Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Mounting Frustration by Susan E. Cahan
Mounting Frustration by Susan E. Cahan
FRUSTRATION
THE ART
MUSEUM IN
THE AGE OF
BLACK POWER
SUSAN E. CAHAN
MOUNTING
FRUSTRATION
SUSAN E. CAHAN
2016
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
Epilogue 253
Notes 269
Bibliography 319
Index 335
viii I llustrations
I llustrations ix
x I llustrations
I llustrations xi
The research for this book began in 1978 when I was hired as a high school in-
tern at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was placed in the museum’s Community
Programs Department, created in 1970 to engage a wider public in the aftermath
of the catastrophic exhibition Harlem on My Mind. The exhibition had been held
in 1969 but, nine years later, was still fresh in the minds of the museum’s staff
members, and saying the words “Harlem on my mind” was like uttering an obscen-
ity. I didn’t know anything about the show or understand why it provoked such
consternation, but even as a high school student, I could see that the Commu-
nity Programs Department had an uneasy relationship to both the communities of
New York City that it was meant to serve and the rest of the museum. Our offices
were located in the museum’s basement off a long, stark corridor. The exhibitions
we mounted—of artworks created at social service organizations, such as senior
citizens’ centers—were mainly seen by the groups of schoolchildren who entered
through the museum’s side door. Two months after I began my internship Philippe
de Montebello was appointed as the museum’s director, succeeding Thomas P. F.
Hoving, who had served since 1967. The Community Programs Department was
disbanded. This ending reflected a broader shift in American social values and
xiv A cknowledgments
A cknowledgments xv
xvi A cknowledgments
Up until the sixties, the gallery system would have X number of artists,
established artists—like, ten. Those artists very often decided who the one
or two young artists would be to come in, like protégés, and then they would
be nourished and they would become the next group. And for the average
person—average artist—there was no way to enter unless they got, literally,
what the slaves got: a note from the master to come in. You’d go to a gallery
and if you didn’t know some famous artist, they’d wonder: Why are you
there? . . . The art criticism was just as impossible to deal with. You just
sat there like you sat waiting for the morning paper to come. . . . And those
criticisms were either devastating or they made you; the gallery dealers and
curators just looked to what the critics were saying.
The institutions that make up the art establishment determine what constitutes
high art through a process of selective acquisition and display. Until the late twen-
tieth century, African Americans were virtually absent from this circuit as cultural
producers and cultural consumers. Prior to 1967 one could count fewer than a dozen
museum exhibitions that had featured the work of African American artists, with
the exception of museums at historically black colleges and universities. On rare
occasions when the work of African American artists was shown, it was typically
in segregated contexts, as in Contemporary Negro Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art
in 1939 and The Negro Artist Comes of Age at the Brooklyn Museum in 1945. In the late
1960s and early ’70s, several large-scale exhibitions focusing on African American
culture were mounted by major museums in the United States, including the Met-
ropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum
of American Art. The invisible yet very real boundary separating “African Ameri-
can art” from the universal notion of “art” had been pierced. Yet these shows did
not bring about a seamless transition to integration. Each was a wildly contested
event, a spark that ignited debate, dissention, and often protest, revealing diver-
gent visions of progress.
This book excavates the moment when museums w ere forced to face artists’
demands for justice and equality. What strategies did African American artists use
2 Introduction
Introduction 3
4 Introduction
Introduction 5
6 Introduction
Introduction 7
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Introduction 9
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Introduction 11
12 Introduction