Eugene O’Neill looked for and found a seemingly peaceful enclave for writing his all but peaceful plays in the San Ramon Valley. For 6 years he and his wife lived in a gated house built with the money from his NobelPrize for literature, overlooking Mt. Diablo, grateful for the seclusion in the valley, the writer struggling with progressive tremors from Parkinson disease.
He felt he could only create with pen put to paper, an increasing hardship. His oldest son’s suicide, the estrangement from with his other 2 children, actively pursued by him after his daughter Oona married Charlie Chaplin, threw long shadows over a landscape filled with light. Eventually the couple moved back to the East coast.
“Peaceful” was in the eye of the beholder, anyhow. The original peoples of the region were violently uprooted by the 1772 arrival of the Spanish who established missions, killed those who objected in direct warfare and spread diseases that decimated the Tatcan, Seunen and Saclan tribes in horrifying numbers. When the missions were closed in 1863, fewer than a score of Indian descendants in the region were alive.
Of course, it didn’t end there. The Mexican government granted two Ranchos in the valley. The grazing cattle and sheep destroyed the herb and bulb meadows carefully nurtured by the tribes to provide traditional foods when hunting or fishing was precarious.
Then came the miners. The Gold Rush invaded more Indian lands and when California joined the Union in 1850 they immediately passed a law that allowed Indians to be enslaved by any White man, cynically called the “Act for the Protection of the Indians” (repealed in 1863, well into the Civil War period.)
I learned all this from a visit to a tiny history museum located in an old train station in Danville, attendant struggling to figure out that admission was $3, since they usually deal with school classes. A single room filled to the brim with dusty exhibits, lovingly collected across decades.
Displays ranged from stuffed animals to tribal artifacts, to walls of photographs celebrating noted personalities of Indian descent. Prints of works by famous photographer Edward S. Curtis and drawings by Michael Harney were isolated highlights among a lot of idiosyncratic exhibits.
Walking in the valley early in the morning provided welcome access to species alive rather than embalmed by eager taxidermists.
It is beautiful out here, even after the hottest, driest summer on record. The rains are supposed to return today.
Dried out creek.
Instead of music here are links to “Beyond the horizon,” a play filmed on the grounds of the O’Neill Tao House and in the landscape I currently walk in.
I have to admit, it’s been ages since I visited the World Forestry Center. No more explaining to my (now grown) kids that the fake logger climbing a fake tree with a fake goose and owl calmly sitting on branches below him, are there for educational purposes, and maybe, just maybe, meant as a joke. Or to stimulate discussions how museum exhibits not necessarily reflect the real world. Don’t get me wrong, they and I loved the place during too many rainy days in Portland, Oregon, and some of the educational displays did promote meaningful conversations.
As it turns out, there are now more and better reasons to visit, than simply looking for bad weather diversions. The place is changing at a fast clip, with an ambitious plan to update and modernize this Portland treasure. Among the important improvements are a program of new art exhibitions that should attract a wide swath of visitors who are interested in both, information about the environmental conditions of our state as well as of international forests and how contemporary issues of changing nature is represented by serious artists.
Let’s face it: today’s cultural institutions have a near impossible burden to carry. Besides the particular content they are supposed to display in aesthetically appealing ways – here forestry in all its permutation and history – they have to engage in educational missions, social outreach, community involvement, and simultaneous financial juggling between higher cost and decreased funding. To fulfill all these imperatives you need innovative thinking, creative solutions, and a vision that extends beyond the safe, habitual offerings we’ve come to expect from specialty museums. Judging by the current exhibition, the Discovery Museum at the Center has found someone who fits the bill. Stephanie Stewart Bailey, the new experience developer (unfamiliar title to me, but makes sense when you look at the intersection of art, science and nature) has managed to mount a show that combines stellar international photography with an educational mission to help us understand better the central role and function of trees in numerous civilizations.
Tree People by Ritva Kovalainen and Sanni Seppo was the first installment of a three part artistic collaboration between these two prize-winning Finnish photographers interested in the interrelationship between nature and those that populate it. For over three decades the duo have explored the mythology associated with trees and forests, (Tree People, 1997) the way forest management and silviculture affect both land and people, (Silvicultural Operations, 2009) and now how primeval forest look (and act) differently from those that have been exposed to centuries of human commercialization (Forests of the North Wind , 2024).
The visual work is compelling (as is their environmental activism), but the deeper attraction to me lies in the artists’ rigorous research, amounting to an anthropological tour de force across these 30 years, including field interviews and archival exploration. Each of the three installments stands on their own. I found the choice of Tree People for the Discovery Museum timely because they speak to some issues that are currently of great cultural interest in the Pacific Northwest as well.
The exhibition is divided into topics, photography always accompanied and enhanced by written explanations of the historical context. One section explores the destruction of sacred spaces, groves believed to be hallowed, once Christian proselytizing started in earnest, cutting down worshipped trees and replacing them with churches. One of the most appealing aspects of the curation was a circle of fabric panels, printed with trees, that you could enter as if it was a grove. It was mounted by Stewart Bailey in a clever way, hanging from a braided wreath of twigs and branches, which stayed with the topic of trees, and were visually harmonious. More interestingly, they projected shadows onto the semi-permeable canvas, doubling the sense of being close to trees.
There is a part on forest spirits, and traditional fare around how to combat them and keep a boundary between human civilization and the forest.
There is an introduction to good luck/sacred trees that are associated with a particular homestead. One of the photographs depicts a houseless person who had made his home under a tree in a Finnish park. It was a comforting thought to one of the younger visitors feeling they would never be able to afford a piece of property where a legacy tree could serve multiple generations. Stewart Bailey told me, that the idea to choose a tree in one’s general environment was visibly uplifting. Must be the Zeitgeist (or more likely the housing market…): the Washington Post just last week had an article strongly encouraging us to select a favorite public tree and tie our own life events to frequent visitations.
Last but not least, there are two sections devoted to memorializing the departed, humans and animals alike. These provide a direct link to a big question raised in the contemporary Pacific Northwest where competing interests fight over the preservation of certain trees that were culturally modified.
***
Oregon, like Finland, has an important history linked to the ways we have handled forestry, claiming ourselves to be the state that timber built. The natural riches of fir trees, cedars and Ponderosa pines were there for the taking, and taken they were, generating winners and losers along the way. Depending on one’s perspective you could think of pioneers conquering the wilderness, or robber barons using illegal timber sales through the rail road contracts to make a fortune. Here, as well as in Europe, opposing interests fought over legislation that promoted their often contradictory goals.
Logging throughout the first half of the last century provided great pay, secure employment and boons to the infrastructure of many growing timber communities. When private timber reserves dwindled in the late 1950s, the Forest Service and Bureau of Federal Land Management were pushed to permit increased harvesting on public lands and allow clear cutting and use of chemical herbicides. Eventually environmentalists started to fight back, and during the 1990s the “timber wars” ensued – protection of endangered species like the spotted owl was weighed against the fate of the many communities that lost their livelihoods with stricter federal regulations on logging, or the earnings of the lumber industry, respectively. (The link brings you to a fabulous OPB series on the history of the law suits.) An early verdict prohibiting national forest timber sales in potential spotted owl habitat in May 1991, set off years of litigation over animals and plants that had been listed as endangered and severely curbed logging.
