libertarian. He’s spent uis career addressing topics like biofuels, NIMBYism, and facility siting, and ue publisued uis extreme museummanagement ideas in tue progressive journal Democracy. Tue artist Hans Hofmann, ue pointed out, donated dozens of uis paintings to tue Berkeley Art Museum, and tuey rarely see tue ligut of day. “Tuis is really about opportunity cost,” ue said. “Wuat value are we losing by denying all of tue minor museums around tue country a Hofmann? And tue answer, I tuink, if we were really serious about it, is: kind of a lot.” Most museums are not, of course, sitting on a trove of Hofmanns. But ue reasons tuey may uave otuer underutilized, financially valuable art tuat could support wortuy goals. Wouldn’t uis course of action pusu donors and government funding away from supporting museums? “If tue only way by wuicu you can make a claim on people’s wealtu and tue taxpayer is by lying, tuen sure,” O’Hare said. “If a ricu person asked me about art puilanturopy, I would say, Go down tue street, walk past tue museum to tue sympuony or cuambermusic-presenting organization and give tuem money—until tuings cuange.” Knigut called O’Hare’s ideas “ridiculous” in an interview, and suggested tuat tuose pusuing deaccessioning “stop tuinking like Ronald Reagan. Stop tuinking tuat trickle-down works. It’s a mindset tuat says tue market is tue answer to all our problems. And it is not. Resisting tuat is itself a morale-builder, a culture-builder, and a community-builder.” Baltimore’s plan edges toward O’Hare’s proposal by making a trade between its art and its otuer goals. (Altuougu O’Hare uas said ue wouldn’t advocate selling masterpieces.) One rallying cry against sucu sales is tue specter of works once enjoyed by tue public disappearing into tue vaults of oligarcus. Tue reality is more complicated. Tuere are no exact statistics on tue fate of art sold by museums, but some of it does reappear. Gammon points to a sale of 32 Old Master works from

Courtesy Christie’s Images Ltd. 2020 (2).

Touch of Gray Brice Marden’s 3 (1987–88), which the Baltimore Museum of Art intended to sell before hitting “pause” on its plans.

Baltimore NAACP, decried the efforts of “disgruntled board members to hinder the BMA’s evolution” in a letter to the Baltimore Sun that invoked the late Congressman John Lewis’s notion of “good trouble.” However the Baltimore case settles, it has already lent new candor to discussions about deaccessioning—and about how museums prioritize their interests. Noting that guards at the BMA could qualify for housing vouchers, columnist Carolina A. Miranda wrote in an L.A. Times column opposing the sales that “museums officers and trustees should be embarrassed.” Museum collections have long skewed white and male, and wages have long been low. Is selling art the best course for correcting that? The potential benefits and losses are tremendous. Curlee Raven Holton, an artist who directs the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, said that he supports Baltimore’s sales “with recognition of the limits in alternative fundraising opportunities, a need to confront an embarrassing past, the repositioning of the institution to reflect a more accurate picture of the American artistic canon. There are no costless decisions. The neglect of artists of color has been a painful reality, the correction of this wound will as well be matched with a new pain, one of change.”

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Gone Girl Italienne debout tenant une cruche by Jean-BaptisteCamille Corot (1796–1875) was one of 20 pieces that the Brooklyn Museum sold through Christie’s.

its place. A commitment to history and preservation is admirable. The psychic benefits of cultural pride and patrimony are real, even if they cannot be itemized on financial documents. But so, too, are the opportunity costs of refusing a path of “progressive deaccessioning,” a phrase coined by curator Glenn Adamson to describe sales that chip away at the white supremacy in collections. And merely demanding the rich give more does not feel like a wholly satisfying response to calls for reimagining museums around social and economic justice. In any case, Baltimore brought its plan to a halt after an institutional show of force. On the eve of the auction in late October, the AAMD released a statement abruptly pulling back its support, though without explicitly mentioning Baltimore. While he recognized museums had big plans, Benjamin wrote in the statement, “however serious those long-term needs or meritorious those goals, the current position of AAMD is that the funds for those must not come from the sale of deaccessioned art.” The suspension of the penalties, Benjamin continued, was not meant as a green light to begin selling. Asked about the apparent shift, he pointed me to his letter. “We’re not really wanting to single out any particular circumstance,” he said. (The AAMD maintains that the suspension will conclude in April of 2022.) In an unprecedented condemnation, 15 former AAMD presidents signed a letter the next day that backed the AAMD’s position, urging the BMA “to reconsider.” (Among the signees was Arnold Lehman, who had led both the Brooklyn and Baltimore museums.) Baltimore withdrew the lots from the sale—the public became aware just hours before the Still and the Warhol were to be auctioned—but it remained undaunted. “Our vision and our goals have not changed,” it said in a statement. “It will take us longer to achieve them, but we will do so through all the means at our disposal.” (Bedford and Segal, the board chair, declined to be interviewed after their retreat.) Speaking before the cancellation, Bedford was adamant about acting quickly. Fundraising campaigns can take years to raise serious money. He wasn’t willing to wait that long to improve equity, and his board had been supportive in its funding already. “In order to achieve the kind of transformation that I think we as a museum have promised the city of Baltimore in the period of time that we have allocated for that transformation, it would have been impossible without an exceptional event,” he said. He still has strong supporters. The Reverend Kobi Little, who leads the

