"Smithsonian and U.S. Army join forces to save works of art and culture threatened by war"

by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport 

[The report on the present-day work of the U.S. Army’s Monuments Officers, posted below, was broadcast on the PBS NewsHour on 7 September 2022.  An extension of the World War II operation to secure art stolen by the Third Reich in occupied countries and from Jews and other disenfranchised and imprisoned people in Germany and Austria that became known as the Monuments Men, the task of the modern version has become the protection of art and ancient artifacts from damage by acts of war.

[The efforts of the World War II predecessors were chronicled first in the non-fiction book by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History (Center Street, 2009), and then in the subsequent 2014 film The Monuments Men, directed and co-written by George Clooney (who also starred), produced by Columbia Pictures in association with 20th Century Fox, and Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam, Germany.]

A new collaboration between the U.S. Army and the Smithsonian Institution is expanding the numbers and capabilities of monuments officers in times of war. Their mission is to advise military commanders on how to minimize damage to art and key sites and to aid foreign allies whose cultural heritage is at risk. Jeffrey Brown reports for our arts and culture series, “CANVAS.”

Judy Woodruff: They’re known as monuments officers, and a new collaboration between the U.S. Army and the Smithsonian Institution is expanding their numbers and capabilities in time of war.

Their mission, advise military commanders on how to minimize damage to art and other key sites during conflict and aid foreign allies whose cultural heritage is at risk.

Jeffrey Brown reports for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Monuments Officer: I have got the base of the mask right here to secure it.

Jeffrey Brown: The National Museum of Pinelandia faces imminent attack, and its precious artifacts must be documented, photographed, packed, and moved to a new location within two hours, amid quickly changing circumstances.

On the scene to help, the U.S. Army’s Corps of Monuments Officers, Colonel Scott DeJesse.

Col. Scott DeJesse, Cultural Heritage Preservation Officer, U.S. Army: You have to be able to speak both languages. You have to be able to speak the language of protecting cultural property, and you must also have your military language and understand the processes.

Jeffrey Brown: People have one or the other often, right?

Col. Scott DeJesse: Have one or the other. And we’re bringing those world’s together in a way that has not been done before.

Jeffrey Brown: Pinelandia, of course, is a fictional country. And this was a simulated training exercise in a large hall at the National Museum of the U.S. Army in Fort Belvoir, [Fairfax County,] Virginia.

The precious art gathered from garage sales, flea markets, even dumpster diving, nothing worth more than a few dollars. But the military officers were the real thing, 21 specialists in art history, archaeology, curation, and other cultural heritage areas, six of them international officers here to train and network, the rest the first cohort of a joint initiative of the U.S. Army and the Smithsonian Institution.

Some were reserve officers moving to this new unit, including Captain Sonia Dixon, who’s also a doctoral candidate in art history.

Capt. Sonia Dixon, Cultural Heritage Preservation Officer, U.S. Army Reserve: I’m passionate about learning about so many different people and their cultures. And I am passionate about the military.

And to get the opportunity to do both of them at the same time and to show people, even if you come from an academic background, you can still have practical ways to help people in the real world.

Jeffrey Brown: There were also six civilian cultural experts new to the military, having completed physical and other requirements, among that group, Hayden Bassett, an archaeologist and curator at the Virginia Museum of Natural History [Martinsville], where he’s been using satellite imagery to document destruction in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Now he’s also Captain Bassett in the U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command.

Hayden Bassett, Cultural Heritage Preservation Officer, U.S. Army Reserve: This is our opportunity to engage with cultural heritage on another level.

I have always had a respect for the military. I never thought I would have the opportunity to take my particular skill set and apply it in a military context and serve in that capacity.

Jeffrey Brown: This was not the career path you were on.

Capt. Hayden Bassett: Certainly not.

Matt Damon, Actor (in film clip): Monuments Men.

Jeffrey Brown: It’s a new take on an idea that goes back to World War II popularized in books and film.

Matt Damon (film clip): So, you want to go into a war zone with some architects and artists and tell our boys what they can and cannot blow up?

George Clooney, Actor (film clip): That’s right.

Jeffrey Brown: And a group then called the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Task Force, often referred to as Monuments Men, scholar-soldiers rescuing artworks and other cultural treasures seized by the Nazis throughout Europe.

In more recent wars, however, the story has at times been less heroic, most notably in 2003 with the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, when the military was criticized for failing to heed warnings about the value of the collection and the need to protect it.

Cori Wegener, Director, Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative: That was a moment in time that really galvanized public opinion even more about the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and it really impacted our mission as well.

Jeffrey Brown: Cori Wegener, a museum curator, was then an Army reserve officer, deployed to the Baghdad museum to assess the damage and salvage what was possible.

Cori Wegener: Walking into those galleries and seeing smashed objects on the floor, even though I was an art museum curator, I didn’t really know how to go about evaluating or salvaging objects. And I felt a little bit lost. I wanted to make sure nobody was placed in that position again.

Jeffrey Brown: Today, Wegener heads the Smithsonian’s Cultural Rescue Initiative. And it was she and Colonel DeJesse who designed the intensive 10-day training program that included courses in forensic documentation and practical problems like drying out damaged artifacts, and briefings from international partners, such as a Ukrainian museum director working to secure objects there.

There was a symbolic moment at Arlington National Cemetery, with a wreath laying at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, including the nephew of a monuments officer killed in action in World War II, and the simulated museum evacuation, which included a jolting moment after one of the role players, acting as a security guard, accidentally, on purpose, put his foot through a painting.

That was just one moment of chaos amid constantly changing circumstances.

Capt. Sonia Dixon: It is not just we are looking at the art objects. Cultural heritage is so diverse, so dynamic, and, depending on the culture, it changes. It can be an object, and it can also be an intangible thing.

Jeffrey Brown: For his part, newly commissioned Captain Bassett was suddenly officer of the day, in charge of this operation, and found himself facing a commanding officer who arrived on the scene to ask some tough questions.

Commanding Officer: Cultural artifacts, they are important, but they are number two to human life. That’s the priority for our combat forces, OK? So if you need me to divert combat forces to protect the site, then I need to know that. Is it a company? Is it a platoon? What is it?

Jeffrey Brown: We’re you surprised by his questions?

Capt. Hayden Bassett: Oh, absolutely.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes?

Capt. Hayden Bassett: Part of my job during that was to be able to effectively communicate why cultural heritage is important, why, in this case, the Army or the coalition forces were expending resources to invest in cultural heritage protection.

Jeffrey Brown: And that, of course, remains a question. Why and how much should the U.S. care about preserving culture in situations when lives are at stake?

Colonel Scott DeJesse, who, by the way, is also a painter in civilian life, is a veteran of cultural protection in a military context. And he puts the issue in military terms.

You’re not suggesting that sending art historians out into the battlefield will win victories? Or you are?

Col. Scott DeJesse: I would say it’s a strategic imperative.

The part that we're moving into is the — not only a justification for doing it, but a validation for doing it, to validate the success for the mission. If the commander says, our lines of effort are to build partnerships, strengthen our partnerships with the host nation, well, we’re the experts that know, hey, this is how you build a partnership, by working, by protecting each other’s — what our societies mean.

Jeffrey Brown: Cori Wegener frames it from the civilian side, as a responsibility for museum and other professionals.

Cori Wegener: How can you ask the military to perform their duties for a treaty about protecting cultural heritage, if we don’t tell them what cultural heritage is? We’re teaching them how to do it, not just why they have to do it.

Announcer’s Voice (at “pinning ceremony”): Captain Hayden Bassett.

Jeffrey Brown: The training program’s end was marked by a pinning ceremony for these official newly minted monuments officers, now ready to deploy as needed around the world.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown at Fort Belvoir in Virginia.

Judy Woodruff: Redefining the U.S. military.

[In his more than 30-year career with the NewsHour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe.

[As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors, and other artists. Among his signature works at the NewsHour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Coordinating Producer of CANVAS at PBS NewsHour.]

The NASA Art Program

[On 1 December, I posted a couple of articles on Orbital Reflector, a huge sculpture created by artist Trevor Paglen that is currently orbiting the Earth (see “Sculpture In Space”).  That’s the first piece of art created for display in space (it will disintegrate in our atmosphere before it reaches Earth after circling the globe for about three months, so it will never be seen here below), but the National Air and Space Administration, better known as NASA, founded in 1958, has had a program soliciting artists to create art about space and space exploration since 1962.  Here are two articles about that program, which you will see has enlisted some very well-known artists to its endeavors.  I just recently learned of this match-up of art and technology, and the pairing fascinated me.  ~Rick]

“NASA AND THE ARTS”

by Bert Ulrich

On first consideration, the concept of NASA commissioning pieces of art may seem far-fetched. However, reflecting the tradition of the military’s art programs, NASA began commissioning artists to document and capture on canvas the drama of its missions. The catalyst behind NASA leaving an artistic legacy was NASA Administrator James Webb. Upon seeing a deftly executed portrait of Alan Shepard, Webb came up with the idea of an arts program. Webb felt that NASA should actively seek out artists to show a different side of the space agency, reflecting that “Important events can be interpreted by artists to give a unique insight into significant aspects of our history-making advances into space. An artistic record of this nation’s program of space exploration will have great value for future generations and may make a significant contribution to the history of American art.”

A NASA art commission was modest, a mere $800, but artists were not motivated by the financial gains but rather at the prospect of witnessing American history and documenting it. They were also given free reign to create works of art. NASA was not going to dictate a certain style as was the case of socialist realism of the Soviet Union. In fact, artists interested in participating in the program were quite a diverse group, ranging from the avant garde Robert Rauschenberg to the figurative Norman Rockwell. Rauschenberg created works for various launches, including Apollo 11 and the first space shuttle launch. Rockwell visited NASA centers and was even loaned a real space suit to create works, which would be displayed in Look magazine.