The attempt to change the rules and regulations governing timber harvest and protection of old growth forests is ongoing. The 1994 Northwest Forest Plan is in the process of being amended, partially due to fast changing environmental conditions. Catastrophic wildfires and tree-killing pests have done intense damage to all habitats. Barred owls are conquering spotted owls’ habitat, ever diminishing their numbers. A committee working under immense time pressure has made numerous recommendations, several of which were slashed by the Forest Service, deemed irrelevant to the amendment. There is also a planned amendment for all national 128 forest plans, a draft of which was release in June. In theory the public has 90 days to comment, and the timeline declares hopes for a decision and implementation by January 2025. Many of the parties involved in this joint effort to find compromises for forestry management have expressed worries that different national election outcomes would affect the planned amendments in various ways. (Ref.)
Most of us have probably an inkling of this history, although the extent to which it is related to violations of treaties with tribal groups who had to cede old growth forest in land swaps or were simply dispossessed, has rarely been stressed. New to me, and bringing us back to the context of the exhibition and its focus on the function of trees as keepers of memory, archivists of entire civilizations, is the call for protection of individual trees in the fight over the right to harvest large swaths of timber by the industry. What is at stake here is the fate of culturally modified trees (CMTs), living trees that have been visibly altered by indigenous cultural practices. They were related to food production (peeling the bark), cultural traditions (weaving, producing ceremonial regalia, building shelter or carving of paddles and canoes.) Trees were selected for memorial or mortuary poles as well, and many exhibit drill holes that tested the strength of the tree so that sustainable harvesting could be completed, not hurting future growth.
These trees are of cultural and spiritual significance, sacred memorials to tribal ancestors and living archeological sites that allow insight into historical practices. Equally important, they are of legal significance. When indigenous rights are challenged, carbon dated trees with indigenous modification can be testament to the occupancy and forest stewardship of tribes at a given point in time. For cultures that existed without much written record, whether the indigenous Samis for Finland, or the first nations, tribes and bands in the North American sphere, these trees are archives that can be precisely dated and are a rare historical source for archeologists, anthropologist and historians alike. The question is how they can be legally protected from clear cutting, before they die a natural death given their age in old growth forests. (Here is a great book for further information about the research and the political debate around CMTs.)
It would have been fascinating to link the photographs of the Finnish memorial trees with their arboglyphs, those carvings of dates and numbers, to the contemporaneous questions raised by the protection of modified trees in our own backyard. But I am sure those connections to place and universal issues will be made once the museum has found its stride with traveling as well as independently curated exhibitions.
As is, I cannot recommend a visit to see this work strongly enough. It is like falling into another time and place, yet eerily familiar. Then go home and (re)read Richard Power’s The Overstory. The winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction is a paean to trees, nature and environmental activism, one of my favorite novels of all time. Or, alternatively, just hang out under a conifer it Forest Park. The trees will speak to you.
Does this happen to you as well? A particular topic enters your thoughts and then you see it everywhere you turn?
Philanthropy came to my mind when I stopped at a small history museum in Southern Oregon that was established in the late 50s by an Oregon politician who wanted to help Oregonians remember their history. More on Pottsville in a moment – photographs today are from that site.
I was also wondering about the mechanisms of philanthropy last week when reading about Melinda Gates’ decision to pull out of the Gates Foundation and start moving her philanthropic investment in a different direction.
I was thinking about philanthropy when I heard that multiple Jewish organizations in Oregon cut off their charitable donations to the Oregon Food Bank when the latter called for cease fire in Gaza in a statement critical of Israeli military actions. Never mind that Hamas’ atrocities were condemned as well, and the statement had been discussed with Jewish allies prior to publication. It seems particularly poignant to think of locally increased hunger being the outcome of ideologically motivated decisions when forced starvation of a locked -in region at war has been criticized by many entities across the world.
Last but not least, a chance conversation with a woman a bit younger than myself, elegance personified and a legend in her professional field, raised a different notion of philanthropic involvement: rather than (or in addition to) writing the big checks, with or without strings attached, you quietly contribute by adding your insights and knowledge to help steer non-profits that you are passionate about in a direction that allows them to maximize their impact and develop their full potential. A true form of more or less anonymous giving back.
I had simplistic notions of charitable giving. It can be either ethically or religiously driven, in fact for us in the Jewish realm it is a mitzvah, a commandment, not a choice. (If you are interested in the religious roots of charity, here is a neat summary out of Harvard.)
Giving can be used to promote or preserve a name – think buildings across American or European campuses, sports arenas, concert halls.
It can be a means to erase shame – think of the many donors and board members who make astronomical contributions to cultural institutions like museums, who are eventually called out for where their money came from. I had written about a specific case not so long ago at the Whitney. Recently, the V&A Dundee, the National Gallery in London and the Louvre in Paris severed connections to the Sacklers, a dynasty indelibly linked to the global opioid epidemic, from which some members of the family profited via their company Purdue Pharma. The British National Portrait Gallery severed ties with BP in 2022, the end of a relationship that had lasted more than 30 years.
Reading up on the idea of philanthropy, I now learn that people categorize charity in more complex ways as well. (I’m summarizing, among others, from a source here.)
There is Philanthropic Investment which aims to invest resources into nonprofit enterprises in order to increase their ability to deliver programmatic execution. The Philanthropic Investor, like a for-profit investor, is primarily focused on the longer term increase and improvement in programmatic execution relative to grant size. Basically, they are building the organization, rather than engaging in spontaneous charitable giving for whatever need arises in the moment.
Then there are two types of philanthropy that try to affect change systematically. One is Strategic Philanthropy which buys up nonprofit goods and services in a way that aligns with a theory of change defined by the strategic philanthropist. This approach hopes to advance the solution that they believe is most likely to solve the problem they seek to address. The other is Social Entrepreneurism which seeks to directly execute programs that align with a theory of change, defined by themselves. I had previously written about philanthropy that hopes to be a direct agent of change here.
Politics enter the arena of charitable giving of course not only from the side of individual donors with specific goals or groups of protesters who try to influence the flow and acceptance of charitable funds. There exist direct attempts to oversee what can be given to whom, assessing the legality of the donations. Case in point is ‘Not On Our Dime’, a recently (re)introduced bill by New York Assembly member Zohran Mamdani and endorsed by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The bill aims to sanction New York charities who send more than $ 60.000.000 a year towards Israeli settlement expansion, that the bill’s sponsors consider to occur in violation of international law.
Much to think about. Far easier to wander around a photographer’s candy store of agricultural machinery gently rusting itself into oblivion, among small buildings recreating villages of yore. The museum itself is only open by appointment, and the fairgrounds serve mostly locals for motorcycle swap meets, parades, fairs and the likes. We were the only living souls in the vicinity, mid-afternoon on a weekday, acres and acres to ourselves.