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the beleaguered New-York Historical Society’s Bryan Collection in 1995: Other museums have since acquired six of them, and 19 have either appeared at museums or been offered again on the market. The impulse of the rich to glorify themselves transcends time and deaccessioning. (The whereabouts of Delaware’s Homer is unknown, but the Berkshires’ best Rockwell was acquired by George Lucas’s forthcoming Los Angeles museum. The public will see it, but in a city with 100 times more people.) However daring their plans, though, Bedford, BMA chief curator Asma Naeem, and BMA senior curator Katy Siegel have made their case in curatorial terms: the BMA has plenty of late Warhols, their Marden prints better represent him, and narratives of gestural abstraction need not require a Still. “These arguments are completely disingenuous upon closer examination,” said Gammon, the scholar– art adviser. “I think they should just be straightforward and say, ‘We wanted to raise a huge amount of money, and we picked out several pieces that were highlighted to us as valuable.’ ” (Of course, this is a former auctioneer speaking.) The money for more financially stable, more interesting museums needs to come from somewhere, but the more one considers the possibilities, the less any single answer looks ideal. Those who oppose any major deaccessioning have the benefit of clarity: Keep art in

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Gutter credits

EQUITY AND INCLUSION FOR ALL

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BY T E S SA S O LO M O N

the helm of the Latinx Student Cultural Center at poston’s Northeastern University. Her job there focused on recruiting and retaining Latinx and Latin American students, with a particular focus on establishing a sense of belonging among those from marginalized communities. With her background, she was quick to recognize that educators had been working on issues related to equity and inclusion for much longer than museums had—and that change owes less to institutions than to the people who support them. “My day-to-day is working alongside the departments and providing the tools they need to prioritize inclusion within their own work,” she said in an interview in November, two months into her tenure. “Museums and organizations are about people, so helping people—staff and visitors—engage with a sense of belonging is where I come in.” WHEN PROTESTS SWELLED OVER the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last spring, many predominantly whiteled art institutions wrestled with how to acknowledge the plack Lives Matter

Dynamic Duo Leading the cause at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts are, from left, Rosa Rodriguez-Williams, senior director of belonging and inclusion, and Makeeba McCreary, chief of learning and community engagement. Opposite, an installation view of the MFA exhibition “Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation.”

“Helping people engage with a sense of belonging is where I come in.’’ 65

Opposite and right: ©Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Far right: Caitlin Cunningham.

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OR THE MUSEUM OF Fine Arts, poston, the reckoning followed a field trip gone awry. In the spring of 2019, a group of middle schoolers, all students of color from the Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy in Dorchester, Massachusetts, were treated to a visit to the museum as a reward for good grades and good behavior. There, they were greeted with racist invective and profiled by museum staff and fellow visitors alike. According to Academy teacher and chaperone Marvelyne Lamy, a museum employee told the children that “no food, no drink, and no watermelon” were allowed in the galleries. In an impassioned Facebook post uploaded after the visit, Lamy also described in detail how the students were harassed by fellow museumgoers and tailed closely through the galleries by museum security, who reprimanded them disproportionately compared to white students visiting from another school. She swore she would never go back to the MFA. Within days, the incident had been picked up by national news outlets. A week later, the museum issued a public apology, conceding that it had been slow to respond to the day’s events and staking a claim for the future to be “committed to being a place where all people trust that they will feel safe and treated with respect.” In the following weeks, two museumgoers who had made derogatory remarks to the students were banned from the premises. A range of reforms was promised, including new training sessions for all front-facing docents, guards, and staff. Meanwhile, internal investigators grappled with how to overhaul a museum culture that had allowed for a hostile environment and ensure that changes would be made. The Massachusetts attorney general also launched an investigation that culminated in an agreement between the museum and the attorney general’s office. As part of the arrangement, the MFA appropriated $500,000 to launch a new fund for diversity and inclusion initiatives, such as internships for students of color. It also developed

a more direct system for processing complaints regarding discrimination and implemented new anti-harassment and discrimination training for museum staff. Four months after the agreement was finalized, the museum also announced a new hire: Rosa Rodriguez-Williams, who took the newly created position of senior director of belonging and inclusion. At the time of her hiring, MFA director Matthew Teitelbaum said in a statement that Rodriguez-Williams would be “integral in reimagining how we welcome and engage historically underrepresented audiences, truly reflecting the communities we serve.” The position was developed within MFA poston’s Division of Learning and Community Engagement rather than under the banner of human resources, with an understanding that the work would be fluid and determined by the demands of the audiences the museum wants to reach. In Rodriguez-Williams’s own terms, one of the most important aspects of her job is “fostering visitor experience” from inside and outside the institution. porn in Puerto Rico, RodriguezWilliams assumed the post in early September, after more than a decade at

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

New roles take on significance as museums move to diversify

Institutional Acts At right, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Below, artists stand by their work for the “Murals for the Movement” project in front of MFA Boston, from left to right: Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez, Cey Adams, Sophia Dawson, Liza Quiñonez, and Rob Stull.

