Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum

Chapter 4. New York to L.A.: Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, 1994 -1995

0 in 1976, driskell and lacMa got it right with Two Centuries by showing that communities of people who do not regularly constitute the art museum audience could be made to feel welcome if their artisticcontributionswererecognizedandpeopleoftheirracialgroupwere involved in the production of the exhibition. This collaborative approach benefited the art museum by increasing its audience and financial revenue. This was an important revelation in the relationship between art museums and Black artists, especially after the public relations fiasco of Harlem on My Mind. What followed Two Centuries was an increase in the visibility of Black American art in the 1980s through three major exhibitions: Hidden Heritage: Afro-American Art, 1800–1950 (Bellevue Arts Museum, 1985); Sharing Traditions: Five Black Artists in Nineteenth-Century America (National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1985); and Black Art—Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African-American Art (Dallas Museum of Art, 1989). Each show included artists featured in Two Centuries and elaborated on its themes. At the same time that these exhibitions celebrated Black American art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, contemporary Black American artists were impacted in a struggle for representation in the art world. It became clear during the 1980s that exhibitions of Black American art were engaged in an effort toward mainstream recognition on two sepaneW york to l.a. Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, 99–99 ChApTER 4 neW york to l.a. rate but related fronts. First, the corrective exhibition of Black American art continued to provide an in-depth historical examination chronologically and thematically. Second, contemporary artists and curators were concerned with breaking the historic cycle of omission by exhibiting the work of Black artists in their moment of production. The culture wars of the 1980s brought frustration with the traditionally conservative exclusionary practices of art museums to a head. In response, three New York museums—the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art (now defunct), the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art—mounted The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the1980s(1990),theexhibitionthatdefinedtheartworldandartexhibitions of the 1980s. By centering on the work of artists marginalized by the art world because of their cultural identities, curators, artists, and art activists challenged the canon of American art through exhibition. The Decade Show served as a corrective intervention by claiming the art world for these cultural “others” and provided an institutional critique of the 1980s art world through the unique strategy of solidarity in difference that was successfully broached by these three institutions. The tripartite show was part of a surge of challenging artists, activism, and exhibitions that contested the institutional racism and conservatism of American art museums. Whether or not racial identity was a subject of their works, the presence of the proud racial difference of the artists was in conflict with the assumed standard of the elevated White “norm” in American race relations and in the art museum. Guided by the right-wing administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan (1981–1989) and George H. W. Bush (1989–1993), the National Endowment for the Arts functioned conservatively as a watchdog group to decide what should and should not be validated as American art. Art that asserted criticisms of America’s colonial history, the increasing economic gap between “the haves and the have-nots,” conservative religious and family values, and the unapologetic persistence of police brutality against Black and Latino men was simply not welcomed or tolerated by the NEA. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the culture wars were happening in the streets, universities , congressional meetings, and museums. This chapter investigates the controversial art exhibition Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1994 during this volatile period. Exhibition viewers and critics were uncertain whether images that depicted  chaPter 4  the Black male nude such as photographs from Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Males (1980) and Black Book (1986), representations of Black men as criminals in Gary Simmons’s The Lineup (1993), or Black male violence in Robert Arneson’s Special Assistant to the President (1989) served to criticize popular conceptions of Black masculinity and contribute to an interrogation of them, or to reinforce those popular conceptions. The ambiguity of the meanings of the artworks was complicated by two factors. First, Black Male was a new kind of all-Black show in which the artists were unified not by their racial...