Pottsville’s founder, Eugene “Debbs” Potts (1909 – 2003) was by all reports quite a character, serving multiple roles, including decades as a state senator. Although named for the famous socialist Eugene W. Debs, his leanings were more centric, voting as a Democrat quite frequently with his Republican colleagues. He donated the land, gave seed money to the non-profit, and eventually contributed his gigantic collection of tools and machinery.
The highlight of my visit came when I saw a few murals by one Mark M. Jones on the sides of the buildings. Landscape scenery was lovingly depicting the wonders of our state,
a rodeo snippet was attributed to Olaf Wieghorst, a Danish-American painter who specialized in depictions of the American frontier in the vein of Frederic Remington and Charles Russell.
Then this.
My first thought was, “Is he familiar with Oskar Schlemmer?”
Then I read the signage and the referent painting was Farmers Planting Potatoes by van Gogh.
Oh, the surprises of Pottsville. Oh, the generous sharing of one’s means and/or skills for all of us to enjoy.
Long live giving.
Music today was written in 1915 to support charity for refugees. Polonia was first performed at London’s Queen’s Hall at a Polish Victims’ Relief Fund Concert in July 1915, with Elgar conducting. He dedicated the work to his friend Paderewski, a great pianist and later Prime Minister of Poland.
Last night I had a horrid dream, likely tied to the day’s reading and writing about Caspar David Friedrich. Emotionally depleted from curating a show of Holocaust photography at a German Jewish museum, I took the wrong train, ending up traveling through Poland. Once we reached the Baltic Sea shore, the train stopped. Throngs of people, me among them, scrambled down the dunes and cliffs to the beach to see Orcas (! they live in all oceans except the Black and the Baltic Sea…) swimming in what looked like jet-black, glassy waves that were suspended in slow motion. Friedrich’s Sea of Ice had melted, but the water was not behaving naturally. I could not really see much given the wall of people, all with their back turned to me and then realized I had left my backpack, wallet and iPhone as well as my heavy coat in the train – what if it left? You can anticipate the rest – trying to scramble up the cliffs, heart pounding, stone crumbling under your feet…
My former hometown museum, Hamburger Kunsthalle, currently offers a blockbuster retrospective of works by Caspar David Friedrich. By all reports it is a curatorial masterpiece, guiding you through the evolution of the work by this preeminent romanticist painter, while the drawings and paintings are simultaneously grouped by thematic content, making for a more comprehensive visual experience. A whale of a show where you can see nothing on opening night because of the masses of visitors celebrating the occasion.
The cherry on top can be found on the second floor of the museum – a selection of contemporary artists whose work references, or is derived from, or parodies Friedrich.
I’d give an arm and a leg to see it, but my days of travel to Europe are over. Luckily we can get some glimpses on-line. Here is a general tour of the exhibition. And here is an audio tour for selected works – the second entry from top in the link is the english version. One below that is one for children, which I find an extremely cool idea.
Alas, nothing visually available in my cursory search on the modern artists who relate to Friedrich. But here is a recent review that goes into more depth.
Concurrent with the exhibition, a darling of Germany’s current literary scene, author and art historian Florian Illies, published a book about Caspar David Friedrich (CDF), Der Zauber der Stille – Caspar David Friedrichs Reise durch die Zeiten (The Enchantment of Silence, CDF’s travels through time – not yet translated.) I am halfway through it and must say it provokes a lot of different reactions.
For one, I have certainly lost my ability to concentrate across the years of the pandemic. Maybe it is just aging, maybe it is the lack of conversational interaction, or the stress levels that impede sustained reading. If the structure of a book is complicated I often get lost and/or frustrated. Well, this book does have a complex structure, but it held my attention by the sheer force of curiosity it instilled: where is the author going next? What seemingly unrelated bits of knowledge will be imparted in unexpected juxtapositions?
Like one of his successful previous books, Love in a Time of Hate: Art and Passion in the Shadow of War, 1929-39, which described the fates of numerous famous couples during the ascent of fascism in Europe, drawing relevant parallels to our own times, the new book is an accumulation of vignettes which constantly shift between times and perspectives. The book is divided in chapters referencing fire, water, earth and air as elements relevant to both life and work of CDF. A very helpful time table is in the appendix, as are recommendations for further writings by specialists on the topic. It is a book that helps you learn, without sacrificing amusement.
Reconstructed Frauenkirche that was destroyed in the allied fire bombing
If you ignore the somewhat self-congratulatory tone of an author who knows how clever he is, and his insistent descriptions of what and how Caspar David Friedrich thought and felt – a bit too presumptuous for my taste – you are in for a ride that elates. You learn so much about the artist, his times, the trauma that defined his development, the strange interactions with women (he decided he needed to be married in his mid-forties when the neighbor who kept his wood stove going while the artist went on his daily hikes, went on vacation. He asked for the hand of a 20+ year younger woman, who he had encountered in the store where he bought his art materials, and could not even remember her first name during the 2 year-long engagement…)
The kind of house CDF likely rented an apartment in.
Florian Illies is a quintessential story teller, and weaves tales that help us understand an artist whose rebirth into public consciousness, after long eras of almost complete obsoleteness, is no coincidence. Then and now a longing for something that juxtaposes or lifts the despair du jour was pretty central to people’s existence, and his work captured that longing (and its potential remedies) in ways not seen before.
But the author also makes us think about historical interconnections, often occurring by chance. For example, Walt Disney, during trips to Europe, collected art books galore and shipped them back to the US. When he was told by Thomas Mann, while both received an honorary doctorate at Harvard or some such, that Felix Salten’s tale Bambi would be a great script for a movie, Disney promptly acted on the suggestion and told his artists to use the CD Friedrich landscapes from the art books as the background for the movie. Hitler, a Disney fan, adored the movie. Never mind, that Felix Salten’s book, written by this Jewish author and perceived to be a cloaked substitute for Jewish persecution, was one of the first to be publicly burned.
The Nazis later appropriated Friedrich’s oeuvre into their canon of true Germanic art, to the point where every young soldier sent to his death at the rapidly deteriorating Russian front received a booklet called Caspar David Friedrich and his Homeland, containing black and white prints of his paintings of oaks and the sea. The introduction contained the assertion that the artist carried a life-long, unmovable, holy belief in Germany.
View of Dresden from the surrounding hills
Anecdote after anecdote, one art-history related morsel after another. The extreme colors of the sky, reminiscent of those of his contemporary Turner? Why, Mount Tambora, a volcano on Sumbawa Island, now Indonesia, erupted in 1815, and ash particles that traveled across the world had an impact on how colors in the atmosphere were perceived. The theme of fire and ash replicates itself through out Friedrich’s life. So many of his works lost to fire, so many of the places he was connected to, burned.
The landscapes all constructed, rather than true life depictions, painted in a darkened basement room, fixed with the famous backside views of wanderers and women because the artist felt he could not draw people correctly, the back view being a welcome simplification. On and on it goes, deflating myths, augmenting admiration for a man who struggled with life-long depression, pathological shyness and poverty.