The first group of NASA artists traveled to the Kennedy Space Center, Fla., in 1963 to witness the last Mercury launch, transporting Gordon Cooper on orbit. Artists commissioned included Peter Hurd, George Weymouth, Paul Calle, Robert McCall, Robert Shore, Lamar Dodd and John McCoy. Mitchell Jamieson was assigned to a recovery ship to artistically document splashdown and landing operations. Although NASA staff needed to get used to artists being around, after a while they welcomed them into the NASA community, which afforded the artists amazing access, including suit-up activities. Artist Peter Hurd reflected on the whole experience: “For the next five days, we painters, seven in all, roamed the Cape, sometimes with guides, sometimes by ourselves. We had been invited … to make notes, sketches and paintings … to form an archive of potential historical value. I am certain that I speak for all when I say we were, each of us, tremendously stirred and often awed, by the things we saw and heard during those five crowded days.”

The works created from Cooper’s mission were incorporated into an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in 1965. Art Critic Frank Getlein who reviewed the exhibition for the Washington Star wrote, “‘Eyewitness to Space’ is the collective name of 70 paintings and drawings produced by 15 artists under the NASA Art Program, now 2 years old. The work shows total freedom and a wide variety, ranging from the superb illustrationist’s style of Paul Calle to the highly individual abstraction of Washington artist Alfred McAdams.” The success of the first exhibition led to a second exhibition of NASA art at the National Gallery in 1969 following Apollo 11. However, as the Apollo program drew to a close in the 1970s, fewer commissions took place, which coincided with the lull of missions between Apollo and the shuttle. James Dean arranged for a transfer of NASA commissioned works to the National Air and Space Museum to protect the collection. It wasn’t until the inauguration of the space shuttle that the program took on a new momentum under the direction of Robert Schulman. Schulman’s commissions embraced a number of subjects, but mostly focused on the space shuttle.

In the 1990s the program was turned over to Bert Ulrich, who was tasked by Administrator Dan Goldin to embrace new art forms. Works included video art by Nam June Paik, an Ode to NASA by Ray Bradbury, and photography by Annie Leibovitz. Patti LaBelle performed a song commissioned by NASA that would eventually be nominated for a grammy. The song “Way Up There” became an elegy for the lost crew of space shuttle Columbia. Works have been commissioned on subjects ranging from Mars probes to the Hubble Space Telescope. Newly commissioned works started to attract the attention of museums like the Pompidou Center in Paris; the Hirshhorn Museum and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; and the Guggenheim, New York, N.Y.; which all exhibited NASA commissioned works. For NASA’s 50^th anniversary, the Smithsonian is collaborating with NASA and the National Air and Space Museum to create a traveling exhibit of NASA art, which will run until 2010.

Today, the art program has been scaled back, but commissions have continued for a modest honorarium of $2,500. The collection currently comprises of some 3,000 works divided between the National Air and Space Museum and NASA. They still share something new with the public, and tell NASA’s story in a unique way. They also provide a historical record. After all, what often is left over of great ages in history is art. As Lester Cooke, one of the NASA art program’s original founders, wrote, “I hope that future generations will realize that we have not only scientists and engineers capable of shaping the destiny of our age, but also artists worthy to keep them company.”

[This undated (ca. 2008) article was originally posted on the NASA website (https://www.nasa.gov/50th/50th_magazine/arts.html).  The site contains some samples of the NASA art.  Bert Ulrich has been the Multimedia Liaison for  Film and TV Collaborations at NASA since 2005.]

*  *  *  *

“ANDY WARHOL, ANNIE LEIBOVITZ, NORMAN ROCKWELL FEATURED IN NASA | ART”

by Arcynta Ali Childs

These famous artists and many others are among those with works in the Air and Space Museum’s newest art exhibit

When you think about the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), art may not be the first, or even the second, thing that comes to mind.  A new traveling exhibition, “NASA | ART: 50 Years of Space Exploration,” on display at the Air and Space Museum from May 28 to October 9, just may change that.

The NASA | ART project was established in 1962 by NASA administrator James E. Webb. Its mission was simple—commission artwork that captured the essence of what the agency and the space program were all about, in ways that photographs simply could not, says Tom Crouch, senior curator of aeronautics and art at the museum.

Mercury Astronaut Gordon Cooper’s 1963 Faith 7 spacecraft launch, depicted in Mitchell Jamieson’s First Steps, marked the first time that an artist was sent to a space event. The program, initially launched by James Dean, still continues today, under the leadership of Burt Ulrich, the program’s curator at NASA Headquarters.

Dean helped select more than 70 works of art, including drawings, photographs, sculpture and other artistic renderings “that would both represent the NASA | ART collection as it was and is and celebrate the 50 year history of the agency,” Crouch says.

The collection, arranged chronologically, takes viewers through an exploration of space—from Mercury to Apollo to Gemini, to the space shuttle, aeronautics and beyond—as told from the perspective of artists including Annie Leibovitz, Alexander Calder, Norman Rockwell and Andy Warhol, among others.

“Artists are given this sort of back door view of what NASA’s all about and what’s nice is that they can share that experience through their own imagination to the public,” Ulrich says. “It really took a lot of foresight, I think, for James Webb who started the program. I think he had this idea that through the great ages of history, art is often the residue of that and it’s such a wonderful way of looking back at history.” In addition to depicting the people, places and great events that viewers already know, the artists also introduce viewers to other astronauts and aspects of space exploration they may not.

Native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith uses various aspects of Native American symbolism in her painting Indian Science, which honors the first Native American astronaut John Bennett Herrington. Annie Leibovitz’s photograph entitled Eileen Collins captures the first female pilot (Discovery, 1995) and the first female commander of a space shuttle (Columbia, 1999) during training at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Artist and fashion designer Stephen Sprouse (1953-2004) used imagery from the Sojourner Rover to create a work of art that was essentially a dress and a pair of slippers. The piece called NASA Rover Mars Pink, carried an additional twist. With a pair of 3-D glasses, the dress took on a whole new dimension. The designer debuted it in a line of clothing he showed at NYC fashion week in 2000.

Towards the end of the exhibition, artists commemorate the astronauts from the Columbia and Challenger missions in “Remembering Lost Crews.” Artist Chakaia Booker uses pieces of a space shuttle tire donated to her by NASA to create a sculpture, Columbia Tribute, which resembles a black star, hanging on the wall above the gallery.

The final piece, though, is an unexpected musical composition written by Terry Riley with a multimedia component designed by Willie Williams, and called “Sun Rings.” Performed by the Kronos Quartet, the piece incorporates actual sounds of space—radio waves from the far reaches of the universe converted into sound waves.

“The whole exhibit is the arrogance of man’s imagination,” says Nichelle Nichols, the actress who played Lt. Uhura on “Star Trek” and who later worked for NASA in the 1970s and 80s recruiting women and minorities to the space program. “I realize what a powerful word that is, it’s not negative,” she continues. “This is what all the art is—to imagine what it is that takes us from ground zero to as far as the imagination can take you and then beyond; an incredible collection.”

[This article initially appeared in Smithsonian magazine on 31 May 2011.

[NASA | ART: 50 Years of Space Exploration was on display at the Smithsonian’ National Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C., from 28 May to 9 October 2011. The museum is open daily (except December 25)  from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.  See https://airandspace.si.edu for more details.

[Arcynta Ali Childs was awarded journalism fellowships from the New York Times Student Journalism Institute, the National Press Foundation, the Poynter Institute and the Village Voice. She also has worked at Ms. magazine, O, and Smithsonian.]

The National Museum of African Art

In the Washington Post early last November, there was a review of an exhibit of a private African-American art collection.  The exhibit was at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art on the National Mall and the reviewer, Philip Kennicott, noted that the show was planned “to celebrate the 50th anniversary of what was once called the Museum of African Art.” That “independent museum on Capitol Hill,” as Kennicott later described MAA, was started by Warren Robbins, a man who had my father’s job at the U.S. Embassy in Bonn, West Germany, a few incumbents before Dad was there.  (The post had been Cultural Affairs Officer, often unofficially called the cultural attaché.  Robbins had the job from 1958 to 1960; Dad had held the post from 1965 to 1967.)  

When Robbins (1923-2008) and Dad were introduced at a party, Robbins had already bought the townhouse on A Street SE that had belonged to Frederick Douglass, a former slave who became an adviser to Pres. Abraham Lincoln.  When the property had just come on the market a few years earlier, he was afraid that the historic house, which had been Douglass’s residence from 1871 to 1877, his first home in Washington, would be developed and lost.  Robbins had family money, but at the time he bought the townhouse, he had no idea what he would do with it; he only knew he wanted to preserve it.  

That’s when the former Foreign Service Officer learned that there weren’t any museums in the U.S. that focused specifically on African art (as distinguished from African artifacts and cultural/sociological objects), so that’s what he decided to use the house for.  Robbins had been collecting African art since the 1950s when he bought one piece on impulse and he wanted to introduce this unexplored but important creative wealth to American museum-goers who heretofore had only seen African art in collections at natural history museums or museums of ethnography where the emphasis wasn’t on its aesthetics.  As Robbins points out, it was largely private collectors who played an “important role” in “the universal appreciation of Africa’s creative tradition” and “its preservation as a resource for posterity.”  (Indeed, in addition to Robbins himself, two private collectors played significant parts in the very success of the Museum of African Art: Eliot Elisofon and Gaston de Havenon, about which you’ll hear more shortly.)

When my dad came along, sometime around 1967 or ’68, having just resigned from the U.S. Information Agency, then the cultural propaganda outlet of our diplomatic service, Robbins asked him if he’d like to join up, and Dad became the unpaid Director of Development for the new Museum of African Art.  (My father wasn’t entirely inexperienced in the world of art, though he had no background in African culture.  In the late 1950s, he’d bought a part-ownership in a small modern art gallery in Washington, the Gres Gallery, which I’ve mentioned once or twice on ROT.)  Fifteen years after starting MAA, Robbins (with some input from Dad) engineered the take-over by the Smithsonian of the small, but by then prominent, museum, which had by that time expanded, with the help of a Ford Foundation grant, into the neighboring townhouses.

