A social awakening is happening in the museum world.
Two new exhibits discuss the whiteness of art and the struggle of African-American artists to bring more black faces into paintings. Jacob Lawrence's 1941 series about the black migration from the south to the north is at the Museum of Modern Art. And Jean-Michel Basquiat's eight notebooks that have never been presented to the public are at the Brooklyn Museum.
WNYC's art critic Deborah Solomon said in this interview that museums seem to be responding to the national conversation on racism following the killing of several un-armed black men recently. “I think museums are realizing as we become a country made up more and more of minorities, that we need to include minorities in the museum population and the story of art,” she said.
The MoMA show reunites all 60 panels of Lawrence’s migration series for the first time in 20 years. It includes other art-works from the period – books, songs, photographs, paintings – and it comes with a series of public events, film screenings, music performances and poetry commissions. “I like the Jacob Lawrence show because it puts Lawrence in a large social context – and captures the hardships of American blacks in the early to mid 20th century. It acknowledges that life matters more than art,” she said.
When Lawrence's migration series was opened at Downtown Gallery, he was the first African-American artist to be represented by a New York gallery. The panels show both public life and private life, a lynching, a race riot, a family sitting together in a shack, trying to decide whether to go north; a starving boy standing at his mother’s table when there’s nothing to eat; an empty room with a green window shade pulled down, from which people have moved away. “I think it is the leading work of social dissent in all of American art,” said Solomon.
Like Lawrence, Jean-Michel Basquiat also wanted to tell the story of his people. His new show at the Brooklyn Museum features eight notebooks he wrote between 1980 and 1987 dismantled in 160 pages, along with 30 related paintings, drawings, and mixed-media works.
A quotation inscribed on a wall of the Basqiat exhibition says, “The black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings. I realized that I didn’t see many paintings with black people in them.” Solomon said the exhibit shows Basquiat was also thinking about his role as a social activist. “We are reminded once again that social justice and the absence of blacks in art history was of concern even to Basquiat,” she said.
Solomon said she applauds MoMA for introducing a social show. “Art does not exist in a bubble. It springs from life and I am all for including people’s experience in our museum experience.”
What do you think? Should art shows come with social missions? Why or why not? Join the conversation with a comment.
Two new exhibits show how Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jacob Lawrence fought to portray the African-American experience in a white art world.