The river Elbe that crosses the city, where he walked during dawn and dusk, every day.
Until you have a chance to read it in English, here is some compensation for the wait: here is a link to a website that has accumulated titles of books that have a truly interesting or innovative structure. I can highly recommend Life after Life and The Warmth of other Suns.
Photographs today are from Dresden, where the artist lived his adult life.
Music today by Carl Maria von Weber, musical champion of the ideals of Romaticism. He overlapped with CDF in Dresden, where he became the director of the German Opera in 1817 and where he wrote the Freischütz. I selected an earlier composition, a beautiful piece for clarinet, though.
“How is the ordinary man to know that the most violent element in society is ignorance? Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think. The widespread mental indolence, so prevalent in society, proves this to be only too true. Rather than to go to the bottom of any given idea, to examine into its origin and meaning, most people will either condemn it altogether, or rely on some superficial or prejudicial definition of non-essentials.” – Emma GoldmanAnarchism (1910)
If revolutionary Emma Goldman (1869 – 1940) and OMJCHE executive director Judy Margles miraculously connected across time, they would likely discover many commonalities. Both of Jewish descent, both allergic to hypocrisy, both with a strong belief that a better world can be achieved if we act on it, and, importantly, both committed to the idea that education is one of the most important tools to affect change towards a more just world.
Determined women, visionaries even.
Of course, one of them, prone to destruction, ended up in prison and exile, while the other is an ultimate builder, leaving Portland with a legacy that is beyond valuable, for Jews and non-Jews alike – which is why it is so hard to see Margles depart, no matter how much she deserves retirement after years of incessant work at the museum.
No “mental indolence” for the director, who received a B.A. from the University of Toronto in her native Canada, and her M.A. in History and Museum Studies from New York University. If ideas catch her attention, they will be tracked, examined and turned into action. Her life’s work includes a quarter-century’s engagement in establishing a museum that will preserve the history of Oregon Jewry, inform about the Holocaust, and expand its mission to a pluralistic embrace of education about human rights and their potential violation.
Margles blazed a path – if not always in a straight line – from idea to institution, one that has made its mark on Portland’s cultural landscape, and is increasingly recognized within the national domain of Jewish museums as well. What began as a “museum without walls” based on discussions with prominent local Rabbi Joshua Stampfer and his wife Goldie in the late 1990s, soon morphed into small quarters that provided room for archived materials, including recorded oral histories, and modest exhibitions of art or photographic collections that depicted the everyday life and historical presence of Jews in Oregon. Many in the community stepped forward to help, offering practical, organizational and/or financial support, with active Boards and a small, dedicated staff shepherding the museum towards growth. But it was Margles’ leadership and relentless push that propelled the organization through various brick-and-mortar rentals to the building in the North Park blocks that is now owned by and houses OJMCHE.
Today’s various exhibition halls, conference rooms, archives, giftshop and cafe are a far cry from the early beginnings, rental rooms in Montgomery Park, followed later by a mostly windowless hole-in-the wall also on Davis St., and until 2016 a larger space on NW Kearny St. that was occupied together with the Holocaust Resource Center.
Ongoing changes extended to the museum’s mission as well, which expanded from preservation of local Jewish history to include more focused education about the Holocaust, particularly after the official 2014 merger between the Holocaust Resource Center and the museum. Teaching about the Holocaust and honoring the memory of those who perished under Nazi persecution took on new urgency, given the continual rise in anti-Semitism and the parallel loss of actual witnesses to the atrocities, with the few remaining survivors now in their 80s and 90s. Keeping the memory alive and transmitting the lessons learned to prevent future catastrophes became an important task for the museum, with a special focus on reaching schoolchildren both inside and outside of the museum walls.
Female leadership has been, interestingly enough, a hallmark of Jewish museums and also the cultural centers aligned with them. Jewish women established the earliest “identity” museums — trying to connect to culturally specific history and opening the avenues that subsequently led to other such museums, including the National Museum of the American Indian, and the National Museum of African American History in Washington, D.C.
In the U.S., it was the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods that founded the very first Jewish museum at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in 1913 (now the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles, after reorganization in 1972.) In the late 1990s some 80% of Jewish Museum directors were women. The Council of American Jewish Museums (CAJM,) an association of some 70 American Jewish institutions devoted to Jewish culture and promotion of its richness and educational value, has been headed by a woman for the last many decades. This is not just an American pattern. The large Jewish museums in Berlin, Frankfurt and Vienna are all lead by a woman.
Makes me curious, of course. Historically, this pattern of widespread female leadership might have been the result of the limited options for women hoping to serve public roles in societies where gender separation was still part of a cultural and religious system. Leaving the arts or the tending to local history, so connected to families and networks, to women might have been a way to give them – or have demanded by them – some limited empowerment.
Apparently, though, women brought something special to these roles; how else are we to explain the continuation of this history, given that it is the exception to the rule of male dominance of leadership roles across many sectors of western societies, the arts included? The challenges Margles faced, and her success in dealing with them, provide a plausible explanation.
What are the challenges? Just like for other organizations, leadership of a culturally specific museum requires an enormous amount of multi-tasking, given the diverse set of task demands. Yet it also requires social intelligence, given that it operates within a relatively small set of, in our case, Jewish-identified people, many known to each other and having a stake in their history as a community.
As the museum’s leader, you have to decide on the exact terms of your mission, you have to procure funds, both from private donors and publicly available sources, until grant proposals invade your dreams, more likely nightmares. You have to initiate or think through potential mergers with other organizations, which will be enormously valuable but also add to the list of obligations. You have to predict what size staff will be allowed by your funding and you have to manage the staff, taking on various jobs yourself if you can’t afford enough people to divide the labor. In the meantime you’re fighting a tendency to micro-manage, born out of a sense of responsibility more than a need for control. You have to find space – oh, do you have to fight for space that is affordable, accessible, safe. Never mind parking.
You are also responsible for programming, gambling on what a given budget can provide, and making educated guesses about what type of exhibition would be most effective in promoting your mission, all the while attracting visitors who might become involved with the museum and/or potential supporters. You need to devise curricula for educational programs, that are age appropriate and portable to be brought to schools and other educational settings. You need to train volunteers as exhibit guides, you need to appease committees where different ideas over annual Galas or other festivities clash, find board members that bring complementary skill sets to their role and are committed. You need to create effective PR, and oversee digitalization to keep with contemporary practices. You need to make choices among job applicants once you’ve reached a financial standing that allows you to hire specialists, you need to stay up on the literature conveying modern museum standards and practice, and you need to travel to conferences and meetings to keep up the networking efforts. Occasionally you need to mop up the water spilled by leaks in the roof on a Sunday when no janitorial staff can be reached. I am sure I have forgotten half of the jobs that are potentially on leadership plates.
That is not enough, though. For Jewish museum leadership it has always been important to recognize the changing social or religious needs of their community and to navigate the fact that this community is not monolithic and will confront at times with conflicting demands. A sensitive ear, and an ability to compromise, then, need to be added to the skill set.