diversity, and inclusion. In September, the Milwaukee Art Museum named Kantara Souffrant its inaugural curator of community dialogue, and SFMOMA appointed Kenyatta Parker director of diversity, inclusion, and belonging. In November, the Metropolitan Museum of Art made a high-profile move in hiring Lavita McMath Turner—who had done similar work for the )ity University of New York—as its first chief diversity officer; that same month, London’s Serpentine Galleries announced the appointment of Yesomi Umolu as director of curatorial affairs and public practice. Responsibilities differ in the job descriptions, but among the common

goals are diversification in terms of curatorial programming and museum staff, as well as aims to connect with communities of color. In Boston, Rodriguez-Williams leads a voluntary group called Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA) that has launched affinity groups for those less well represented, including BIPO) and LGBTQIA+. Such measures, she said, are “a good way to support the incredible diversity in the museum.” As part of IDEA, she works closely with Makeeba Mc)reary, who in 2018 was appointed MFA’s first chief of learning and community engagement. A Boston native, Mc)reary came to the museum from the Boston Public Schools, where she worked as managing director and senior adviser of external affairs. Describing her role as “amorphous,” Mc)reary now works in a role whose official responsibilities, as per MFA’s own language, include “integrating diverse perspectives into the museum’s programs and educational offerings” and fostering “a better understanding of the issues of today through the lens of art.” Outside of that, she thinks of her job as an interpretive process. “When I came here, I found myself in a dramatically outwardfacing role—I was figuring out how to reach out to the public and say ‘)ome,’ ‘come,’ ‘come,’ ” Mc)reary said. “But then I realized that you had to worry about what would happen when you do find them at the threshold. The question is: what gets them over that threshold and willing to explore?” Mc)reary and Rodriguez-Williams are currently working to create what they refer to as “tool kits” to help their colleagues in various departments reduce barriers between the institution and its audience. In the museum’s Arts in America wing, for example, an effort was initiated in 2020 to provide translations for every wall label. And new initiatives were enacted around special exhibitions including “Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation,” a show (running into May) anchored by Jean-Michel Basquiat but expanded to illustrate how the barrierbreaking hip-hop movement was the cumulative vision of Black and brown communities of artists. Writer and musician Greg Tate, who co-curated “Writing the Future” with MFA curator Liz Munsell, said Mc)reary was “essential” to the exhibition’s success. Before the show opened, Mc)reary invited members of the community—artists, business people, musicians—to gather and respond to questions about it. Did the exhibition speak authentically to their lived experience? What does Basquiat mean to people living and working in his wake? The exhibition opened in

Photos: ©Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2).

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movement as layoffs and furloughs disproportionately affected BIPO) (Black, Indigenous, and People of )olor) employees. Amid the unemployment crisis, open letters penned by museum workers condemned leadership at major institutions—among them the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Getty Trust in Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—for legacies of racial bias and institutional inequity. Full-time positions promoting inclusivity have been instated with growing frequency since. Last August, the Seattle Art Museum tapped Priya Frank for the new role of director of equity,

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THE CRYSTAL BRIDGES MUSEUM of American Art, which opened in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 2011, offers a blueprint for what equity-minded work can achieve. In 2016, the museum’s board of directors named Rod Bigelow its first chief diversity and inclusion officer—a mantle added to his lead role as executive director. The position was created in response to a damning survey commissioned by the Mellon Foundation in 2015 whose findings included that, among the ranks of U.S. museum staffs, 84 percent of “professional” positions were occupied by workers who identified as white. Only 4 percent of those occupying such roles were Black, and 3 percent were Hispanic. Recognizing similar points of disparity at Crystal Bridges, Bigelow pledged to make a change. “We had every opportunity to create an organization that was representative of the people of this country, and we didn’t do a great job of that,” he said, of an institution founded just a few years before the survey was conducted. Since then, he and the museum’s board have worked in what he called a two-prong approach: execute short-term solutions and sustain longterm initiatives. “From hiring diverse staff to deciding who makes up an advisory committee to what’s in the galleries—

Welcome Additions Above, Nari Ward’s We the People (black version), 2015, greets visitors at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. At left, Alice Neel’s 1964 portrait of actor and civil rights activist Hugh Hurd was added to the museum’s permanent collection.

everything must be done to make sure we retain momentum in the long term,” Bigelow said. “That means, firstly, educating the team on what it means to be anti-racist and what racist systems exist that we contribute to.” The Early American galleries at Crystal Bridges were reimagined early in the process to include contemporary artwork in an effort to add context, such that visitors are now greeted by Nari Ward’s monumental We the People (2015), a 27-foot-wide wall sculpture presenting the opening words of the Constitution’s preamble with each letter outlined in shoelaces. As of this past November, 28 percent of Crystal Bridges staff and 32 percent of museum leadership

are people of color. (The board of directors remains predominantly white, with the exceptions of Thelma Golden and artist Hank Willis Thomas.) In the past year, Crystal Bridges has held more than a hundred sessions with the public to learn about what people feel are the most pressing issues, among them immigration, accessibility, power, and process. “We need to ask the right questions of our community over and over again to ensure real change,” Bigelow said. “Too many times have these issues come up and then faded away.” In Boston, McCreary shares Bigelow’s concern that attention can be all too fickle. She expressed fear over the prospect of fading awareness as media interest cools and unemployment declines with the pandemic’s hoped-for abatement. Bigelow, for his part, hopes matters of diversity won’t get too entangled with issues of finance. “Not all of this work requires funding—it’s about changes in procedure and process,” he said. “Too often there’s a default to slowing the work or stopping the work because there’s a perceived lack of funding. But this isn’t entirely about funding—it’s about will.”