So, you see that I have something of a personal connection to NMAfA.  I even went to the reopening gala, after the MAA expansion was completed, in May 1971 as the escort of Muriel Humphrey (1912-98), the wife of Senator-Vice President-Senator Hubert Humphrey (1911-78), who was a member of the museum’s national council.  I was in the army, assigned to the now-decommissioned Fort Holabird in Baltimore at the time, and I wore my dress blues to the semi-formal event.  A few years later, on my mother’s 50th birthday, my father threw her a big party in the museum, the guests socializing and dining amidst the art on exhibit.  (I was unable to attend this celebration because I was stationed in West Berlin by then.  I sent Mom 50 red roses at the party in my absence.)  Therefore, I decided, on the basis of this link and the interest in African art engendered by my parents’ association with the original private Museum of African Art, to compile a brief history of what is now the National Museum of African Art. 

In 1871, the renowned abolitionist, orator, and writer Frederick Douglass (1818-95), born into slavery from which he escaped in 1838, bought his first home in Washington, D.C., at 316 A Street, S.E., on Capitol Hill.  Two years later, Douglass purchased the attached house at 318; he lived and worked in the home until 1878, when he moved to Anacostia (now the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, administered by the National Park Service), though the Douglass family maintained ownership of the property until the 1920s.  The combined houses remained in private hands until 1964, when Warren Robbins bought them and established the private Museum of African Art and opened the property to the public. 

Robbins had started collecting African art while on a trip to Hamburg, West Germany, when he was Cultural Affairs Officer in Bonn, sometime in the late 1950s.  On an impulse, he spent $15 for a wooden Yoruba statue (Nigeria) in an antique shop.  A year later, once again in Hamburg, he paid $1,000 for 32 African masks, textiles, and other objects, and thus began his association with the art of Africa.  His collection attracted attention when he returned to Washington and decorated his home with the pieces and people, sometimes complete strangers, began coming by to see them.  To accommodate the growing curiosity, Robbins, who’d as yet never been to Africa, created an informal museum in the basement of his home as a way “of improving communications between cultural and racial groups,” as he later stated his goal.

In 1963, he raised $13,000 and took out a $35,000 mortgage to buy the townhouse at 316 A Street, S.E., half of Douglass’s Capitol Hill residence.  The newly-minted museum director opened his display to the public in June 1964, establishing the first museum in the U.S. dedicated to African art.  Almost immediately, nearly 200 works were pledged at gifts or loans to the nascent museum.  For the opening, Robbins’s own art was supplemented by loans from Eliot Elisofon (1911-73), a photographer and photojournalist for Life magazine with an esteemed private collection of African art, and items borrowed from the University of Pennsylvania Museum.  The museum’s mission, the new director said, was to introduce “the cultural heritage of the Negro people, known mainly in academic circles, to the attention of the general public.”  In 1966, Robbins launched the Frederick Douglass Institute of Negro Arts and History, the museum’s educational arm, and began raising additional funds to purchase the other half of the structure.  The collection was now officially named the Museum of African Art.  In addition to never having visited the continent, the former Foreign Service Officer had also never before worked in a museum, never been involved with the arts, and never raised money.   

Included in the display of masks, sculptures, carvings, bronze and iron castings, decorative items, textiles, and ceremonial objects, MAA had a gallery devoted to musical instruments.  Recorded drums, recreating the sounds of eight different kinds of drumming—from the kind that sends messages to the kind that accompanies important ceremonies—filled the air of the museum as in a second-floor gallery could be seen a Nigerian raft zither, an Ethiopian lyre, and a leg rattle from Malawi.  Along with the weapons, household items, and masks, all the objects on exhibit at MAA were displayed to emphasize their aesthetic properties—that is, the visual beauty of their form and decoration—without overlooking their sociological and spiritual import.  As the museum itself phrased it: “Today the art of Africa takes its rightful place beside the other great art traditions of the world . . . .”  In the original museum setting (before the million-dollar reconstruction), exhibits sat on rough wood flooring surrounded by tropical plants and wall hangings were displayed against clay, ivory, terracotta, or ebony-colored backgrounds.  (This tactic was clearly a replication of the theatrical setting that Warren Robbins used in his home museum before the formal foundation of MAA, when he adorned his rooms with tropical plants to suggest the African jungle.) 

In addition to its principal exhibits, the art of the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, MAA maintained two permanent displays that related to its origins and core mission.  One was a recreation of the study Frederick Douglass used in his home in the 1870s, furnished with genuine objects, such as his desk (a gift from Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1811-96, prominent abolitionist and author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and personal effects (including his typewriter), or period-appropriate antiques based on the original furnishings.  On the walls of the study were pages from The North Star, the anti-slavery newspaper Douglass published (1847-51); photos of Douglass in his many public activities; and examples of the many letters he wrote to prominent and important correspondents. 

Nearby was a gallery that displayed reproductions of modern Western art that showed the influence of African motifs with the African art object that inspired it, such as Paul Klee’s Senecio (1922) shown with an Ashanti fertility doll (Ghana).  Other famous European and American artists in this display included Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Alexander Calder, and several German Expressionist painters.  Even though the Western art in the gallery wasn’t original—real pieces would have made this exhibit fantastic—the gallery was a source of fascination for me, a novice in African art like most Americans and Europeans at the time, and it informed my view of modern European and American art ever after.  (I later went to an exhibit at the Phillips Collection, Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens—see “Art in D.C. (Dec. ’09-Jan. ’10)” on ROT, 18 January 2010—that showed the influence of this same culture on the Euro-American photographers of the 1910s and ’20s, the era in which the cognoscenti “discovered” African art.  I’d already learned where some of the striking images of our artistic heritage had come from and approached this exhibit already a little in the know, as it were.) 

In 1967, the Ford Foundation awarded the museum a $250,000, three-year grant, to be matched with funds raised form other donors.  By this time, MAA’s holdings included 300 art objects and the grant was intended to support the Douglass Institute’s efforts to create traveling exhibits, lectures, publications, audio-visual materials, and expanded educational programs.  By 1969, the New York Times reported “increased attendance and activity” at the five-year-old museum, “with weekly figures up 33 per cent.”  In April 1970, MAA closed for a major expansion and refurbishment project which would eventually double the museum’s space.  Funded largely by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities ($1 million) and the Ford Foundation ($300,000), with smaller contributions by other donors (including $40,000 from Washington philanthropist David Lloyd Kreeger, a significant supporter of the arts in the Capital, for whom the new extension was named), the remodeling was designed to unify the combined structures added over the museum’s seven-year lifetime. 

The initial plans for the MAA didn’t include exhibits of African-American artists, though temporary shows were devoted to them.  Part of the purpose of the expansion was to afford space and financing to include black American art as an integral part of the museum’s permanent collection.  (The Smithsonian’s museum doesn’t incorporate African-American art as part of its principal mission, probably on the argument that a National Museum of African American History and Culture, officially established in 2003, is in the planning stages.) 

The museum reopened in May 1971 (with the gala that I attended with Muriel Humphrey), almost exactly seven years after it first opened its doors, featuring an exhibit of items from the magnificent private collection of Gaston de Havenon, shown in public for the first time.  (You can take my word for that apparent hyperbole: I saw it—I still have the catalogue—and was thoroughly knocked out.  If anyone still believes that African art has little aesthetic appeal and is only useful as sociological or anthropological artifacts, then you need to find a copy of this catalogue somewhere—The deHavenon Collection [Museum of African Art, 1971]—and look through it.)  Some of the most beautiful and stunning pieces of art, drawn from the cultures of West Africa, were on display; de Havenon (1904-93), an art dealer and collector, acquired some of the most sublime examples of sub-Saharan creativity I’ve seen anywhere even since that introduction. 

The art of Africa, like that of Native Americans, Australia, and other non-Western cultures, used to be called “primitive”; there even used to be a Museum of Primitive Art in New York City.  That term implied a lack of sophistication and aesthetic values, the tinkerings of childlike peoples.  The implicit insult aside, the term was just inaccurate.  One look at the objects on display at the Museum of African Art (and its successor beneath the Mall), not to mention the art museums that today have all established sections devoted to African art, will disabuse anyone of the thought that this creative work is anything less than aesthetically sophisticated and artistically refined.  The term of art today is “naïve” art, an attempt to describe its origins as untaught and traditional—which is not the same as unrefined or artless.  (This is also inaccurate, since the artists are only “untaught” in the sense that they weren’t trained in Western-style art academies or conservatories.  Traditional artists are, indeed, taught their art, but at the knees of their predecessors.  Each generation of artists is trained in the techniques and styles of its culture by those who practiced the art before.)  One glance at a Bambara antelope headdress from Mali, a BaKota reliquary figure from Gabon, or an Ashanti fertility doll from Ghana will prove that conclusively. 

This is not the place for a disquisition on African art, but a few things should be noted, as they affect the notion of an art museum devoted to its display.  First, unlike modern Western art, African art isn’t primarily decorative.  While many African cultures have extensive decorative traditions (unlike, say, the Inuit, who traveled light and had little time for or interest in decoration), almost everything Africans created was for use—if not ceremonial and religious, then practical and domestic.  The beauty of the objects, though inarguably important, is secondary to the main purpose for the object’s creation.  When we see such an art object in a museum, we’re seeing it out of context since its original intended setting is a great part of its meaning to it creators.  That, of course, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t appreciate the aesthetic appeal of the art; but we should acknowledge its greater import.  Furthermore, because African artworks are made for use, they’re never pristine and seldom very old—because most African works of art get used up over time.  (This phenomenon is furthered by the fact that African traditional art objects are created from organic materials, such as wood, grass, skins, and natural fabrics, that deteriorate in time (with the uncommon exceptions of bronze and iron sculpture).  An advantage of this artistic tradition is that work done today is very similar to that done decades and even centuries ago—but as outsiders to the cultures in which these pieces are created, we have to be very careful about the ways we look at them, understand them, and appreciate them in a museum display—not to mention how we acquire them.

