Date of Award

2021

Document Type

Thesis - Restricted Access (SIA Only)

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Fine and Decorative Art and Design

First Advisor

Eric Wolf

Abstract

In the late months of 2020, the Brooklyn Museum re-installed part of its Art of the Americas and American Art collections in an effort to redress unmet expectations about non-white representation in museums globally. This curatorial endeavor, one of a constellation of anti-racist actions carried out by the Brooklyn Museum in the wake of George Floyd’s death, utilized the following decolonizing practices: it made efforts to surface the history of its institutional bias in order to acknowledge and locate current harm as a departure point for more responsible future curation; it made efforts to debunk the myth of neutrality and comprehensivity in its collection; and, it made efforts to collaborate with other entities to fill gaps in its scholarship and execution. In the following chapters, this paper will appraise the Brooklyn Museum’s reinstallation of three fifth-floor galleries in an attempt to tell a more diverse and inclusive narrative of American Art, as one possible model for dismantling the infrastructure of white supremacy in permanent collections, particularly of Colonial origin. Though there are few empirical ways to evaluate the re-installation’s efficacy, this paper will praise or problematize the galleries’ new organization, new works on display, and new wall labels, and consider additional approaches for how this institution and others might meet the moment. In taking a deeper look into one leader in the field’s response to 2020’s Summer of Racial Reckoning and call to anti-racist action, we can propose a baseline for identifying shortcomings, replicate impactful changes, and begin to imagine future possibilities for anti-colonial and actively anti-racist telling of American art history. The Brooklyn Museum’s willingness to engage with controversial, politically charged topics and experiment with curatorial strategies is, in a sense, brave given the museum field’s slow adoption of change and general resistance to taking non-neutral stances. In my findings I show that the anti-neutrality of the Brooklyn Museum’s reinstallation of the Art of the Americas and American Art collection hinged largely on interpretive wall texts and object descriptions to spell out the works’ connections to the Colonial American project, reading in between the lines to find hidden narratives. Because the Brooklyn Museum sorely lacks in original material evidence of the ingenuity and creativity of non-white groups in the early eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries, a broadening of interpretive strategies was necessary to position Black, Indigenous, and other people of color in the narrative of the early years of American history and art. It is important to note that while anti-neutral labeling that explicitly calls out injustices related to the creation or use of an object or the biography of its subject or creator, is an important facet in the re-installation of an early American collection, doing so rarely illustrates the full dignity of individuals who have been erased. In short, while the Brooklyn Museum makes admirable strides in the direction of progress, more work is needed to fully answer the calls for anti-racist reform in collections and installations of early American Art.

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