Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power by Susan E. Cahan (review)

Susan E. Cahan's Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power is a meticulous case study into an embattled New York art establishment, which black artists critiqued as perpetuating racist, exclusionist collecting and exhibition practices during the 1960s and 1970s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem ground Cahan's investigation into activist challenges to, and staff rebuttals for, the role of museums in society. Despite gains made by protests, Cahan argues that museums nevertheless maintained authority via incremental "concessions" and "appeasements," forestalling any major change besides museum restructuring.

Courtesy Duke University Press

The book includes six chapters. An introduction and epilogue enclose four central sections, each addressing one aforementioned museum and its situated history. Cahan's case-study format introduces each institution's history in order to contextualize the bureaucratic and ideological agendas that guided how they interfaced with artists and activists. Indeed, Cahan's text functions more as an inquiry into the museums' top-down responses to protest than as a cultural history. Hence, the final words of the subtitle, "in the Age of Black Power," indicate a generalized mood of black self-determination and action rather than signal engagement with the varied influences from which Black Power crystallized. Positioning Black Power as the study's atmospheric backdrop, Cahan articulates just how existing sentiments skeptical of integration and open to separatism fed into the events in her book.

As her introduction makes clear, the stakes involved in past power struggles between museums and individuals produced negative and positive outcomes for today's art communities.¹ Art institutions exert particular sway over the legitimization of art, whereas its players—the artists, curators, staff, and writers—must navigate implicit protocols of a system designed to refresh its authority. Once an individual succeeds, they receive a "lifelong membership," which Cahan notes was not guaranteed for people of color, and black artists in particular, who in the 1960s and 1970s began challenging the neutrality of a network designed by individual and personal tastes.

Cahan explains that appeals for equity were challenged by "quality debates," which problematically positioned artistic talent, not systemic discrimination, as the reason for an artist's success. Demands for equal representation manifested more race-based exhibitions—an outgrowth of segregationist policy—which Cahan views as a problematic format. Race-based exhibitions sustained divisions between black artists and their peers, bolstering the status quo by not requiring museums to integrate. Highlighting the slow pace in change, Cahan's text lays bare the tensions between artists, museum staff, and among each other when the 1960s seemed full of new possibilities.

The first chapter begins with the founding of the Studio Museum in Harlem (SMH) in 1968. Cahan details its initial inception by an interracial group in 1965, its rocky beginnings, and its subsequent embrace of black and local leadership. These staggered events serve as a springboard for Cahan to handle several significant points that inform later chapters. First, culturally specific and community-based museums such as the SMH in New York City developed out of federal antipoverty programs, meaning governmental dollars reentered as a major supporter to art ventures.² Moreover, it was clear that integration remained a complicated project because corporate profit, reputations, and diverse opinions splintered unity.

For example, according to Cahan, the uproar surrounding SMH's first opening, featuring abstract light installations by Tom Lloyd, symbolically represented the widening rift between the interracial Committee to Form the Harlem Museum and figures such as Edward Spriggs.³ Rumors about the destruction of one of Lloyd's light boxes inflected an ensuing aesthetic debate about which style—figuration or abstraction—contained more value for black liberation. Cahan views Spriggs's ascent as SMH's director as representative of the separatist gesture that would shed influence from downtown arts players and...