By 1973, the year Robbins made his first visit to Africa, MAA included 12 exhibition galleries, an auditorium, and a library; held 5,000 objects; and had a staff of 20 (one of whom, by then, was my father).  Eventually, the museum grew to comprise adjoining buildings, ultimately including nine townhouses, 16 garages, and two carriage houses.    

(Robbins had raised money, reportedly $25,000, to buy a beaded icon called Afo-A-Kom back from a Manhattan art gallery.  The  West African Kom people considered the century-old figure sacred; it had been stolen from a hill-top village in Cameroon in 1966 and the New York Times located it at the New York gallery, where it was for sale (for a reported $60-65,000).  Robbins led a delegation to bring the statue back to its home, where he was greeted by Nsom Nggue, then fon, or king, of the Kom people, and welcomed enthusiastically by a pageant of men and women in tribal dress.)

As early as 1966, the New York Times had pronounced MAA, “a tiny but excellent” museum.  In the ensuing years, Robbins’s museum gained considerable prominence, as attested to by visits from celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor and Muhammad Ali.  Washington Mayor Marion Barry (1979-91; 1995-99)—who died at 78 last 23 November—even married his third wife in the museum in 1978.)  In 1976, Robbins began a campaign to get the Smithsonian Institution to absorb the Museum of African Art.  He lobbied friends in Congress and in October 1978, the legislature voted to authorize the acquisition.  S. Dillon Ripley, Secretary of the Smithsonian, announced the take-over in August 1979; MAA was officially renamed the National Museum of African Art in 1981.  By that time, MAA owned 8,500 African sculptures, costumes, textiles, musical instruments, and jewelry; numerous books on African culture and history; early maps of Africa; educational materials; and photographs, slides, and film segments on African art, society, and environment bequeathed to the museum by world-renowned photographer Eliot Elisofon; and had an annual budget of $900,000.  Robbins became the National Museum of African Art’s first director, remaining in that position until 1983, when he became Director Emeritus and a Senior Scholar at the Smithsonian. 

(When Robbins deeded the museum, its property, and its holdings to the Smithsonian Institution in 1979, the Institution ran it for seven years.  Then, to support the construction of the new building on the Mall, the Capitol Hill property was sold in 1986.  The Capitol Hill site was purchased by the National Association for Home Care (NAHC), which operates the Caring Institute.  NAHC restored the property to the condition it was in in 1871-77 in 1990 and 1993 and opened the current Frederick Douglass Museum and Hall of Fame for Caring Americans on the property.  The museum is open to the public.)

NMAfA opened Ethiopia: The Christian Art of an African Nation in 1984, its last exhibit at the Frederick Douglass House, and in 1987, NMAfA was relocated to a new, subterranean building on the Mall behind James Renwick’s red sandstone Castle, the Smithsonian’s historic original building on Independence Avenue.  (The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery for Asian art, NMAfA’s next-door neighbor, is likewise mostly below ground.  The Sackler contains art of North Africa, as well as the Middle East and Asia.)  Congress appropriated $960,000 for the two new museums and ground was broken, with Vice Pres. George H. W. Bush officiating, on 21 June 1983.  Designed by architect  Jean Paul Carlhian of the Boston firm Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott, the four-story structure is 96% below ground, with the four-acre Enid A. Haupt Garden as its roof; only the single-story, domed entrance pavilion, 35 feet high by 90 feet long, with the admissions counter, info desk, and elevators to the exhibit floors, is at ground level.  (The Sackler’s entry is topped with pyramids.)  Based on an overall concept by Japanese architect Junzo Yoshimura, Carlhian’s $75 million, 370,000 square-foot design for the twin museums, Ripley’s last big project before his retirement in September 1984, incorporates geometric forms which are meant to provide a unity of the project to existing Smithsonian buildings: the Smithsonian Institution Building (the Castle), the Arts and Industries Building, and the Freer Gallery of Art.  According to a Smithsonian website,

The National Museum of African Art was placed adjacent to the Arts and Industries Building with circular forms derived from the semicircular arches of the Freer Gallery of Art across the way. The pink granite reflects the colors of the Smithsonian Institution Building and the Arts and Industries Building, while the gray color reflects the Freer Gallery of Art.

The NMAfA is constructed principally of red granite with a motif of circles reflected in its domed roof, round windows, curved stairways, and arched doorways.  (The Sackler, continuing the variation of a classical theme, is of grayish-tan granite and uses a diamond shape as its architectural motif.  The two museums are connected underground by a corridor or concourse that also contains offices and classrooms for various Smithsonian programs.) 

The new museum, with five times the space of MAA’s Capitol Hill home, was opened in September and that same month an anonymous donor gave NMAfA a gift of $200,000, in recognition of which the museum renamed its library the Warren M. Robbins Library, the world’s principal resource center for the research and study of the visual arts of Africa.  The new museum has 68,800 square feet of space, of which 22,000 square feet are exhibition galleries.   The main exhibition spaces are on the first and second floors below ground, with six galleries, a lecture hall, the Warren Library, the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives (containing over 350,000 items), the museum workshop, the museum store, and NMAfA admin offices.  On Sublevel 3 is another exhibition space for displays of special selections from the collection and the other Smithsonian offices and classrooms, plus the entrance to the concourse to the other buildings.  Some of the galleries are devoted to permanent displays, including the 525-object Disney-Tishman African Art Collection, a 2005 gift of unique and rare pieces from the Walt Disney World Company to NMAfA. 

Continuing installations, which rotate works from the museum’s permanent collection, span the cultures and forms of the continent below the Sahara.  Some exhibits explore a particular region, such as the lesser-known works from Sierra Leone and Liberia, the art of Benin, the pottery of Central Africa, and the archaeology of the ancient Nubian city of Kerma, as well as ceramics, small stone figures from the 15th to the 18th centuries, and the artistry of everyday objects.  NMAfA’s focus also covers contemporary art from the continent, such as Senegalese artist Ousmane Sow’s Toussaint Louverture et La Vieille Esclave (1989), a mixed-media sculpture of Haiti’s18th-century liberator.  The museum’s educational projects for both children and adults include films with contemporary perspectives on African life and storytelling programs, as well as lectures, public discussions, and musical performances.  The practical workshops, such as traditional basket-weaving, bring Africa’s oral and cultural traditions to life along with demonstrations by African and African-American artists.

By the time Warren Robbins died at 85 (of complications from a fall at his home), NMAfA held over 9,000 art objects from the continent of Africa and 30,000 books on African art, culture, and history.  As of 2009, the National Museum of African Art’s yearly budget was $6 million and its current collection, the largest public holding of contemporary African art in the United States, comprises 12,000 items.  In June, NMAfA marked its 50th anniversary, commemorating the day in 1964 that Warren Robbins opened the doors to the Frederick Douglass townhouse that had become the Museum of African Art. 

[The National Museum of African Art, the United States’ only museum dedicated to the collection, conservation, study, and exhibition of traditional and contemporary African art, is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. (closed 25 December).  Admission is free. NMAfA is located at 950 Independence Avenue, S.W., near the Smithsonian Metrorail station on the Blue and Orange lines.  For more information about the exhibitions and the museum, call (202) 633-4600 or visit the museum’s website, http://africa.si.edu; for general Smithsonian information, call (202) 633-1000.

[I said above that I had a personal connection, through my father, to the original Museum of African Art.  Between gifts from my folks, early inheritances, and my own acquisitions, my own small art collection includes a few pieces of works from Africa, mostly purchased from MAA.  Among these are a carved wooden Bamun figure of a boy from Cameroon, a Bambara “Chiwara” (female antelope headdress figure) from Mali, a stylized iron bird from the Bobo people of Burkina Faso, a carved wooden Yoruba twin figure, a Bronze Senufo equestrian figure from the Ivory Coast, and three carved wooden masks from the Senufo, Baule (Ivory Coast), and Ibibio (Nigeria) peoples.]

                                 

“Exhibit Unravels Mysteries of Ancient Chinese Temples Through History, Science”

Reported by Jeffery Brown

[An art exhibit at the Smithsonian in Washington brought together art, history and science to solve the mysteries of Chinese temples that date back to the 6th century.  This report was aired on the PBS NewsHour on 11 July 2011.]

TRANSCRIPT

judy woodruff: Finally tonight, bringing together art, history and science.

Jeffrey Brown takes us through a unique museum exhibition.

 

jeffrey brown: Sculptures from sixth century China, the head of a Buddha, a seated bodhisattva, a kneeling winged monster, works of art from museums around the world. They tell a tale that goes back some 1,500 years.

This is a story of ancient history and the latest technology. It’s got religion and lots of art, and for you mystery and CSI fans, yes, great treasures have been lost and an investigation is ongoing.

It begins in Northeast China in what is today a rural coal mining area at the Xiangtangshan caves. The name means Mountain of Echoing Halls. In the middle of the sixth century, during the Northern Qi Dynasty, one of the shortest-lived, but most creative in Chinese history, artisans turned the caves into Buddhist temples, carving the limestone into beautiful sculptures and shrines.

Today, worshipers still come to the caves, but they pray to largely empty spaces. That’s because, in the early 20th century, looters forcibly removed many of the cave’s sculptures in order to sell them on the international art market.

Unraveling Mysteries of Ancient Chinese Temples

keith wilson, Arthur M. Sackler and Freer Gallery of Art: All of a sudden, these objects that were created as religious icons and really seen by many Westerners in the 19th century as idols or icons of religious worship, all of a sudden, these were considered fine art.

jeffrey brown: Keith Wilson is the curator of ancient Chinese art at the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of Art in Washington.

keith wilson: Basically, that happens in part through the world’s fair movement. In 19th century world’s fairs, there were often cultural displays from various countries throughout the world. And this is where the West first saw things like Chinese Buddhist sculpture, and finally it’s being recognized within the international canon of what fine arts is all about. So there was a demand.

jeffrey brown: The sculptures made their way to art dealers around the world, who then sold them to collectors, including Western museums. This was decades before such transactions were prohibited by international law.