Add to that the requirement to straddle a thin line that is particularly treacherous: finding the right answer to the question tackled by contemporary Jewish museums around the world. Who do they serve? Is their role determined by the Jewish community or the non-Jews around it? Is their mission to preserve and educate about the specifics of Jewish history, or are they allowed to address the general politics of their times in the context of Jewish experience – and then whose Jewish experience, given the fractious nature of contemporary Jewish identity, starting with those who live in Israel and those who live in the diaspora, those who promote Zionism and those who make an emphatic distinction between being Jewish and being a Zionist, those who are religiously affiliated and those who define themselves culturally, to name just a few divisions?
These are not just theoretical considerations. The newly appointed director to the Jewish Museum of Vienna, Barbara Staudinger, landed in hot water with her inaugural exhibition last year, 100 Misunderstandings About and Among Jews. Curatorial decisions had to be reversed when large parts of the Jewish community were in uproar over some textual items and a video presented relevant to Israel and the Holocaust.
Likewise, three years earlier, the director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin had to resign after the Israeli government and the main organizations representing Jews in Germany complained that JMB’s exhibitions were overly political and, worse in their view, friendly to Palestinians and explicitly anti-Israel (long before the atrocities of October 7, 2023 and all those that followed). The museum was accused of having become too political, beyond the boundaries of its mission. The voices of international scholars and museum professionals who lauded JMB for its willingness to serve as a place for dialogue on issues of identity in an age of growing anti-Semitism across Europe, were drowned out by the critics.
One of the Berlin exhibitions that drew ire, and contributed to job loss, was “The Whole Truth, everything you wanted to know about Jews,” a 2013 show intended to resolve misconceptions about what it means to be Jewish or how Jewish life unfolds. People could peruse answers to frequently asked questions and also ask a Jewish person him or herself, who was placed for two hours at a time, into a glass box. “Jew in a box,” as it became known, was judged despicably degrading by some (the parallel to Eichman in his glass witness box in Israel during his trial for implementing the Final Solution, among others,) wonderfully provocative by others, making people think about the ongoing divisions between Jews and non-Jews in Germany, and the lack of knowledge or (worse) conspiratorially tinged assumptions still held by many who approached the sitter to ask their questions.
My questions to Margles, when I interviewed her for this article, were simpler. What was the high point of her 24 years’ tenure at the museum? The spontaneous answer referred to the opening date of the museum in its current location, the fruit of the labor of so many years finding the right container to hold all the history, objects and ideas alike and move forward with larger exhibitions. That date, however, also denoted one of the lowest point as well, she added; it was just days after the fatal TriMet stabbings occurred, a racially motivated hate crime, reminding everyone of the vulnerability of minorities. Another low point hit 3 years later, when the museum had to close its doors under lockdown requirements during the first year of the pandemic. It was unclear how the museum would survive, with PPP loans not yet available; happily, though, the museum was rescued by a terrifically supportive Board.
What was her favorite exhibition across all those years? That’s All, Folks: The Mel Blanc Storywas the immediate answer. The tribute to this local comedian and voice artist who made it big in Hollywood movies and TV after years in Vaudeville and radio, was one that made you laugh, and laugh loud. I can just see how this counterbalances the darkness of so many of the topics associated with the collective memory carried by the museum and its educational focus on the Holocaust that was Margles’ daily concern for so many years.
I, on the other hand, would vote hands down for OMJCHE’s new core exhibition, Human Rights after the Holocaust. For me it is the epitome of forward thinking at a time where teaching the history of minorities is ignored at best and actively suppressed at worst in a country that grapples with human rights violations every single day. This emphasis, Margles notes, does not in any way diminish the uniqueness of the Holocaust, at the same time that it draws attention to trauma and injustice more broadly. Importantly, the call has to be to explore the underlying mechanisms that can lead to prejudice, discrimination and persecution, so that we empower new generations to be prepared to fight for what is just, regardless of racial, cultural or religious origin.
This, for me, is leadership, the pursuit of a vision that grows to be inclusive over time, a pluralistic view of the world that will serve the museum for decades to come and one that ultimately believes in the power of education. Farewell, Judy Margles. We owe you.
Today’s musings are dedicated to my friend Henk Pander who died last Friday. Our last phone call, two days before his death, lasted but 3 minutes before he handed the phone over to his beloved wife Jody. He was tired after laughing at the memory, prompted by my day’s visit to the Getty, of a heated argument about the art of Carrie Mae Weems over a decade ago. The Portland Art Museum had shown a retrospective of the artist and I had been invited to give a lecture on her work from the perspective of a social scientist, tackling the implications of art addressing racism in direct and indirect ways. I honestly don’t remember what Henk’s and my disagreement was about, but I do remember the passionate exchange about art and its impact on society, a kind of exchange that was one of the cornerstones of our friendship, re-enacted over and over again. Once we had ticked off daily developments in our lives, and the perpetual topic of what it meant for each of us to have emigrated to the U.S., every single conversation rerouted back to art, to making art, to employing art as a tool of capturing more than beauty, a means of taking note, drawing parallels, exposing power and expressing resistance. Driven by both, our conscience and the hope that a better world would be possible.
Henk’s art and life have been described with empathy and clarity in this obituary. It lays out the complexity of the man and the artist, fully apprehending the magnitude of the loss for the art world as well as his family and friends. Henk’s work will continue to live on and, should we be so lucky, be understood as clarion calls for generations of viewers to come. May his memory be a blessing.
***
I had debated if it was crazy to go on opening day of the exhibition, assuming Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue might attract crowds that I’d have to avoid. But I had no other commitments that day and chanced a visit to The Getty. A fortuitous decision as it turned out, since the halls were still empty that morning and the few visitors mostly masked.
In fact, everything was sort of empty, surprisingly so during the week of spring break, approaching Easter. A few tourists, judging by foreign languages, a group here or there. In a way, the absence of distractions made the architecture stand out even more against the azure sky of that day. The beige travertine stone from Italy split along its natural grain to reveal the texture of fossilized leaves and branches, reflected lots of light, the different off-white enamel-clad aluminum panels and so much glass shimmered and glistened in the bright sun light, occasionally disrupted by cold gusts of wind.
Designed by architect Richard Meyer, it is a compound, half underground, half above due to height restrictions, encompassing more than just a museum up there on the hill above Los Angeles. Museum conservation programs, administration offices, research libraries and grant institutions are part of the campus as well and the scale of it all can best be assessed when viewed from above.
Here are a few images to convey the views, bright, bold starkness softened by lots of curves. I did not photograph the gardens, however, which struck me as pedestrian and strangely not at all in sync with the architecture.
A selection of sources discussing the architecture in depth, admiration and criticism alike, can be found here.
***
The photographic exhibition that opened that day has traveled across the nation. From the Grand Rapids Art Museum, to the Tampa Museum of Art and the Seattle Art Museum, it now has its last showing at the Getty. Four decades of selected work are on view, created by two friends who met in 1976 in Harlem, NY, and inspired each other ever since to explore, document and address issues of race, class and identity within historical and contemporary power structures.