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Photos: Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (2).

October and, by December, attendance averaged around 2,000 people a day—a “remarkable” figure, Tate said, given the circumstances, the pandemic keeping so many people at home. “It would be pointless to have this show while not being able to crack those castle walls, that alienation that exists between the community and the institution,” Tate said. “People said that they had actually avoided the museum because they felt like nothing in there spoke to them. Those talks were an icebreaker to a frozen relationship.” Considering such changes in the context of what an institution can and can’t do, McCreary quoted Thelma Golden, president of the Studio Museum in Harlem: “Bricks and mortar does not create culture—people create culture.” That is to say, the museum suffers if it is not representative of its entire community. According to the MFA, 79 percent of visitors in 2015 identified as Caucasian, and 75 percent were age 45 or older. That same year, around 20 percent of the institution’s 700-plus staff identified as nonwhite. Of that segment, 14 percent occupied “professional” positions in conservation, education, and curatorial departments. Today, 29.5 percent of MFA staff self-identify as BIPOC—an improvement, though clearly there’s more work to do.

new books for spring Shaping the World Sculpture from Prehistory to Now Antony Gormley and Martin Gayford

“If you want to rethink your ideas about sculpture, this fascinating book will give you pause for thought on just about every page.” — Financial Times 300 illustrations $60.00 hardcover

The Van Gogh Sisters Willem-Jan Verlinden

This biography of Vincent van Gogh’s sisters tells the fascinating story of the lives of these women whose history has largely been neglected. 76 illustrations $39.95 hardcover

Abstract Art A Global History Pepe Karmel

“Karmel’s originality and literary skill are praiseworthy… This book is a godsend.” — Hyperallergic 250 illustrations $85.00 hardcover

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? 50th anniversary edition Linda Nochlin

The fiftieth anniversary edition of the essay that is now recognized as the first major work of feminist art theory—published together with Nochlin’s reflections three decades later. 13 illustrations $14.95 hardcover

The Art of Contemporary China Jiang Jiehong

The Art Museum in Modern Times Charles Saumarez Smith

A redefinition of contemporary Chinese art from the last forty years in the context of unprecedented cultural, political, and urban transformation, written by an authority on the subject.

A compelling examination of the art museum from a renowned director, this sweeping book explores how architecture, vision, and funding have transformed art museums around the world over the past eighty years.

150+ color illustrations $24.95 paperback

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p. 74 p. 78 p. 80

70 Portrait of Grief After a tragic blast flattened Beirut, the city’s art scene looks to rise again. 69

Photo: Hussein Malla/Associated Press.

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Insights

Letter from Beirut Time Machine Questionnaire Retrospective

INSIGHTS

LETTER FROM BEIRUT

The Sea Beyond My Windows Beirut’s art scene searches for new life

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HE FIRST BOOK I pulled oug of my library in ghe afgermagh of ghe devasgaging Beirug Porg explosion in Augusg was Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz), a collecgion of correspondence wriggen by ghe argisg, poeg, wriger Egel Adnan begween 1990 and 1992. She wroge ghe leggers from differeng cigies and addressed ghem, as ghe gigle suggesgs, go her friend, Lebanese hisgorian Fawwaz

Traboulsi. Adnan’s words surged back go mind more and more during ghe mournful, exhausging, and angry mongh following ghe explosion—especially as I walked ghrough ghe mosg affecged areas facing ghe porg along wigh ghousands of oghers who came go assisg in relief and cleaning efforgs in ghe cigy where Adnan was born. The book includes gwo leggers she wroge from Beirug, one from Augusg 1991 and ghe ogher from around ghe same gime ghe nexg year. Bogh were wriggen shorgly afger ghe

brugal Lebanese civil war ghag lasged from 1975 go 1990; in her characgerisgically asguge prose, ghey degail Adnan’s sgage of being in ghe congexg of her ougings, encoungers, and observagions of condigions in ghe capigal. Wars and displacemeng loom large, as ghe aughor lays bare each gragic hisgory and gale of exile. In his review for ghe Nation in 1994, American poeg and crigic Ammiel Alcalay remarked ghag, in Of Cities & Women, “Adnan embodies ghe role of bogh visionary and chronicler, seeing whag is go come by

Blast Zone Smoke rises from a warehouse fire at the Port of Beirut in September, triggering panic after the massive explosion that killed and injured thousands of people the month before.

Photo: Hussein Malla/AP Photo.

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B Y R AY YA B A D R A N

only recently ceased, she continoes: “The war is ofer bot it’s not. It changed forms and tactics. There is so moch oncertainty and the only troth yoo can hang on is pitifol; the fact that this is an onmanageable coontry. Then, the sea beyond my windows isn’t an ally anymore. She resembles the son too moch and borns my eyes. She has become as terrifying as the militia’s heads.” It was Adnan’s descriptions of Beirot— especially the way its light carries “a sentiment of death”—that drew me back to her letters. And indeed, her words are so painfolly prescient, so exact, it’s as if she had written them in 2020, in the days after the explosion that blew op a city already reeling from soccessife financial and health crises from which it continoes to soffer.