Now experts are trying to, in a sense, put Humpty Dumpty together again. In part, they’re doing it the traditional way, creating an exhibition originating at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, out of all the works they could gather from around the world, pieces like this hand of a Buddha that’s now in the collection of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.

This gives us a sense of scale, among other things.

keith wilson: The body that this hand belonged to, which is still in the cave, is about 20 feet tall. This hand was the proper left hand of a seated Buddha. Through the project, we’re now able to identify that Buddha as the Buddha of the future, or Maitreya, one of three Buddhas that were on the central altars of the north cave at Northern Xiangtangshan.

jeffrey brown: But what makes this project so unusual is the merger of art history and new technology to recreate one of the original caves using 3-D imaging.

This digital cave is now part of the exhibition and allows us to see what the actual cave once looked like. The cave’s surface was scanned by a Chinese team from Peking University, which spent four weeks at Xiangtangshan. A technical team in Chicago then helped turn the scans into these wire frame images. Chicago researchers also traveled the world to scan images of every sculpture and fragment they could find, and then placed them digitally in bright yellow back into the cave.

In doing so, Wilson says, scientists and art historians learned even more about the original site.

keith wilson: Another result of this project has been in really building the number of objects that we now know come from the place.

jeffrey brown: But, so, how – but how do you – how do you figure out that a particular piece which was thought to belong in another cave, in another site belonged actually . . .

keith wilson: A couple of – a couple of different ways.

The old-fashioned way is connoisseurship, where you compare the style of one head to another head. The digitizing has also helped, because it records so many details so correctly that, in this physical matching that we were talking about, it allows us to – to physically prove that a piece had been removed from this site.

jeffrey brown: Of course, this also raises another question: Why not just recreate the cave for real and send the sculptures back to China?

Wilson says that, with the works scattered in so many collections for more than 100 years, the Chinese themselves recognize that’s not going to happen and haven’t made such a request. But the art-technology collaboration, he believes, does offer a new way to think about artworks and their original sites.

keith wilson: For a lot of us, maybe even from the first days of the project, there was a sense that the project does provide an alternative to repatriation, that is, the physical return of the objects, that the digital cave allows us to see these elements back in place.

jeffrey brown: The unraveled mystery of the caves, “Echoes of the Past,” at the Sackler Gallery until the end of July, when it moves on to museums in Dallas and later San Diego. 

[Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan ran at the Sackler from 19 March to 17 July 2011.  The museum’s publicity stated:

[Majestic sixth-century Chinese Buddhist sculpture is combined with 3-D imaging technology in this exploration of one of the most important groups of Buddhist devotional sites in early medieval China. Carved into the mountains of northern China, the Buddhist cave temples of Xiangtangshan (pronounced “shahng-tahng-shahn”) were the crowning cultural achievement of the Northern Qi dynasty (550-77 C.E.). Once home to a magnificent array of sculptures—monumental Buddhas, divine attendant figures, and crouching monsters framed by floral motifs—the limestone caves were severely damaged in the first half of the twentieth century, when their contents were chiseled away and offered for sale on the international art market.

[In Echoes of the Past, ancient sculptural masterpieces are united with a set of innovative digital components, including a video installation that offers an immersive, kinetic re-creation of one of the largest stone temples. Touch screens and research kiosks offer more detailed information about the site and the themes explored in the exhibition.]

David Wojnarowicz

[16 March will be ROT’s second anniversary. I’m very pleased to have made it to that benchmark, and I hope to keep the blog going for some time into the future. This profile of artist and activist David Wojnarowicz, whose work I got to know after his death, will serve as the anniversary article, the 159th I’ve published on the site. While I haven’t written all the articles, I have selected them all, and my one intention has been to keep a variety of topics and ideas before the readers. I think I’ve managed that to a small degree at least, and I hope my choices have been interesting—and, in some way, instructive. I’m sure readers of ROT will find the subject of this profile, who found himself once again at the center of recent controversy, one of the most fascinating in the two years of the blog. ~Rick]

On 1 December 2010, Martin E. Sullivan, director of the National Portrait Gallery, part of the Smithsonian Institution, removed a video from its exhibit Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture which, according to the museum’s website, was “the first major museum exhibition to focus on sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture.” (In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll state now that my late father had been a docent at the Portrait Gallery for several years in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.) The video, A Fire in My Belly, was made in 1986-87 by artist David Wojnarowicz, a painter, photographer, videographer, sculptor, writer, and activist (among other things) who died of AIDS in 1992 at 37. Fire is a kaleidoscopic, two-part film (one part’s 13 minutes long, the other’s seven) of scattered scenes, many filmed in Mexico, intended to communicate the suffering of people with AIDS—it was made at the time Wojnarowicz saw his best friend die of the disease and when he learned he had it also—but Wojnarowicz used multifarious images to make his point. One of the scenes, 11 seconds long, included in the four-minute excerpt at the museum, displays ants crawling over a crucifix. It was this scene that riled William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, who claimed that the video was anti-Catholic “hate speech” and galvanized several prominent conservative politicians and public figures to pressure the Smithsonian to remove the offending clip from the exhibit. (On a holiday trip to Washington, I saw Hide/Seek, which ran from 30 October 2010 to 13 February 2011.)

Explaining why A Fire in My Belly belonged in Hide/Seek, New York Times art critic Holland Cotter wrote:

And crucial elements missing from much of the exhibition—personal and political anger, formal rawness, overt spirituality—are embodied in that work. In a sense the video was missing even when it was here: it was edited down for the occasion to barely 4 minutes from 20. But to have removed it entirely because of ideological strong-arming was to violate the premise and the promise of the show: difference was sent back into hiding.

I’ve said before (most notably in “The First Amendment & The Arts,” 8 May 2010 on ROT) that I’m close to a First Amendment absolutist. With few exceptions, I oppose suppression of artistic or intellectual expression, censorship by government action or private intimidation. I especially oppose it when it’s a matter of someone’s sensitivities being offended. (Not everything you don’t like is hate speech.) We’re grown-ups: we should be able to take that and fight back like adults—speaking out and protesting. Suppression is just not an acceptable method of fighting expression you don’t like. We shouldn’t have to run off to tattle to the principal every time someone calls us a name. (Ironically, it’s usually the schoolyard bully who does the name-calling; in this case, the bully is the tattler.) There’s no Constitutional protection against hurt feelings. And Wojnarowicz had a valid point to make: like Terrence McNally in his 1998 play Corpus Christi, also an object of attempted suppression (including again by Donohue and his organization, which ironically claims to stand for free speech), Wojnarowicz had long been angry at the Catholic Church’s treatment of homosexuals and the Church was often one target of his activism. (Also like McNally, Wojnarowicz was raised Catholic. He had some horrific childhood memories of brutal treatment by the nuns who taught him.) In other words, this wasn’t just a blind gesture of anti-Catholic antagonism—the artist had something to say that even the Church should hear. In New York Times, Michael Kimmelman called the video “a spiritual cri de coeur.” Leo Shapiro, the stage director whom I’ve mentioned often on ROT, believed that artists are society’s oracles. “The point of an oracle,” Shapiro asserted, “—you support the oracle, you don’t support what it says. It doesn’t always give you good news.”

Wojnarowicz wasn’t unfamiliar with this kind of clamor during his lifetime. Some of you may recognize the artist’s name as the plaintiff of a lawsuit that derived from another controversy over his art some two decades ago: David Wojnarowicz v. American Family Association and Donald E. Wildmon in 1990.

Wojnarowicz’s essay in the exhibit catalogue for Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, Artists Space’s 1989-90 show about the devastation of AIDS on the art community curated by photographer Nan Goldin, was assailed by such NEA opponents as then-North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms and California Congressmen Dana Rohrabacher and William Dannemeyer, members of what Paul Mattick of The Nation called “Helms and Co.” “Postcards from America: X-Rays from Hell” (reprinted in Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration by David Wojnarowicz [Vintage Books, 1991] and David Wojnarowicz: Tongues of Flame, edited by Barry Blinderman [University Galleries of Illinois State University, 1990]) engendered the wrath of conservative culture warriors because they claimed that public funds were used to publish the essay, which they had found offensive. (Wojnarowicz had called John Cardinal O’Connor, the Archbishop of New York City, “This fat cannibal from that house of walking swastikas” and described how in his imagination he’d “dowse Helms with a bucket of gasoline and set his putrid ass on fire,” for instance.) This scrutiny brought Wojnarowicz onto the radar screens of the conservative activists who had already threatened the NEA over an exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs in 1989 and would again over the “NEA Four” in 1990.

(In September 1989, the private Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., planned to host Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, inaugurated by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. The Perfect Moment, supported by an NEA grant, had run at the ICA in December and January 1988-89. Mapplethorpe decided to show a series of photographs that he’d explored shortly before his death on 9 March 1989 and the directorship of the Corcoran and several members of Congress were shocked when they saw the new works, which included homoerotic male nudes and depictions of gay sex. The museum refused to go forward with the exhibit and its organizers turned to the non-profit Washington Project for the Arts, which showed the photos in July and August 1989. The Perfect Moment went on to Boston and Cincinnati, and in April 1990, the director of Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center was indicted on obscenity charges for mounting the show. Although the CAA director was acquitted, the episode marked a serious point in the struggle between the forces of censorship and the advocates of free and open expression in the arts.