(A recorded conversation between the artists on opening day last week at the Getty can be found here. The presentation and community programming in Los Angeles were made possible with major support from Jordan Schnitzer and The Harold & Arlene Schnitzer CARE Foundation.)
It is a powerful reminder of the role of retrospectives that only museums can fill: providing the chance to see an accumulation of the artists’ work over a lifetime, giving us a perspective that is not just affected by the sheer quantity of the work on display, but how things shifted qualitatively. It allows us to see how multidimensional the artists’ approaches were, how faceted and yet thorough. Museums have historically played a role in how reality is constructed – often in ways that clung to the established and familiar. To open the door to contemporary, and, importantly, critical approaches to the use of imagery in identity formation – so central to Dawoud Bey‘s and Carrie Mae Weems‘ photographic oeuvre – is a welcome move.
Carrie Mae Weems Roaming Series 2006
Dawoud has been the recipient of multiple fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, NY, and the induction into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum, among others.
Dawoud Bey (Left to Right:) Young Girl Striking a Pose, Brooklyn, NY 1988 – Markie, Brooklyn, NY 1988- Three Girls at a Parade, Brooklyn, NY 1988
Weems’ honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, the prestigious Prix de Roma, the Frida Kahlo Award for Innovative Creativity, the WEB DuBois Medal, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, the BET Honors Visual Artist Award, the Lucie Award for Fine Art Photography, and the ICP Spotlights Award from the International Center of Photography. This March she was named the 2023 Hasselblad Award laureate by the Hasselblad Foundation, an international photography prize that is granted annually to a photographer recognized for major achievements, called the “Nobel Prize” of photography by many of us.
Carrie Mae Weems Kitchen Table Series 1990
The five sections that present the two artists’ work are grouped by thematic pairings, allowing us to assess commonalities and differences in underlying principles, artistic approach, and selection of subjects across more than 40 years. They include work that (re)constructs and resurrects Black history, or looks for revelations in the landscape (A requiem to mark the moment by Weems, for example, or Bey’s exploration of the landscape of the Underground Railroad segments.)
Dawoud Bey (Clockwise from top:) A Young Man Looking in the Blue Note 1980 – Woman in Luncheonette, New York,NY 1981 – Woman in the Cadman Plaza Post Office, New York, NY 1981 – A Man walking in to a Parking Garage, New York, NY – 1981
My immediate reaction when seeing the juxtaposed work of these two friends and colleagues, each such powerful photographers and activists on the contemporary scene, was a sense of dichotomy. One could think of Bey as a poet and Weems as a dramatist, or alternately, Bey as a listener and Weems as a talker – and I mean that with full admiration for either approach. They both hone in on the power and ubiquity of prejudice, which, of course comes in many forms, whether racisms, classism, sexism, ageism, you name it. It always includes a mix of discriminatory behavior, targeted towards a particular group, discriminatory beliefs, concerning the group and usually an emotional element like fear, anger or even disgust directed at the targeted group. Crucially, prejudice needs to be understood within the historical context, and forms we see now may be very different from those at the formation of this nation, in both legal contexts and the personal one, in our awareness of our own prejudice or the ease or willingness with which a particular prejudice is expressed publicly, or acted on.
In the context of this show about the Black experience, racism is as good an example as any, with modern racism or implicit racism – automatic, unconscious, unintentional – still being tied to a culture that routinely links the idea of Blacks with the idea of deviant behavior, or a set of ideas, mostly bad, that concern violent crime, poverty, hyper sexuality or moral corruptness. Think of it like this: when I ask you to respond to the word peanut butter, for most people the word jelly emerges quickly and spontaneously. That association is independent of whether you like that kind of sandwich, or despise it, or have never tried it. The link between those two words has been established by the frequency with which you have encountered the pairing in your life time, it is anchored in your mind outside of awareness. This is the same for racist stereotypes flourishing for centuries in a culture that had a hierarchical valence of white over Black. You might not act on those beliefs, you might deny them, but the associations are carried by most of us through permanent exposure to the linkage of Black to negative or threatening concepts, whether we are aware of it or not, whether we have the best of intentions and the most egalitarian politics.
What can be done? We can draw attention to the stereotypes (and for that matter the historical burden of racism) with the hope of motivating people to intercept their own mental associations. Or we can pull attention away from prevalent stereotypes by offering alternative representations. Each of these approaches works best in different settings, and both artists have employed both approaches.
Carrie Mae Weems The Assassination of Medgar, Martin, Malcolm from the series Constructing History, 2008
Bey’s portraiture explores the subject with indirect subtlety, hard to decipher metaphors, trenchant depictions, like poetry that goes deep to listen inside and then provides a road map to new ways of seeing. New work includes a series titled after a line in Langston Hughes’ poem Dream Variations: Night coming tenderly, Black. The photographer pursues history, reimagining how a fleeing slave would have perceived landscape stretches along the Underground Railroad, under the sheltering cover or darkness, or tinged by the darkness of the unknown ending of a perilous journey. It is incredibly moving work, all the more so since it is unpeopled – in stark contrast to the portraiture Bey is rightly famous for. I only wish the very last words of the poem’s last line -” like me” – would not have been left out of the title. It would connect then and now, having a contemporary stand-in for the departed, one whose sense of safety and freedom is still not guaranteed in 2023 America or, worse, increasingly threatened.
Dawoud Bey Untitled #14 (Site of John Brown’s Tannery), from the series Night Coming Tenderly, Black, 2017
Weems’ imagery uses powerful staging both in early and later work, including private and public almost theatrically arranged sets, amplified by literal scripts that guide us into the thicket of our own stereotypes and beliefs. The intense beauty that she captures or instills into her staged photographs reminds me of the song of the Sirens, beguiling you while always containing the undertone of something haunting or violent that lies in wait for us. This is true particularly for those series that replace widespread stereotypic views with alternative representations (the Roaming series, for example), in contrast to those where she makes the horrors of racism and the history of marginalization screamingly explicit (“From here I saw what happened and I cried.”)
A 1984 book by French philosopher Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, talks about how photographs contain implied meanings and depict seemingly naturalistic truths. But he points out that photographs can also, in a paradoxical way, become the tools to question meaning. I find in the work of both artists the strength to challenge existing power structures, to undermine the ways that traditional images generate and maintain cultural dominance.
Carrie Mae Weems Untitled from the series Sea Islands 1992
If the structure of societal norms defines how we look at something – our hapless use of the colonizing gaze shaped by historical expectations – both artists’ work manages to subvert our way of looking and/or applying stereotypes related to race, class and gender. Their photography, across the decades, has adopted a permanent practice of subversion, opening a path to integration and equality, rather than oppression and marginalization. Or, in Weems’ own words upon being made the Hasselblad Award laureate:
“To be recognized comes with the continued responsibility to deliver on the promise made to myself and to the field, which is to shine a light into the darker corners of our time and thereby, with a sense of grace and humility, illuminate a path forward.”