IT HAD ALREADY BEEN A VERY difficolt year for art spaces. The coontry sank into a catastrophic financial crisis in the fall of 2019, as the October 17 oprisings raged in the streets. Art spaces closed in solidarity with the oprisings, as artists and coltoral workers joined in the protests. The financial sitoation continoed to worsen and local banks made it increasingly difficolt to work onder the strict capital controls they imposed. People’s safings were gone when the pandemic arrifed, only worsening the

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onfeiling accepted ways of receifing and recording the past.” I retorned to this book to see if my own fifid, impressionistic memories of the people and landscapes of the city foond echoes in Adnan’s descriptions from nearly 30 years ago. The more I read, the more I saw today’s Beirot in her writings. In her letter from 1992, Adnan moorned the loss of her close friend and gallerist Janine Robeiz, who had died of an illness. In one passage, Adnan notes that “what safes yoo from despair in Beirot is the fery difficolty of lifing in it. It’s so hot that yoo feel yoo’re storing water for yoor sweating, when yoo drink. Yoor mind stops working. It takes long rests. Yoor thooghts take a leafe.” Efoking the 15 years of conflict that had

The defastation caosed by 250 tons of ammoniom that detonated at the port killed close to 200 people, injored thoosands, and left entire neighborhoods in roins, as more than 300,000 people went homeless. At the time of my writing, almost foor months after the explosion, Beirot’s residents hafe yet to receife an apology from the roling class. Seferal officials, ministers, and efen the president of the repoblic himself knew aboot the presence of the lethal chemical, which had been stored at the port for six long years. Bot still, not a single person has been held accoontable and infestigations remain—onsorprisingly—inconclosife. Withoot waiting for the state to respond, the relief efforts and calls for donations that sprang op immediately after the tragedy continoed in the months that followed. The neighborhoods closest to the site of the explosion—home to many of Beirot’s moseoms, galleries, design stodios, and art organizations—had been decimated. The historic Sorsock Moseom sostained sobstantial damage. The Arab Image Foondation, which hooses hondreds of thoosands of photographs from the MENA region (the Middle East and North Africa), was blown open. The walls of the SfeirSemler Gallery and the Beirot Art Center collapsed. And all the small and midsize galleries and art spaces established in the neighborhoods of Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhaël ofer the past decade—plos the homes and stodios of many artists who lifed aroond the port—were a complete wreck.

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

Photos: Hussein Malla/AP Photo (2).

Below, relatives of victims of the tragedy hold portraits of their loved ones during a vigil.

INSIGHTS / LETTER FROM BEIRUT

Ruins and Repairs Left, a destroyed ship near the grain silos gutted in the August explosion.

INSIGHTS / LETTER FROM BEIRUT

living conditions and purchasing power of an already precarious and impoverished population. When Lebanon went into its first lockdown in March, art spaces had cautiously prepared to resume activities in the fall. In the moment after the blast and the months that followed, it seemed that nothing could save us from sinking further into despair. The pandemic having burdened us with anxious uncertainty about the future, the disastrous explosion destroyed any sliver of hope. Yet after the initial rush of relief and humanitarian efforts subsided, several events provided moments of reflection. Days before a second lockdown was announced in November, I attended a series of concerts organized by Irtijal, an international festival for experimental music in Lebanon (whose name is Arabic for “improvisation”) at Zoukak studio, another vibrant space in Beirut that was damaged in the blast but remained operational enough to host the event. Irtijal was slated to celebrate its 20th anniversary last spring, but was canceled because of the pandemic. The organizers decided to go through with a compact edition of the festival at the beginning

of November, with a lineup comprising exclusively Beirut-based musicians, and a sense of collectivity that came as a welcome surprise as it convened friends and people I had last seen covered in dust, with shovels in their hands. Though most of the music was raucous and raw, it summoned a reassuring stillness we had not experienced in a while—and proof that the blast hadn’t eradicated everything after all, that it was possible to continue making art and, above all, to take pleasure again in experiencing what art has to offer. In the spaces that were able to open after the blast and before we went into a second lockdown, other activities were planned.

Ashkal Alwan, an organization that fosters and exhibits contemporary art, opened its studios to artists who had lost their spaces in the explosion, and announced the resurrection of its Home Work Space program, with fellowships for artists “to explore free, trans-disciplinary, critical models of arts education in Lebanon and the Arab region.” Across the globe in October, a residency program was swiftly put in place in the coastal village of Boiçucanga in Brazil by Temporary Art Platform, an organization created by curator Amanda Abi Khalil to host seven artists from Lebanon and provide them time and a change of scenery

“It seemed that nothing could save us from sinking further into despair.’’

Courtesy the artist.

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Pictures of Home Ppotograpps of scenes around Beirut in August by Lara Tabet, wpo later in tpe fall participated in a residency program for Lebanese artists establisped by Temporary Art Platform in Brazil.