(In June 1990, NEA chairman John Frohnmayer, appointed by George H. W. Bush a year before, rejected grants for four performance artists—Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, and John Fleck—due to “political realities.” This action was followed by a requirement that all NEA grant-recipients sign an anti-obscenity pledge. Many artists refused and rejected their grants, among them Joseph Papp of the New York Shakespeare Festival, now the Joseph Papp Public Theater. Stephen Sondheim turned down a 1992 National Medal of the Arts, awarded by the president and administered by the NEA, because he felt it would be hypocritical due to President Bush's policy concerning the Endowment; he accepted the award five years later from President Bill Clinton. In September 1990, the NEA Four, as they were by then known, sued the Endowment and the government settled in June 1993, admitting most of the charges of political influence in its grant-making decisions. The politicization of the arts agency went further than the four artists in the suit: additional targets included other performance artists, filmmakers, art publications, exhibitions, and performance venues. President Bush even made specific mention of a painting by David Wojnarowicz during his ex parte communications with Frohnmayer. Later, when Anne-Imelda Radice became interim chairman after Frohnmayer’s dismissal, the Endowment continued its content-based decisions by excluding gay and lesbian artists and projects. The NEA Four were awarded their original grants, but the Endowment ceased funding individual artists.)

From November to January 1990-91, Exit Art in New York’s SoHo mounted David Wojnarowicz: Tongues in Flame, a retrospective. Because the University Galleries of Illinois State University in Normal had originated the exhibit with an NEA grant, Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association launched a campaign against Wojnarowicz, combing through the show’s catalogue looking for sexual imagery. Wildmon then published in a pamphlet opposing funding for the NEA, sexually explicit excerpts of several of Wojnarowicz’s works and an image of Jesus as a drug addict from another painting. Wildmon sent the pamphlet to all members of Congress, among thousands of others, and in May 1990, Wojnarowicz sued Wildmon for libel and copyright infringement under the New York Artists' Authorship Rights Act. Wojnarowicz argued that since the published details were only small elements of the much larger paintings, they didn’t fairly represent the whole works. Wojnarowicz v. AFA was heard in June in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, attracting attention because of the issues. In August, the judge enjoined AFA from distributing the pamphlet further, but awarded the artist only $1 in damages. (Wojnarowicz apparently never cashed the check: it was among the papers and exhibits of the legal case from his effects that were donated to NYU and included in Reality and Realism: The Vision of David Wojnarowicz, a 1999 exhibition at the Fales Library, the rare materials collection within Bobst Library.) With the low award, both sides declared the outcome a victory.

Most of Wojnarowicz’s short life was fraught with hardship. If it wasn’t artistic or political, then it was personal. Born in Red Bank, New Jersey, on 14 September 1954, he dropped out of the High School of Music and Art in New York City, where he’d moved with his mother, at 16 and ran away from home to escape a violently abusive, alcoholic father. (David’s mother had divorced his father, a sailor on passenger ships, when the boy was two and gained custody of David and his brother and sister, but the children’s father kidnapped them and they lived with him, moving frequently and subject to constant abuse until David was nine. The father eventually returned the children to their mother, but they continued to live in fear of him until he hanged himself in 1981.) After hitchhiking cross country and back between 1970 and ‘73, Wojnarowicz settled again in New York City, living for a time on the streets and working as a prostitute (among other things). He recorded some of this life in a graphic (and autobiographic) novel, Seven Miles a Second (DC Comics, 1996), created with artist and cartoonist James Romberger. The world in which Wojnarowicz lived is also preserved in the monologues he transcribed from some of the people he met on the streets, published in The Waterfront Journals (Grove Press, 1996). The artist’s own journals have also been published: In the Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz (Grove Press, 1999). His world’s also visible in much of Wojnarowicz’s art, especially his paintings, which often contain images and sometimes words reminiscent of his childhood. Sadly, when he died of AIDS on 22 July 1992—he was diagnosed in 1987, the year his closest friend and former lover, photographer Peter Hujar, died of the disease—he hadn’t gotten very far chronologically from that childhood.

As early as 1970, Wojnarowicz began writing and taking photographs (with a stolen camera and film) to document his life and the life he saw around him, and also as a way to take control of his life, which was already painful and difficult. His first major project, which he developed between 1978 and ’79, was Arthur Rimbaud in New York in which Wojnarowicz photographed a friend wearing a mask of Rimbaud’s face in various places around the city as he engaged in different activities—riding the subway, standing in an abandoned warehouse, masturbating on a bed. (Some of these pictures were in Hide/Seek. Wojnarowicz especially identified with the French poet, along with Jean Genet and the Beats, particularly William Burroughs, who was also a friend, and Jack Kerouac.) At the same time, Wojnarowicz was making short films like Heroin, made not only about addicts but by them; stenciling burning houses or falling people on the sides of buildings throughout the city; and playing in a band called 3 Teens Kill 4—No Motive (from a New York Post headline). He was bearing witness to the history that the official record didn’t tell because, the artist thought, “People should witness things. They should, at the very bottom level, be witnessed.” This might be called the artist’s creed and would be the prevailing impulse of Wojnarowicz’s art in all the forms, including his writing—perhaps particularly his writing—and it often alluded to his own life, especially his childhood, which he said he always carried with him.

By the ‘80s, Wojnarowicz devoted his art to chronicling the gay sex scene in New York City. He frequented the piers and abandoned warehouses along the Hudson and photographed, painted, or described the life he witnessed. At the same time, he began to show his art in all its forms—painting, sculpture, photographs, videos and films, collages, mixed-media—in galleries in the East Village, becoming an important venue for challenging art. Wojnarowicz was experimenting with any medium he could find, it seemed without restriction. In 1982, he let loose 30 “cock-a-bunnies”—he’d rubber-cemented tiny rabbit ears and tails onto cockroaches from his apartment—at the Beast Show, a star-studded event at P.S. 1, an art center in Long Island City, Queens. His visual artworks were eclectic in their use of media, ranging from conventional canvas, to masonite, maps, photographs, trash-can lids, “found objects,” and such unlikely material as loaves of bread and plastic sharks—and he often incorporated texts into his paintings, along with other visual media. He painted in acrylics and spray paint, on top of his own works and on supermarket posters. He was also appearing in the works of other artists as a model or subject, and many of his own works were collaborations with other East Village artists. His first important show was Fast, a group exhibit in 1982 at the Alexander F. Milliken Gallery in SoHo and in 1985 (and then again in 1991), one of his pieces was included in the prestigious Whitney Biennial. After that, his reputation for both shocking and insightful, pointed and moving work grew, spreading beyond New York’s downtown art scene. By the ‘90s, he was participating in exhibits not only in California, Illinois, and Ohio, but Paris, Cologne, and Madrid. In the end, as Richard B. Woodward wrote in the New York Times three years after the artist died, “he was an angry, East Village misfit who mined his own troubled life—as an abused child, a young street hustler and a gay man with AIDS—for his work. Especially in his last year, he boldly explored his outcast state, brimming with rage against political or religious power that would brand him a pariah.” He was angry at the forces that wanted him just to disappear, that treated him as if he were invisible. He wasn’t invisible anymore!

Two years before Wojnarowicz’s death, at the time of Tongues of Flame, Shapiro, who knew and admired the artist, said: “One of the things he sets a clear example of is the function of the artist in this society. You know, they always talk about like the canary in the mines—the ones that die first. . . . This is what Wojnarowicz’s function is: he was literal cutting edge.” Wojnarowicz offered his art as testimony of life he felt no one else acknowledged. According to writer and cultural critic Cynthia Carr, “Art was his way of witnessing. On some level, the work was about putting information out there, exposing what’s usually hidden and creating cultural counterweight. Where the marginal were ignored, he would exalt them.” In the words of artist Adam Kuby, who pointed out that the artist’s work wasn’t just about politics and AIDS:

Wojnarowicz illuminates connections that are present but unseen, and creates associations that help us understand the web within web of our complex existence. Through startling juxtapositions he describes the real ecology between man and nature, economics and the environment, compassion and compulsion.

For Shapiro, who also saw his own art as testimony, “It’s very brave work,” for, as Living Theatre co-founder Julian Beck asserted, “The avant-garde artist travels a dangerous road.” Beck characterized such artists as “the advance guard, the ones who were looking for trouble, who were taking the risks, the fools and the heroes.” David Wojnarowicz was one of these men: “One lesson from childhood,” Carr also observed. “The neighbors knew about the violence in his household. They witnessed it. But nobody intervened. David promised himself that when he saw injustice, he would not be silent.” Until his death (and apparently even beyond), he never was. Personally shy and reticent, art and writing gave him a way to say what he couldn’t in a social setting. His prominence eventually taught him to talk about his work and his feelings, and he spoke out whenever he could and wherever he found a platform and through whatever medium he found effective—visual art, video, performance, writing, speaking. He did it all—and he got very good at it. And it landed him under the microscopes of people like Wildmon, Helms, Rohrabacher, Dannemeyer, Pat Robertson, and George H. W. Bush. In his essay for the catalogue of Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1999, the first retrospective of Wojnarowicz’s work after his death, Dan Cameron, then senior curator there, wrote:

In the most fundamental historical terms, Wojnarowicz appears to have been the leading voice in the first generation of artists to come of age in the AIDS era, for whom the relationship between the private and the political was powerfully evident.

Wojnarowicz quite simply put himself out there, his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at. And peck they did.

It became the artist’s mission to call attention to any injustice he perceived in American society, especially (but not exclusively) where it concerned the gay community. As we’ve seen, he targeted the Catholic Church for its treatment of homosexuals, but he didn’t limit his anger to religious institutions. He railed against politicians, the government, health-care bureaucrats, and journalists, too, but his largest target was American culture itself. Wojnarowicz saw himself as on the outside—but he wasn’t looking in, his nose pressed against the window glass. He wanted everyone else to get out. He often wrote of “the preinvented world,” the programmed society that promulgated rules by which we are all forced to live, not for the good of all but so those who make the rules can control us better, the world where the wilderness has been chopped up into property by fences and no-entry signs—

the world of the stop light, the no smoking signs, the rental world, the split rail fencing shielding hundreds of barren miles of wilderness from the human step; the place where by virtue of having been born centuries late one is denied access to earth or space; choice or movement. The bought up world; the owned world—the world of coded sounds; the world of language; the world of lies; the packaged world; the world in metallic motion.

