Existing comment:
INTRODUCTION
The American University Museum recently acquired 9,000 works from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, a Washington institution that closed its doors to the public in 2014. Together with our Watkins Collection we have an especially strong cache of works by Washington regional artists. While curating a show of Washington paintings drawn from our growing collections, I became interested in how my memories of a formative time in my life might be affecting my choice of artwork for this exhibition.
This most influential time for baby boomers like me has been referred to as "the long sixties" by both National Gallery of Art curator James Meyer, and sixties radical Tom Hayden.1 Meyer references Tom Hayden's book, The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama (2011), as one source for his use of the term.2 I have identified my personal "long sixties" as the years between 1957 and 1982. My intention is to foreground the effect of my experiences and memories of this important time in my life in my selection and present interpretation of paintings from that period.
I hope to add transparency to my curatorial process. Every exhibition necessarily presents the intersection of curators' memories, knowledge, and experiences with the available artwork, limitations on physical space and financial resources, and their understanding of contemporary contexts. The intersection of these elements affects what is exhibited as well as how it is experienced and interpreted by the viewer.
I began my process by limiting my selection to paintings in our Watkins and Corcoran Legacy Collections. Months into the process, it became clear that these limitations were creating absences in the exhibition. My choice of medium, together with choices made by those who collected and contributed art, and what works our institutions eventually decided to accession, were pre-determining the exhibition's shape and content. Of course, every exhibition has its absences. Every exhibition involves making choices and compromises. But when I finally opened the exhibition to works outside of the museum's collections, I was able to address a few of the more egregious under-representations.
It is the curator's job to deliver an aesthetic, emotional, meaningful experience, one that illuminates for engaged viewers how their own lives and times are intertwined with, and shaped by, their experience of the past and their perception of the present. Every exhibition is an opportunity to address what we can see of the past from our contemporary perspective, and vice-versa. My perspective includes the acknowledgement of persistent, systemic gender and racial injustice, bias, and violence that was present in the fifties, laid bare in the sixties, and continues to the present day. It is clear to me that the defining characteristic of Washington art in our collections made during "the long sixties," and still its operative tendency, is an adherence to aesthetic and commercial constraints that encourage artists to remain silent when their voices are most needed in the face of bias and violence that has not gone away. |