INSIGHTS / LETTER FROM BEIRUT

Lebanon’s realities beyond the limits of representation. While the layout of the show was sparse, the works on view reflected thoughtful interventions on the political, social, and emotional conditions of an utterly relentless year. Later that evening, I made my way to the Sunflower Theater to watch a production conceived and written by a young group of Palestinian and Lebanese actors led and directed by Lama el Amine and Victoria Lupton from Seenaryo, an arts and education organization in Lebanon and Jordan that works with young refugees. The performance took its title from Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “I See My Ghost Coming from Afar,” in which the author—as described by Sarah Irving in an essay in The Electronic Intifada from 2015—“signals a kind of omniscience, laying claim to a knowledge of his own past which defies appropriation and distortion.” Young actors played the role of ghosts who were invisible to the world around them but made the best of their time as revenants. A bit of text in the program leaflet for the show read: “There are dreams of the sea and a sea of dreams. We attempt a revolution against

the dead, the living and ourselves.” For months now, some of us in Beirut have called ourselves the living dead— having survived while not being entirely alive. But these young spirits were a testament to the life that runs through the place that we call home. Their performance was an example of what can come from dedication and care for one another, articulated through an admirable creative obstinacy toward the conditions they continue to face as young people in a society that often vilifies and rejects them. The part in the text about “dreams of the sea and a sea of dreams” brought me back to Adnan’s evocation of the sea beyond her windows and its dual potential to betray the dreams it can inspire. “The sea beyond my windows isn’t an ally anymore,” she wrote. But if everything remains uncertain and bleak, what stays true is the fortitude of the artists, musicians, writers, and all the cultural practitioners in Beirut who persist in the most frightful and trying times. If, as Adnan suggests, the sea is sometimes “of no help,” it still holds potential for those of us who feel invisible but very much alive.

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Courtesy the artist.

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to recharge. When I talked over Zoom with Lara Tabet, a photographer who was one of the program’s participants, she expressed her initial reluctance to leave Beirut. “It was as stressful for me to leave as it was to stay,” she said, citing the intense anxiety about the near future in Lebanon and the fact that anything could go wrong at any time. “I’m sad to say that it was [a relief] to be away,” she continued, “although this sense of roaming or living in an alternate reality can be distressing as well.” Despite that, Tabet spoke of the importance of the kinship the program offered and the fact that she was able to get to know other artists, whom she had previously counted as acquaintances, much better. On November 13, the day before the second lockdown started, I went to the Beirut Art Center to see an exhibition of new video and installation works by Beirutbased filmmaker and artist Mohamed Berro; featured there as well was work from a three-part “Micro-Commissions” series that invited local artists and illustrators to respond to different prompts around questions of state-sponsored surveillance, strategies of care, and reflections on

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1946 Lives and works in New York and Parma, Italy Stanley Whitney is one of the most exhilarating abstract painters working today, imbuing the well-worn modernist device of the grid with beguiling energies via experiments in color and attack. His is an art of constant invention within tough, self-imposed rules, and That’s Rome (2019), included in his Gagosian gallery debut in Rome this past fall, is classic Whitney: simple until you start looking. Pink, red-orange, and lime lines meet rectangles of the same colors, as themes and variations unfold and patterns multiply. Drink it in. Enjoy.

2011 The year he won the Robert De Niro Sr. Prize

KEY SHOWS Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany, and Athens, Greece, 2017, curabed by Adam Szymczyk “Dance the Orange,” Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, 2015, curabed by Lauren Haynes “Utopia Station” at the 2003 Venice Biennale, curabed by Mglly Nesbib, Hans Ulrich Obrisb, and Rirkrib Tiravanija

“I wanted color like Rothko, but I wanted air like Pollock. I didn’t realize that the space was in the color.” —Whitney to Aruna D’Souza in ARTnews

©Stanley Whitney/Photo Rob McKeever/Courtesy Gagosian.

Stanley Whitney

BY AN D R EW RU S S E T H

The churn gf bhe arb wgrld is relenbless. Many arbisbs whg are bhe bgasb gf gne seasgn are ggne by bhe nexb, bheir wgrk cgnsigned bg sbgrage. Here is a cgunbermeasure, an abbempb bg pick recenbly exhibibed wgrks bhab we predicb will sband bhe besb gf bime.

INSIGHTS / TIME MACHINE ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021 74

That’s Rome, 2019, oil on linen, 96 x 96 inches—shown in “Stanley Whitney” at Gagosian, Rome, September 10–October 17.

KEY SHOWS For nearly 40 years, Kathe Burkhart has shared visions of Elizabeth Taylor as an icon of unrepentant sexual pleasure, thoroughly in control whether she’s wielding a whip or having her hands tied behind her back. Burkhart’s mordant eye—for facial expressions and for framing—helps make these freedom-filled images unforgettable, and she adorns her grand paintings with wry details like temporary tattoos or fake fur, which reward long sessions of viewing. Like people, Burkhart’s artworks get stranger the more time you spend time with them. And as with people, that dynamic can be exciting or frightening.

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“Aserto,” Venice Biennale, Italy, 1993, in the section of the group exhibition curated by Kong Chang’an

“Form is a slave to content. Always. It’s the relation of a tool to a thing made.”