Wojnarowicz said he recognized this as a teenager “after my first motorcycle ride.” One morning, he realized “that government and god were interchangeable and that most of the people in the landscape of my birth insisted on having one or both determine the form of their lives.” In a 1988 interview in Arts Magazine, the artist explained:

[T]he world is a place we’re born into with a preinvented existence, where everything’s been laid out. Perhaps the most radical thing you can do, then, is use your imagination. With all these different indicators seeming to press on you wherever you go—stopping for a traffic light, walking on the sidewalk instead of the middle of the street, the imagination, too, is shaped somehow. But I still think there are keys that can unlock it, you can break through a lot of things . . . like socialization.

The conformity he thought society demanded, turning us into “a tribal nation of zombies,” was not where the imagination lived. In that same interview, Wojnarowicz said of one of his large paintings from The Four Elements series:

Earth is about the idea of architecture coming from an unconscious impulse. It’s the same thing I said before about preinvented existence where the imagination is formed by all these signifiers we’re surrounded by. And that’s where I think the most radical thing lies; inside that imagination where we can leave that pre-invented world. That’s where real freedom is.

Homogeneity, which Wojnarowicz called “a one-tribe nation,” is an illusion anyway, because within that society are several tribes. One runs the government with false promises, propaganda, and a strong arm; one comprises the reporters and commentators who “work hand in hand with the government” to con the people so that they never “break through the illusion and examine the structures of their world.” Finally, there’s the tribe that sees the truth through the manufactured haze. This diatribe appears in Wojnarowicz’s essay “In the Shadow of the American Dream: Soon All This Will Be Picturesque Ruins,” published in Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, which came out in 1991, the year before the author died. His rage was well established by then, of course; he’d seen the marginalization, the repression, the denial of anyone who dared not to conform—sexually, politically, religiously, intellectually, culturally. Of course Helms and Co. would go on the attack. David Wojnarowicz was dangerous! The people who see the reality, he warned, want action:

A civil war and a national trial for the “leaders” of this country, as well as certain individuals in organized religions, is the soundtrack that plays and replays in the heads of members of that tribe. Some members of the tribe understand the meaning of language. They also understand what freedom truly is and if the other tribes want to hand them the illusion of hope in the form of the leash—in the form of language—like all stray dogs with intelligence from experience, they know how to turn the leash into a rope to exit the jail windows or how to turn the leash into a noose to hang the jailers.

Wojnarowicz was entirely unschooled. He got into the High School of Music and Art with a portfolio he’d put together one night and he’d play hookie for weeks at a time to roam the streets and hustle. He ultimately dropped out at 16 to live on the streets and never returned to any kind of formal school, learning entirely on the streets and highways of the United States and Europe, the ultimate autodidact. He was also self-taught as an artist, picking up his knowledge of style, technique, and materials from other street artists, observation, experience, and experimentation. Because he wasn’t a product of the art establishment, he had little regard for it. Just as he saw himself as an outsider in society at large—a position he believed was vital not just for his own work, but for the art world and society as a whole—he regarded himself as separate from the world of galleries and studios, patrons and collectors. It wasn’t so much that he disdained that world—he would eventually show his work in galleries, sell paintings for as much as $20,000 even in his lifetime, and see his art displayed in museums—he just never figured the established art world would be interested in the kinds of work he was doing. Like many street artists, his canvases were usually the walls of buildings and, in his case, the wrecks of cars abandoned outside his Lower East Side apartment. (He’d discovered that if he graffitied the hulks, the city’d tow them away overnight instead of the months they’d sit at the curb otherwise.)

Wojnarowicz began his art career while he was playing in his band, known as 3TK4, a “post-punk” combo that used recordings of street noises and conversations as a form of percussion. He’d hang posters he’d spray-painted in the areas near the group’s gigs. The posters disappeared as fast as he put them up, he recalled—apparently people were taking them down to hang in their homes. He began painting directly on the buildings, and he started a series of graffiti works, walking around SoHo at night and spray-painting what would become his iconic imagery—burning house, flying bomber, and cowering figure—on gallery doors. In one early piece, he dumped a 100-pound pile of bloody cow bones from a meat packer in the West Village on the stairs of the Leo Castelli Gallery in SoHo, stenciling a knife, fork, and plate on the wall along with his customary burning house and plane. It wasn’t that the artist had anything against Castelli or the art establishment. “At that time I thought galleries were a joke, that they would never touch anything this real or address issues like that.” Collectors were all about collecting, amassing art for themselves, he thought, and galleries catered to buyers, not artists. They were all about selling, “the collector structure,” art as a commodity. “I did that work just to give people something different to look at on the way in,“ Wojnarowicz explained, “something that would balance their view of what I thought was inside.” His first exhibit came when the owner of the Milliken Gallery had taken notice of his “street signs” and, after finding out from Peter Hujar who the graffitist was, asked Wojnarowicz to participate in Fast (which also included Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, two other former graffitists). That was the summer of 1982, and the young street artist soon began having his own shows. Several galleries championed his work, and I think his attitude to galleries changed—though not necessarily his feelings about collectors. He attended some of the parties to which buyers invited him, but he wasn’t comfortable hobnobbing with people who thought they knew him because they’d seen his work. It dismayed Wojnarowicz that once his work began to sell, once he’d been “validated” by the critical establishment, people would buy anything to which his name was attached. (He also learned that this world could be fickle.) He continued to see himself as an outsider in the art world; in fact, Wojnarowicz at first didn’t think of himself as an artist at all. “Artists,” according to him, “were such-and-such people,” people who were special, different from the rest of us. Wojnarowicz “wasn’t particularly an artist,” he insisted; he was just a guy with something to say who tried hard to find ways to say it—like music, writing, or installations.

Wojnarowicz’s partner in the Castelli action was bandmate Julie Hair, so he didn’t think of what he was doing as art. It was an outgrowth of his work with 3TK4 which he called “action installations.” Then Wojnarowicz met Hujar in a bar in 1979 and “we just started talking.” Hujar, 20 years Wojnarowicz’s senior, became the younger man’s brother, father, mentor, teacher, and, ultimately, the audience for all his art. Because Hujar was a photographer, Wojnarowicz began taking pictures again. He’d been writing since he left the streets—poetry, transcribed monologues of street people—but photography was another way to chronicle the world he was witnessing (and which few others, especially the established media, were recording). “Images can be used as tools of alert, or tools of organization,” explained Wojnarowicz in Aperture, an art photography quarterly. “A photographic image can be a disruption of previously unchallenged power.” The budding artist’s early visual works were photographs, like the Rimbaud series. “A camera in some hands can preserve an alternate history,” Wojnarowicz asserted. (He continued to use photography in his paintings as well as on its own. One of his most moving pieces is a photo portrait of Hujar immediately after his death, a work on exhibit in Hide/Seek.) But at one of the clubs where Wojnarowicz worked as a busboy and dishwasher another street artist, Keith Haring, also worked and Wojnarowicz saw what his fellow artist was doing as his work developed, though Wojnarowicz still thought of his own efforts as an extension of his action installations, not art. Photography quickly led to exploring other art forms, including painting and sculpture; but Wojnarowicz grew into the field almost without realizing that’s what he was doing. “Originally the early stuff I did was very simple,” he said. “I was trying to bring art back from its ‘elite’ nature, the artist as a special creature, an elite person.”

Wojnarowicz didn’t work in so many media and forms, including writing and music as well as all the visual techniques, because he was a dilettante or wasn’t serious about his work and artistic mission. His experimentation had two origins, I believe. First, it was the result of an endlessly restless and curious mind. He was continuously searching for more effective and stunning ways to communicate his ideas and thoughts. Furthermore, his major works, particularly those of his later years, were sorts of collages—if not in the literal sense, which many of them were, then collages of styles, techniques, and media. Whatever he learned eventually found its way into one of his complex works.

The second source for Wojnarowicz’s multi-media impulse was his belief that artists of the future wouldn’t be restricted, by custom or training, to one or two methods of making art. They’d be freer to choose the media and materials they used as well as the ways they applied them. (I find this attitude very like Tennessee Williams’s plastic theater concept, about which I wrote in “’The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theatre” in the Tennessee Williams Annual Review [2002], http://www.tennesseewilliamsstudies.org/archives/2002/3kramer.htm. A shorter version is in the Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia [Greenwood Press, 2004].) Wojnarowicz was simply in the forefront of this movement, perhaps taking his license from his lack of formal art schooling so he’d never been taught the rules. Of course, Wojnarowicz was never much for following rules and restrictions—even when he knew them. As artist and writer Mark Alice Durant wrote: “Wojnarowicz as painter, photographer, and writer transgresses as many formal boundaries as his content transgresses taboos.”

In fact, Wojnarowicz’s large paintings resemble nothing so much as multi-media performances. Divided into quadrants like cartoon panels, a form the artist used in his early wall paintings, or a movie storyboard, they move from image to image, idea to idea like scenes in a play, but communicating in different media and techniques. Some of his later works incorporate disparate visual media and written texts in the form of short stories, which, as in William Blake’s artwork, are integrated into the painting with the other media (see He Kept Following Me and I Feel a Vague Nausea, both 1990). His 1987 Four Elements series not only combines images from many sources (including pornography) but also diverse media. For instance, Water (from which Wildmon excerpted some sexual images for the anti-NEA pamphlet) incorporates texts. (The Four Elements—the other works of the series are Earth, Fire, and Wind (for Peter Hujar)—are reproduced in Tongues of Flame and Fever; He Kept Following Me and I Feel a Vague Nausea are reproduced in Fever. There are undoubtedly reproductions on the ‘Net as well.)

