As I mentioned last week, I asked the visiting African-American art historian Kellie Jones if the Saint Louis Art Museum is up to code or still “getting up to code,” in terms of access and inclusion, after she raised the issue in a speech.
She said, “We’re getting there.”
A mixed crowd of mostly black artists and collectors, gathered at the museum to hear the New York City-based scholar speak, murmured in agreement.
Last week, I also promised to discuss her answer and the response to it by Andrew Walker, assistant director for curatorial affairs and curator of American art at SLAM.
Kellie Jones was in town – and these edgy issues were being discussed in public at the Saint Louis Art Museum – because the museum currently has on view two exhibitions devoted to art by contemporary black artists: African American Abstraction: St. Louis Connections (in Gallery 337 through March 23) and Norman Lewis, Twilight Sounds (in Gallery 323, also through March 23).
Indeed, we will return to these issues many times while these exhibitions remain on view at the shining, white-marbled institution on the hill. But, this week, the previously scheduled discussion about access (figuratively speaking) must be preempted by a story about access – in a very literal sense.
Last Friday (note the date: February 1), three of us set forth from the St. Louis American to look at these two shows. I wanted to see the art itself before writing up my notes on access and inclusion at the museum. Another editor/reporter (Kenya Vaughn) and a college intern (Amber James) were curious to see the shows, as well.
We agreed to meet in the lobby, and I had quite a long wait there. A snowstorm had blanketed Art Hill, so there was a scrum for parking as people thronged to the slope to sled down it.
I didn’t mind the wait. Last year, I ran an edited version of the museum’s press release about its acquisition of Fading Cloth by El Anatsui, along with a color slide of his assemblage, yet I had never seen the actual piece. El Anatsui is West African – born in Ghana, works in Nigeria – who (I remembered reading) uses castoff materials to create the effects of printed textiles.
This very much describes the technique of Fading Cloth, which I was pleased to find occupying a prominent space – an alcove in the museum’s main lobby. From a distance, it looks like a giant hunk of kente cloth, the traditional Ghanaian ceremonial textile (often heavy with red, gold and black) that you see reproduced here as Afrocentric fashion. Get closer, though, and you see the piece was made by stitching together metal caps from liquor bottles, such as Dark Sailor Rum.
The little note about the piece glued to the wall briefly mentions the role of liquor in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It’s weird to see the slave trade used as a passing reference in a museum blurb, but I suppose the point deserved to be made; and, when El Anatsui talks about his work, slavery is no more than that, a passing reference. The artist and curator make the point, and move on. It’s up to us to make more of it, or keep moving.
I had time to make more of it. It was February 1, the first day of Black History Month, which we take seriously in the black press. It seemed to be a good thing that one of the largest, most central objects in the lobby of the Saint Louis Art Museum is a beautiful work of art by a living black African that embodies important historical facts.
Maybe, I thought, this place is “getting up to code.”
Then Amber and Kenya showed up, and we checked at the information desk for the location of the exhibitions we wanted to see, which I was pretty sure had been installed upstairs on the third floor, with the other works of contemporary art.
“Sorry,” we were told. “It’s closed.”
Huh?
“With the weather,” the young woman said, “we’re short-staffed and we’ve had to close some of the galleries.”
Talk about access!
It was the first day of Black History Month, and three people from the black newspaper had come to see the two black art shows, and they were closed.
Now, I am sure the museum honchos have a logical plan for what to close when the museum is left short-staffed by an emergency. The highest, least-accessible third floor seems a logical place to start. The entire third floor – which includes Modern and Contemporary Art, which in turn includes the black art exhibitions – was closed, not just the black art exhibitions.
But, still, it was possible to wonder why “first day of Black History Month” wasn’t blinking, bright, on the radar screens of the museum’s decision makers. Blinking, bright, right next to it might have been “two shows of work by black artists on display.”
But, no.
The two black art shows at the Saint Louis Art Museum – the sort of thing we are lucky if see one time a year, right around Black History Month – were closed on the first day of Black History Month.
Oh, well.
We looked around anyway, and found a lot of work we enjoyed and admired. Black artists (and curators) deserve equal access to art museums, but white artists (and curators) certainly can hold their own. Kenya, for example, found herself admiring the detail in a series of 17th Century Dutch oil paintings.
Still, when your visit begins like ours had, it was hard not to notice that almost every single face – we are talking about hundreds of faces – on display on the main floor of the Saint Louis Art Museums are faces of white folks. Painted by white folks.
The “tribal” art, including the African art, is, of course, in the basement. At least it was open to view – but, then again, the bathrooms are down there. Why is it that African art is never spread out all over the main floor of the museum, with the giant oil paintings of European nobility stuffed in the basement, by the bathrooms?
As we were leaving, Kenya stopped a black family at the elevator. “Are you going to the third floor?” she asked them. They were.
“To see the black art exhibitions?” she asked them. Yes, for that.
“It’s closed,” Kenya told them.
Imagine the impression the museum left on those folks!
By the way, this much came out of my conversation with Andrew Walker, assistant director for curatorial affairs: The museum currently has on staff no (that would be zero) African-American curators.
Could that void have had a role in no one at the museum thinking about the tact of closing the two black artist exhibitions during a snow-day on the first day of Black History Month? When 70,000 copies of a preview article in the American mentioning these shows had been distributed to the black community the day before?
More, next week, on access and inclusion at the Saint Louis Art Museum – including the museum’s three currently vacant curatorial positions.
African American Abstraction: St. Louis Connections and Norman Lewis, Twilight Sounds will be on view (one hopes) at SLAM on the top level, with the Contemporary Art, through March 23.