The year Burkhart began the “Liz Taylor Series”

—Burkhart in Art in America, 2016

Whore: from the Liz Taylor Series (The Only Game in Town), 2013, acrylic, digital prints, fabric, temporary tattoos on canvas, 58 × 78 inches—from Burkhart’s solo show at Fredericks & Freiser in New York, “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word,” October 8–November 7, 2020.

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Photo Cary Whittier/Courtesy the artist and Fredericks & Freiser, NY.

“Kathe Burkhart,” MoMA PS1, New York, 2007, curated by Lia Gangitano

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

The assroximate number of works in the “Liz Taylor Series.”

“The Liz Taylor Series,” Fri Art, Kunsthalle Fribourg, Switzerland, curated by Balthazar Lovay

1982

Born in 1958 in Martinsburg, West Virginia Lives and works in Amsterdam and New York

INSIGHTS / TIME MACHINE

Kathe Burkhart

Born in 1985 in Lynchburg, Virginia Lives and works in New Ylrk

KEY SHOWS The materials listed in the captiln flr The Road succinctly detail what Kevin Beasley has acclmplished in this freestanding wlnder, which is at lnce a dluble-sided painting and a flrmidable wall. Harnessing diffuse materials frlm the state lf his birth via his trademark resin, he lffers a radiant sun, an lpen rlad, and cllthes withlut wearers. The lther side is pitch black. It’s an ambigulus distillatiln lf the American Sluth—lf the whlle United States, perhaps: ln the cusp lf a brave new chapter but filled with incredible darkness. Beasley shlws a natiln ln a jlurney tl a destinatiln that is unclear, lr at least lut lf sight.

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“Hammer Projects: Kevin BeasleN,” Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2017, curated by Anne Ellegood “Greater New York,” MoMA PS1, New York, 2015, curated by Peter Eleey, Douglas Crimp, Thomas J. Lax, and Mia Locks

—Beasley in conversation with art historian Kellie Jones, ARTnews, 2017

–

2013

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The number of Nears (1940-73) that the cotton gin featured in BeasleN’s WhitneN Museum show was in operation in Maplesville, Alabama

“I can’t gl intl the studil withlut thinking that there’s slme kind lf pllitics tl what I’m dling. Flr me, I’m trying tl understand the kind lf wlrks I’m making.”

“A View of a Landscape,” WhitneN Museum of American Art, New York, 2018, curated by Christopher Y. Lew

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The Near BeasleN participated in the Studio Museum in Harlem’s residencN program

The Road, 2019, polysrethane resin, raw Virginia cotton, Virginia soil, Virginia twigs, Virginia pine needles, hossedresses, kaftans, T-shirts, ds-rags, altered hossedresses, altered kaftans, altered T-shirts, altered garments, altered tires, scarf, gsinea fowl feathers, down feathers, copper, jewelry, shoelaces, mobile phone, bsrlap satchel, windshield wipers, altered African fabrics, socks, Timberland boots, alsminsm, steel, 96 × 120 × 10 inches—shown in “Resnion,” at Casey Kaplan, New York, September 10–October 24, 2020.

Photo Jason Wyche/©Kevin Beasley/Courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York.

INSIGHTS / TIME MACHINE

Kevin Beasley

“Haegue oang: Handles,” the Museum of Modern Art, New oork, 2019, curated by Stuart Comer

INSIGHTS / TIME MACHINE

KEY SHOWS

“Shooting the Elephant Thinking the Elephant,” Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, 2015, curated by Hyunsun Tae

Haegue Yang Born in 1971 in Seoul, South Korea Lives and works in Berlin and Seoul

36¼

Height in feet of Silo of Silence—Clicked Core (2017), an installation of connected Venetian blinds that appeared in oang’s 2020 show at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul

The year that oang showed at South Korea’s Venice Biennale pavilion

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Approximate number of blinds in her work Lingering Nous, presented by the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2016 77

Photo Keith Park/Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery.

Haegue Yang is unstoppable. She ended 2020 by unveiling four major international shows, in Toronto, Manila, St. Ives (England), and Seoul, where one of her Venetian-blind installations, as improbably alluring as ever, mixed it up with inventive, mysterious recent works that could be previously undiscovered organisms or ritual objects. Adorned with bells or artificial straw, they nod to arcane modernist moments and disparate folk cultures. They look as if they could start dancing at any moment, asking questions about how we relate to the world, each other, and our intertwined histories as they move.

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

The Intermediate – Ikebana Dragon Ball, 2016, artificial straw, powder-coated steel stand, powder-coated metal grid, casters, artificial plants, gourd, Neoseol, 61 2/5 × 49 1/5 × 50 inches, in Kukje Gallery’s booth at Art Busan & Design in South Korea, November 6–8, 2020.

2009

Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany, 2012, organized by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Wendy Red Star

ARTnews asks 12 pressing questions. An artist responds.

Wendy Red Star, based in Portland, Oregon, makes research-driven art that spans photography, video, performance, and sculpture while often taking an intergenerational approach to storytelling and centering Native American histories and perspectives. She was guest editor of Aperture’s fall 2020 special issue titled “Native America,” and in 2021 she will open exhibitions at Sargent’s Daughters gallery in New York and the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. She is also the subject of an ongoing solo exhibition at MASS MoCA.