“David’s life had nothing to do with the art world,” wrote author, journalist, and art critic Elizabeth Hess, “and his work was inseparable from his life.” Cynthia Carr further explained:

David’s work emerged directly from his life. He knew little art history, had no training past high school, and made a point of not trolling the galleries to see what everyone else was doing. Exposed to unusual hardship as a boy, as a sexually active teen, and as a street person, he didn’t see his experience reflected in the culture. Art was his antidote.

In his essay in the Fever catalogue, art historian and critic John Carlin wrote:

Simply put, David was not just an artist; he used art as a vehicle for something else, not as an end in itself. David was more like a shaman, the witch doctor of our tribe, than someone purely interested in formal relations or being smart. He was a visionary whose work was deeply rooted in our collective daily lives yet constantly linked the everyday to some greater, unknowable force.

. . . .

While most young artists looked to other artists for their referents, Wojnarowicz drew upon the common experiences of Americans of his generation. He did not make art that tried to fit into preconceived notions of what art should be. He was less concerned with aesthetics than with communicating—about himself and society, about things that were real and actually happening but that no one wanted to talk about.

At the same time, though, Wojnarowicz was impelled to work closely with other artists and performers. He did a lot of solo work, to be sure, but he “collaborated incessantly,” as Dan Cameron put it. “In general, the importance of collaboration for Wojnarowicz was based on his belief that the art he produced required the support of and constant interchange with the highly creative individuals with whom he surrounded himself,” the curator wrote. I think that it had taken the young man so long to find a place where he felt he belonged, that he felt a need to work alongside others from the same community—finally, here were people who understood him and whom he understood. In fact, in his short career—it was only about 10 years—Wojnarowicz became a leader in the East Village art and culture world. Many younger artists found in him an inspiration and a model who didn’t succumb to art stardom, and today acknowledge his influence on their work.

The artist was generous not only with his time, appearing as a model in the works of photographers like Hujar and others, performing in films and videos for friends, speaking at rallies and protests, but he donated his work to benefits and gave money to less prosperous artists to the extent that he was often broke. Though he remained an outsider to mainstream society, as much by his own nature and choice as by establishment exclusion, he saw himself as part of a community of artists, a citizen of the East Village, and a native of the gay United States—and he supported these and other societies of which he considered himself part. Wojnarowicz was a true idealist: his art wasn’t for making money—though he took it—it was for telling his stories or making his political points. I worked with Leo Shapiro on a collage performance which included texts by many writers, including playwrights Karen Malpede and Charles Mee, and one contributor was David Wojnarowicz. (I never met the artist; he died the following year and was already too ill to attend rehearsals or meetings.) His concern for others was genuine and deeply felt and it extended to animal life of all kinds, even what Cynthia Carr labeled “the unlovable insects and reptiles.” (Wojnarowicz confessed that when he was living on the street, he shoplifted animals from pet shops, freeing them in Central Park and turning the halfway house in which he stayed into a menagerie until the residents threatened to throw him out.) Lucy Lippard, writer and curator, noted that Wojnarowicz displayed “extraordinary honesty and responsible humanity (is it too corny to call it love?) that was inseparable from the work.” His sole purpose, he said, was “to be understood and acknowledged”:

We can all affect each other, by being open enough to make each other feel less alienated. We all are able to have a profound [e]ffect on each other, a positive effect that sustains us . . . .

Félix Guattari, French activist and philosopher, wrote of the artist:

The authenticity of his work on the imaginary plane is quite exceptional. His “method” consists of using his fantasies and above all his dreams . . . in order to forge himself a language and a cartography enabling him at all times to reconstruct his own existence. It is from here that the extraordinary vigor of his work lies.

Guattari concluded that Wojnarowicz “attempts to create imaginary weapons to resist established powers,” but the artist’s overarching goal, “the most meaningful thing,” was “to make somebody else feel less alienated.” His artistic matrix, however, wasn’t beauty or even aesthetics in general. He had no interest in being “decorative.” Wojnarowicz wasn’t interested in design or composition—he hadn’t had any training in that anyway. He wanted to communicate, to show people what the world he saw looked like—even if they didn’t want to see it. He was a habitual truth-teller, even as a second-grader when he learned that everyone dies: “I remember running down the block and to every kid that I saw I said, ‘We all die, one day we’re all going to be dead!’” The kids cried and their parents decided Wojnarowicz was a sick child—because he thought everyone should know the truth. After his AIDS diagnosis, his message became not resignation but rage. As the New York Times’ Woodward concluded in his contemplation of Wojnarowicz’s work, “Choler . . . was his style.” In a 1990 interview, the artist said, “Somewhere in me, I feel that I don’t want to be polite. I don’t want that pressure of dying in a very clean way, making it easy for people. Somewhere, I want the world to have my rage and reactions.” (It was this element in Wojnarowicz’s work that Holland Cotter felt was excised from Hide/Seek when A Fire in My Belly was excluded.)

Wojnarowicz returned over and over to the same images, like the crawling ants in the video, in different applications in order to wave the red flag and I, for one, found his work disturbing, provocative, confounding, frightening, intriguing, and always, always moving. The America Wojnarowicz depicted, though, was a scary place. “When I was told I’d contracted this virus it didn’t take me too long to realize that I’d contracted a diseased society as well,” wrote the artist. As Marcia Tucker, founding director of the New Museum, wrote in her forward to the Fever catalogue, “In an articulate howl of pain, rage, and longing, Wojnarowicz spoke of a world so dark, so bitter, and so pervasive that its very existence was denied by those who had not experienced it firsthand.” Nevertheless, Wojnarowicz would say, it should be witnessed.

[As long as this profile is, it’s incomplete. David Wojnarowicz, as an artist, as a writer, and as a man, is so complex and his work so nuanced and layered that I have left out volumes that can be said about him. For that I apologize, and I urge interested readers to seek out his art, his books, and the hundreds of article by or about him. Wojnarowicz’s ideas and his work may be difficult, even harsh, but his sincerity is assured, and I guarantee you will find a fascinating subject and a compelling figure. I can tell you that once I started to learn about him from the footprints he left, I regretted not having had the chance at least to meet him when our paths almost crossed in 1991.

[I had intended to mention Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture in the Wojnarowicz article, but there was never the place for even a brief report. So I’ll do it here, as an addendum. To be honest, I don’t have a lot to say about the exhibit. First of all, between the reviews in the New York Times (“Sexuality in Modernism: The (Partial) History,” 11 Dec. 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/arts/design/11hide.html) and the Washington Post (“National Portrait Gallery's 'Hide/Seek' finds a frame for sexual identity,” 5 Nov. 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/04/AR2010110407182.html), the critics, Holland Cotter and Blake Gopnik respectively, said anything I might have and I find I have little to add. Second, the show was very large: 105 pieces covering the end of the 19th century through the first decade of the 21st—essentially a history of 20th-century gay portraiture. Third, since most of the works were photographs and I’m not enamored of art photography, I can’t really comment critically on the art. Generally, however, I agree with Cotter that the exhibit was focused on “stars” and “Hall-of-Fame” art, but since I’m less familiar with this field than he is, that didn’t bother me so much. I was glad to see some of the Thomas Eakinses, Romare Beardons, Jasper Johnses, and Andy Warhols, even if I might also have been awakened to new possibilities if less-well-known artists’ portraits had been displayed. As it was, I didn’t know the work of such artists as Romaine Brooks, Cass Bird, or Minor White anyway, so I was introduced to new artistic experiences anyway. The controversy over A Fire in My Belly notwithstanding, though, I ended up feeling that the sheer volume of work in Hide/Seek made it hard for me to see the overall point of the exhibit. Cotter phrased this as “Work of gay artists was fundamental to the invention of American modernism” or “Difference had created the mainstream” and Gopnik expressed the idea as “Being gay—or being straight and paying close attention to the twists of gender and desire—makes you a better, more careful observer”; but in the welter of photographs, drawings, paintings, videos, and one or two sculptures, what I carried away was that here was a collection of intriguing work by even more intriguing artists. (I also found, like I did at the wonderful Dada exhibit some years ago, that I had to read all or most of the panels accompanying the portraits because, one, I knew so little about the work and, two, it was all so interesting and revealing.) There were some real surprises, like Men Reading (1914) by commercial illustrator Joseph Christian Leyendecker. Approaching the painting of two young, handsome men, impeccably dressed, it’s immediately reminiscent of the classic Arrow Shirt ads, and it was fascinating to learn that Leyendecker was, in fact, the designer of that ad campaign—the painting was the original ad—and that one of the men, who in context are obviously a gay couple, was modeled from the artist’s own partner. Ironically, a few of the items in the exhibit weren’t great or even good art; their inclusion in the show owed more to their message or, if you will, political impact than their artistic quality. The show was sometimes more about history than aesthetics. The excision of the Wojnarowicz video echoed and underscored that. One other point came out from Hide/Seek: The presence of works by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, a clandestine couple in the middle of the last century, seems to say that self-identification as gay has become more openly acceptable since Johns permitted his work to appear here (Rauschenberg died in 2008) as a sign that what once had to be hidden now didn’t have to be. Sadly, the message of the administration of the gallery and the Smithsonian is that some things still have to be.

[As a result of the removal of A Fire in My Belly, several artists tried to remove their work from Hide/Seek (the museum wouldn't comply with the requests) and a number of donors have withdrawn support from the Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian. Martin Sullivan, the curator of the gallery, and G. Wayne Clough, the secretary of the Smithsonian have been forced to justify their actions and have expressed regrets over their decision. The video has been made available on the ‘Net and some galleries and museums around the country, such as New York’s New Museum and Transformer in Washington, have scheduled showings in protest. In London, the Tate Modern, like the Smithsonian a national museum, held a tribute to Wojnarowicz on 22 January at which several of his videos, including Fire, were shown. In the latest move, the Brooklyn Museum has announced plans to remount Hide/Seek, including Fire in My Belly, in cooperation with the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington State, possibly before the end of 2011. As if predicting his own future impact, the artist declared: “Do not give me a memorial if I die. Give me a demonstration.” It seems he got one.]