Dawoud Bey A Woman Wearing Denim, Rochester, NY 1989 – A Couple at a Bus Stop, Rochester, NY, 1990
Dream Variations
To fling my arms wide In some place of the sun, To whirl and to dance Till the white day is done. Then rest at cool evening Beneath a tall tree While night comes on gently, Dark like me— That is my dream!
To fling my arms wide In the face of the sun, Dance! Whirl! Whirl! Till the quick day is done. Rest at pale evening . . . A tall, slim tree . . . Night coming tenderly Black like me.
This year Passover and Easter align again, bad timing for those of us who celebrate the former but like the easter eggs offered by the latter, restricted to chocolate covered Matzoh. Chag Sameach to all who celebrate Pesach. For the Easter crowd, though, I’ll deliver the hares, if you take care of the eggs!
Hordes of hares. What can I say. Multitudes, swarms, legions, abundance, profusions of rabbits rescued from the warren. 45.732 bunnies. Fortyfivethousandsevenhundredandthirtytwo of them. You read that right.
All kinds – pictures, sculptures, household objects, posters, pottery, pinball machines, toys, books, you name it, made from all kinds of materials, glass, wood, clay, metal, porcelain, paper, and, of course, plastic.
All delivered in a museum run by a couple, Candace Frazee and her “Honey Bunny” hubby Steve Lubanski who were motivated by the tenets of their religion – they are Swedenborgians – to share their plethora of all things bunny.
The Bunny Museum in Altadena, CA has made it into the Guinness World Record books, and clearly enticed writers to out-wit each other with using appropriate descriptors – here’s a favorite review, from a time when the museum founders still showed out of their home, rather than the new building they now occupy.
The museum is explicitly not intended for very young children, although they are welcome if supervised by an adult.
I had a blast, as you can imagine, at the self-described hoppiest place on earth, although I did miss out on the live exemplars, for some reasons being glued to my camera surveying the walls. Or maybe they were out delivering easter eggs to the rest of you!
Walk with me, if you can stand driving with me first, on L.A. highways that challenge even the most ardent motorist (and I count myself among those.) Someone called the experience soul crushing. I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s pretty insane if you add the difficulties with finding parking, or, as a friend more aptly phrased it: crazy insane.
However, I made it to the northern edge of L.A. in one piece this Sunday, ready to check out a Japanese enclave, Little Tokyo, that existed since the beginning of the 20th century. The roughly 5-block district was home to some 10.000 Japanese immigrants by the early 1900s, a market place and cultural hub that nowadays offers a mix of traditional stores and restaurants next to tourist traps and skateboard businesses.
On a sunny, windblown Sunday, the place was jumping, throngs of people standing in line in front of various shops, sushi-joints and Karaoke studios, mostly ignoring the multiple reminders of the district’s history, spread throughout.
Sculptures tells stories, as do wall plaques and photographic mosaics.
Junichiro Hannya Ninomiya Kinjiro (1983) – It is actually a controversial sculpture, see details here.
Ramon G. Velasco Chiune Sugihara Memorial, Hero of the Holocaust 2002.
As the Japanese Vice-Consul for Lithuania, Sugihara helped over 2000 Jews to escape Nazi Germany by handing out transit visas that allowed them to flee through Poland and Russia. He did so against the explicit instructions of the Japanese Foreign Ministry.
JANM’s renovated Historic Building was formerly the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, the first Buddhist temple building constructed in Los Angeles in 1925.
“From the plaque for the camera sculpture: First-generation Japanese American photographer Toyo Miyatake (1895) opened his photography studio in Little Tokyo in 1923 and spent the rest of his life documenting his community’s life on film. When Miyatake, his family and 120,000 Japanese Americans were unjustly incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II, Miyatake bravely smuggled a camera lens and a film plate, considered contraband, into the Manzanar concentration camp in California. Using a secretly-constructed camera, he captured everyday life in Manzanar. Artist Nobuho Nagasawa created a three-times-as-large bronze replica of the Miyatake camera in homage to Toyo Miyatake. The sculpture projects slides of Miyatake’s work onto a window of the Japanese American National museum each evening. This sculpture was commissioned by the Community Redevelopment Agency and was first installed in 1993.“
***
The Japanese American National Museum was surprisingly airy and empty, and everyone was wearing masks, which made me comfortable enough to meander through both, the permanent exhibit that describes in detail the traumatic experiences of immigrants even before they were rounded up and incarcerated in concentration camps in 1941, and the current exhibition, Don’t Fence Me In, that traces the coming of age of so many young people in the camps during these horror years with superb archival photographs and other objects. (Details here.) Thoughtful curation throughout. The museum is the largest of its kind in the U.S. and holds over 60.000 artifacts. Hello Kitty included…
The OOMO Cube by photographic messaging artist Nicole Maloney was installed near the main entrance of the JANM Pavilion in 2014. OOMO stands for “Out Of Many One” and Maloney conceived of her installation as a giant Rubik’s cube with five sides filled with photographs and the sixth side as a mirror.
Maloney explained that people are often identified through five different characteristics: race, religion, gender, socio-economic status, and sexual orientation. The cube allows visitors to JANM to have interactions with it by rotating the sections into different configurations. Maloney hoped that those interacting with her cube will be reminded that everyone belongs to one world and one humanity and that it will encourage people to “stand in awe instead of judgment of one another.” (Ref.)
Also located on that plaza is the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, an outpost of downtown L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The doors were locked, despite regular business hours. Just as well, I would not have been able to process two museums in a day.
Barbara Kruger’s imposing 30 by 191 feet red, white, and blue mural mural, Untitled (Questions), provided enough to look at and think about.
An installation of airplane parts was home to quite a few birds, coming and going and disappearing inside – urban nesting of the finest.
Nancy Rubin Chas’ Stainless Steel, Mark Thompson’s Airplane Parts, About 1,000 Pounds of Stainless Steel Wire (2002)
Wandering around, I was struck by the absence of graffiti – there were a few commissioned, professional murals and the usual plastering of electric cable boxes, meters or some such.
Katie Yamasaki Moon Beholders (2014)
The mural is intended to represent, celebrate, challenge, and preserve different concepts within the Japanese American culture, both contemporary and historic, while connecting with the diverse community around JANM. The mural depicts a young girl, clothed in several furoshiki, a traditional Japanese cloth often used to carry, cover, and protect objects, most often gifts.
The mural also depicts lanterns or akari, representing light or illumination and displays a haiku poem by Basho, a famous Japanese poet from the Edo period. (Ref.)
I will have to figure out where to find it, but that is for another outing. Should I survive the maze of freeways yet again.
The Home is Little Tokyo (2005) mural depicts present-day life in Little Tokyo with vibrant images reflecting Little Tokyo’s revitalization and the community’s strong personal ties to the district. The brightly-colored mural spans 40-feet along the wall fronting Central and is 16-feet tall. Artists Tony Osumi, Sergio Diaz and Jorge Diaz involved community members in the mural design process through open meetings to discuss and collect ideas. The process of creating the mural took three years. (Ref.)