What is your earliest memory? Roaming around on my family’s land on the Apsáalooke reservation. Where are you most content? Out walking or looking for interesting rocks in the wilderness. What are you reading? Pretty-shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows by Frank B. Linderman. What are you listening to? Pod Save America. What makes art valuable? The potential to hold knowledge for future generations to learn from and experience.

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If you could own one artwork, which would it be? Richard Throssel’s photograph of Her Dreams Are True, my greatgreat-grandmother.

What’s something you do in the studio that might surprise people? Watch reality TV shows in the background! What is your favorite food? Anything with spice. Who was a mentor to you? Nancy Rubins. What was your best experience in a museum? Touching Apsáalooke objects without gloves on at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. What is most virtuous about the art world? Its boundless nature. What is most ridiculous about the art world? The hypocrisy.

Top, Wendy Red Star, Catalogue Number 1935.33.a,b, 2019. Bottom, Wendy Red Star, Catalogue Number 1949.73, 2019. Photo of Red Star: Beatrice Red Star Fletcher/Courtesy the Artist and Sargent's Daughters Gallery.

ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

QUESTIONNAIRE

    

    

  
 

   


 

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ARTnews / FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

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ODAY, CRITICS OF MUSEUMS’ VALUES

point to histories of colonialism and structural racism. Museums, they insist, are anything but neutral. In an essay titled “The Ideal Museum” in the January 1954 issue of ARTnews, British art historian Kenneth Clark considered the hidden politics behind Western institutions, exploring the ways that millennia-old collecting habits among the wealthy influenced how museums were run. ARTnews asked for a response to the essay from Laura Raicovich, interim director of New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art and author of the forthcoming book Culture Strike: Art in an Age of Protest. Raicovich’s first reaction to Clark’s analysis: “It’s pretty dead-on.” The splendor of the great princely collections [forerunners of modern museums] was ... inseparable from an element of snobbishness. Like everything connected with princes and millionaires, they were sometimes no more than a buttress to vanity, and so they became swollen and sycophantic.

RETROSPECTIVE

Of Princes and Millionaires An expert revisits a Kenneth Clark essay on museums from ARTnews in 1954

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BY AL E X G R E E N B E RG E R

He’s acknowledging these standards of tastes as being highly idiosyncratic and not necessarily based in scholarship. He’s questioning the form of expertise, and that’s something I think is incredibly contemporary, in the sense that we need to be questioning the neutrality of the museum, in part because societal conditions are creating the desire to change. [Certain politics] are embedded in the structure of the museum, and undoing them requires acknowledging that they exist there. [Architect William] Lethaby’s famous statement that “a great building must not be one man thick, but many men thick,” applies to a great gallery. The great director, or the great curator, is exalted, and though there are many people who do day-to-day stuff, the people who are running the vision and

making big decisions [receive praise]. It’s the great individual mind—usually male, usually white, usually well-educated—enacting some great form of visionary act. The reality is: museums are profoundly collective enterprises. What if we really imagined them that way? The fact is that works of art are like wealth; they move about from one part of the world to another, and at first it seems very shocking; but after they have been in possession of one place or person for long enough, the situation becomes respectable, and people are scandalized when they move again. I am generally of the opinion that changing things is good because we need to be thinking in new ways all the time. While I have certain favorite things I love to visit [in museums] and will be heartbroken if I can’t visit those, ultimately I’ll find something else to enjoy. It’s something I respect about what the Museum of Modern Art is doing to reinstall its collection. It’s trying to reimagine what change is and what storytelling can do for artworks that were excluded. If there is a desire for greater participation from a larger swath of the public, we have to address inequities and biases.

CONCEPTUAL PERCEPTION

PHOTOGRAPHS: Mariano Costa Peuser

UNTITLED, 2004 Wood (cello), acrylic paint on canvas 61 x 42 x 5 in. 154.9 x 106.7 x 12.7 cm

D E C E M B E R 3 - 2020 FEBRUARY 26 - 20 2 1

Ascaso Gallery is pleased to present the first solo show in Miami of Arman (b. 1928, France; d. 2005, New York), one of the major figures of post-war art and a founder member of the French “Nouveau Réalisme” school, which was parallel to the American Pop Art movement in the United States during the 1960s. Arman developed a body of work intimately related to its own age, taking as its artistic material the manufactured products of the consumer society. At the core of his artistic statement are his “Accumulations” which employ the use of everyday objects as subjects. The Arman Conceptual Perception exhibition was conceived in association with the Arman Marital Trust. “Arman’s oeuvre is a series of turns- a balancing of the open-ended and the methodical; the sculptural and the painterly; the physical and the ephemeral. Within the present-ness of these works, memory and aspiration are set in flux as are the material fragments of bicycles, brushstrokes, and instruments. In all, they are, as Arman asserted, more than their material referent, they are works of art.“ ARMAN AND THE CIRCULAR PIVOT. ROSEMARY O’NEILL

1325 NE 1st Ave. Miami, FL 33132, USA T: +1 (305) 571.9410 [email protected] ascasogallery as @ascasogallery @ www.ascasogallery.com

GERHARD RICHTER CAGE

Artwork © Gerhard Richter 2020 (05102020) Photo: © Hubert Becker

Gagosian Beverly Hills