Travel-ban and the art, again.
If the MoMA decided to add, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College decided to remove.
Few days ago we talked about how the MoMA decided to change its permanent collection exhibition in order to give more space to immigrant art. Well, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, went for another strategy, they decided that, as the loved Joyce wrote “absence is the highest form of presence”. They indeed decided to mark the Presidents’ Day holiday by loudly responding to President Trump’s executive order — temporarily put on hold — . The project is called Art-Less, the museum is showing how important the contributions of immigrants are by removing or covering works on view from the permanent collection that were made by immigrant artists, or donated to the institution by collectors who were immigrants.
“As soon as the executive order was signed, we started to think about what we could do,” said Lisa Fischman, the museum’s director. The mind behind this idea is the one of the senior curator of collections, Claire Whitner. Objects that were easy to remove, such as paintings, have been de-installed, whilst other pieces, such as statues or objects in display cases, have been covered with black fabric — “articulating in strong graphic terms”, Fischman says, what has been gained from the contribution of immigrants.
Art-Less will be “open” from the 16th to the 21st of February . “We decided to stage this over the Presidents’ Day holiday because that resonates symbolically,” Fischman said. In fact, one of the paintings that has been removed is the portrait of George Washington by Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller, who emigrated to the states from Sweden in the late eighteenth century; the painting was not only made by an immigrant but was also donated from a family of Swedish immigrants, the Munns. The museum stated that about 120 artworks are going to be part of this “exhibition”, for a total of one fifth of the permanent collection that will be affected.
“We’ll see pockets of absence all over the museum,” Fischman said. “The African art section is almost entirely lost to view.” This is because almost the totality of the artworks on show (80%) were a donation from the Klejman family, who moved to America from Poland after the Second World War. Fischman said that the Klejman family is a “rather extraordinary example” of an immigrant family. In fact, Bennet’s son is a Democratic Senator, and her son James oversees the editorial page for the NYT.
The Davis Museum took a very interesting approach (diametrically opposite from the MoMA one) and started engaging with other institutions to encourage them to follow their path, to continue with the Art-Less project that they started.
The fact that so many institution in the art world are standing up against arguably constitutional executive orders, and that as a whole, the art scene is feeling again the need to be social has to be welcomed, and will be welcomed by the most. We, at Feral Horses believe that art should be social. We strongly believe in that, and that is the reason why we try to cover topics like this one, and that is the reason why we signed the anti travel-ban petition. Just a drop in the ocean, hoping that we will be able to do more in the future.