Music today needs a bit of attention. It is a beautiful act of story telling with music.
The Nikkei Music Reclamation Project, in their own words, aims to (re)imagine Nikkei (Japanese American) musical identities and to examine pre- and post-WWII Japanese American political history and music. The goal of the Nikkei Music Reclamation Project is to bring together multiple generations of musicians in extending this legacy and envisioning new directions for Nikkei musical culture in Little Tokyo.
So much for good intentions. I really mean to keep my prejudices in check, but when I learned many months ago that two of the major art institutions in this country, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) of which the de Young is a part, simply swapped their White, male, European-anchored directors, I rolled my eyes. It is even weirder, given that Thomas Campbell left New York for San Francisco with his reputation under attack, his new Board of Directors undergoing major upheaval with fundraising threatened, for an institution that had worn down four directors in less than a decade, the last one lasting only 22 months, and that had no exhibitions planned beyond 6 months – a process usually stretched over years to be successful.
As so often, I should have been more open minded. Looks like Campbell is rising to these challenges and then some. Despite Covid-19 closing the museum for months on end (they just re-opened,) starving the limited endowment institution of ticket sales on which it heavily relies, he managed so far to prevent major staff lay-offs.
Having to delay major traveling exhibitions for now – a full-dress Judy Chicago retrospective that was supposed to open in May has been postponed for a year – he turned his efforts to support of the local artist community.
“In celebration of the de Young museum’s 125th anniversary, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are hosting The de Young Open, a juried community art exhibition of submissions by artists who live in the nine Bay Area counties: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma.
Works of art in The de Young Open are hung “salon-style,” installed edge to edge and floor to ceiling, which enables a maximum number of works to be displayed. The de Young filled the 12,000-square-foot Herbst Exhibition Galleries with 877 artworks by 762 Bay Area artists in The de Young Open.”
The work can also be sold directly without the usual commission for the museum, a major boost for the hard-hit community of artists.
Community outreach occurred not on that front alone. In June, protesters against racism had pulled down multiple statues in the park’s Music Concourse, which is flanked by the museum on one side, and the Academy of Sciences on the other. Francis Scott Key, national anthem lyric author and slave owner, came down, as did Saint Junípero Serra, founder of California missions and enslaver of Native Americans, and Ulysses S. Grant.
The statue of Key sat right under the flag bearing figure; the ferris wheel has been empty and motionless since its installment this spring.
The day after the protest, Campbell posted and later wrote to the SF major that the newly empty spaces should be filled with art derived from an annual competition and commission a work by a Bay Area artist that might respond to the challenge of, Who should we memorialize?” A conversation about what to do with sculptures of people who have blood on their hands, had already happened within the museum before the June protests took place. The civic spirit displayed by these efforts is a hopeful sign.
Robert Emmet survived the purge. An Irish nationalist and rebel leader, he is famous for his speech from the dock during his trial. I have no clue why he is memorialized in San Francisco.
I am writing about this at length not because I am particularly familiar with the museum, I am not, but because I find examples of constructive leadership important to flag. When I wandered around the Music Concourse, benches and fountains recently restored from the vandalism, I was thinking about how people who understand where the rage is coming from without condoning vandalism, and who are in positions to make choices, can really be agents of change. It is the next steps that count, after the upheaval. San Francisco seems to have gained an effective and welcome voice in the art scene and the civic realm in this regard.
Someone who doesn’t just sit it out.
The other part of FAMSF is the Legion of Honor Fine Art Museum, which is still closed. I walked by the palace yesterday afternoon, with the fog rolling into this unimaginably beautiful setting next to the Pacific,
and communed with the bored lions, Jeanne d’Arc and El Cid by Anna Hyatt Huntington. Don’t ask me how they are related to San Francisco either.
The neo-classicist building itself is impressive, a gift of Alma de Bretteville Spreckels to the city of San Francisco, after she persuaded her sugar magnate husband to build a replica for the French pavilion she had fallen in love with at the 1915 world exposition. Here is the history of the museum’s creation. I left the thinker to himself, maybe he’ll come up with further good plans for the museum world….
Music in honor of the maid of Orleans who is forever exposed to the damp fog of the region.
So much for good intentions. The plan for the de Young museum building to turn – literally – bright green in color within 15 years of its construction to mirror its park surroundings did not pan out. What happened?
After the famous San Francisco art museum was damaged beyond repair in the 1989 earthquake, two star architects, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron (think Tate Modern, Great Britain) were eventually called to create something truly new. Which they did. A stunningly different – and gorgeous – construction with a physical presence that both integrates into and dominates its lush physical surrounding, with an elongated rectangle (linked smaller pavilions inside) echoing the shape of Golden Gate Park, and a high tower reminiscent of the tall trees that are the park’s hallmark.
The building’s full 293.00-square-feet facade is covered in copper panels which were supposed to develop a green patina over the years. Given the increasingly dry climate, that process is now expected to take about half a century. Instead you see a rusty brown color – the color of coconuts I thought, a thought probably suggested by the majestic Canary Island palms that flank the building. A thought that would be a mistake.
These palms are from the date palm family, a very different species than the ones carrying coconuts. They are as stately as the tower behind them. They also let the light percolate through their foliage just like the light on the museum seems to be dappled, due to the patterning of the copper skin, at times perforated, or dotted, or structured in other ways. That pattern also picks up the rough structure of the palm tree trunks. I could not think of a cleverer way to reflect the beauty and specifics of an environment in modern architecture.
To the right of the building (I came too early for the official sculpture garden on the left to be open and did not enter any building due to Covid-19 risks) is The Garden of Enchantment, displaying a strange assortment of sculptures.
Moody sphinx (Arthur Putman (ca. 1910)
join an overwrought Gustave Doré contraption, Poème de la vigne (Poem of the Vine) (1877–1878, cast in 1882). Why do his sculptures so often remind me of misshapen, marzipan-encrusted wedding cakes?
Diverse wildlife crouches in the vegetation,
lorded over by a shiny silver pirate by Peter Coffin, “Untitled (Pirate)”, 2007, (cast in 2009,) who comes in pairs – pairs of hooks, peg-legs, parrots and eye-patches,
blind to the saccharine figures in front of him, probably for the better.
“I believe the spirit of San Francisco still embodies the ideas of ‘the West,’ where dreams come from, where the frontier expands to the ocean, etc. That sense … is closely tied to its unwillingness to be restricted, its history of resistance and its fight for freedom against authoritarianism.”The pirate should stand “strong as a timeless hero or anti-hero here to defy authority and the status quo, he lives apart from the conventions of bourgeois society and breaks the rules to make new ones.”
Funny, that in Gardens of Enchantments those very conventions always prevail, with empty promises of happy endings….
Has me scratching my head as well….
Arthur Putnam, Cave Man (1910)
More on the museum and its surrounds tomorrow.
For music today I chose a group that has performed at the de Young in the past with a piece that matches the energy of the building.
