American Art in Flux
A Lunder Institute convening highlights the changing and challenging nature of American art
Throughout the year, the Lunder Institute for American Art has challenged museums across the country with a question that has no easy answer: What is the state of American art?
The question was posed as part of a new initiative, Lunder Institute @, to encourage museums to respond to the prompt by first having internal conversations across departments and then sharing what emerged from those conversations through public programs.
That yearlong process culminated when curators, educators, and audience engagement specialists from each institution came to Colby this week for a three-day convening to share what they learned. Colby hosted a public discussion at the Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts, where representatives from each institution talked about their individual efforts, lessons, and takeaways.
The first-year cohort included the de Young Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, The Broad in Los Angeles, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
A question without an answer
The participants agreed, as Rachel Vogel, assistant curator at the Addison Gallery, said so succinctly: “This is a question that cannot be answered.”
But the conversations around it were revealing. A distillation of key takeaways:
American art is in a state of flux, as traditional definitions and assumptions about the genre evolve along with a larger cultural understanding of what it means to be an American. Museums are becoming more inclusive by “inviting in” and telling the stories of more underrepresented artists.
Internal conversations about exhibitions and programs need to be external and more transparent, so the public understands how and why museums operate as they do. Museums can and should move beyond the exhibitions that feature a dominant curatorial voice, which historically has been considered the absolute authority, and include more artists’ voices in interpretation.
Museums should become less precious and less obsessed with perfection. They should cease doing things in certain ways because that’s how they have always done them. There is room and need for innovation and new ideas.
Museum professionals are earnest in their desire to meet the challenges and changes happening in society at large and react quickly to respond to the world today. Many are already doing so, and the art world is in a “moment of reassessment” about what the field might look like going forward in ways that would “radically depart” from how American art has been taught in textbooks and in American art surveys, Vogel said.
Progress is slow
But sometimes ambitions outpace the ability to deliver, and progress has been slow.
“Most of our galleries are still firmly dedicated to fancy things made by white artists for fancy white people,” said Layla Bermeo, the Kristen and Roger Servison Curator of Paintings at the MFA in Boston. “But you have to have the vision and space in order to make the kind of changes you want to see and create the kind of museum you want to visit.”
Participants agreed they were surprised by the interest the community showed in the Lunder Institute @ events that explored the question about the state of American art. To that end, the MFA Boston had to move to another event space to accommodate a large crowd, and at most events, the majority of the audience was community members.
“A takeaway is that our community—and not just specialists in American art or museums—is interested in the questions we are asking internally and the kinds of conversations that are driving the work that we do,” Vogel said. “It was a helpful reminder to let the public into these conversions more frequently or in ways that are not so protective of the work that we do behind the scenes.”
Erica Wall, director of the Lunder Institute for American Art, said each of the six public programs hosted by Lunder Institute @ partners reflected a discourse taking place across the country that represents the American experience and its complex, diverse, and multi-layered nature.
The convenings promoted discourse in an open and fertile space leading toward innovation, new areas of exploration, and possible answers to questions that continue to arise around what American art is and what impacts its production, its scholarship, and its research, she said.
‘A valuable perspective’
“It’s a valuable perspective of American art in real time. Each program very much reflected the location, culture, and identity of the institution,” she said, adding that Lunder Institute @ has provided museums a platform to practice and exercise continued conversation, both internally among themselves, and externally with their patrons.
The programs that each museum hosted varied widely. The Whitney hosted a program titled “Making Collections, Revealing Histories” that reflected on American art today through the lens of museum collecting and artistic practices.
The Addison hosted a two-panel discussion, “Defining American Art: Then and Now Symposium,” with the first dedicated to the Addison’s founding collection and the second exploring American art in the present. The MFA Boston focused on folk and self-taught art and how those subgenres fit in the larger category of American art.
At The Broad, artists Sayre Gomez and Patrick Martinez talked with author and Los Angeles native Lynell George about the visual culture of LA and its influence on generations of artists. The Crystal Bridges Museum hosted what it called “bite-sized conversations” showcasing the work and stories of artists Danielle Hatch, Linda Nguyen Lopez, and Kalyn Barnoski, and pairing those conversations with a food, beverage, and hands-on creative activity.
The de Young’s program was titled “Making America: On Creative Work and Liberatory Practice,” and it focused on ways that American freedoms are being infringed, with interpretations from a panel of artists.
Ed Patuto, director of audience engagement at The Broad, thanked the Lunder Institute for initiating the program and bringing museum professionals together over the year to discuss an issue that touches everyone in the museum field and beyond.
“Culture plays an extraordinary role in shaping how we see ourselves as Americans and how we see the rest of the world,” he said. “We’re in a time when that is really up for grabs. Being able to sit down with colleagues and reflect about what we are doing in our institutions is absolutely vital” to the field and to American culture as a whole.
A collaborative initiative of the Colby College Museum of Art, the Lunder Institute for American Art supports research and creativity with a goal of expanding the understanding and contexts of American art. The institute invites visiting artists, scholars, and museum professionals to engage across disciplines. It awards fellowships and grants and convenes workshops and symposia to amplify marginalized voices, challenge convention, and provide a platform for dialogue through art and scholarship.
Informed by place and fueled by collaboration, the Lunder Institute seeks to expand who shapes American art and its contours, while embracing a mission of access, a commitment to create a forum for research, dialog, experimentation, and what Jacqueline Terrassa, Carolyn Mussy Director of the Colby College Museum of Art, described as “joyful connection.”
Since its inception in 2017, the Lunder Institute has been unique in its field as a museum-based research institute at a liberal arts college, and one working at the intersection of research, scholarship, and art-making. “The Lunder Institute @ series provides space for safe and rich conversation across the field with our audiences about larger questions related to American art and therefore the American experience,” Terrassa said.
The Lunder Institute recorded all the discussions, which will be archived and available as a resource, and Wall said the program will be repeated in the future with a different group of participating museums.
“This program has created and will continue to create infinite content and possibilities for the Lunder Institute to explore and to prompt further questions for artist practice, research, and scholarship within the field of American art,” she said.
