John Boehner Fires the Opening Salvo

I had the rather auspicious fortune to be in Washington, DC for several days this past week when the opening salvo of a new round in the Culture Wars was fired by Congressman John Boehner. Boehner's ire had been raised when he was contact by Catholic League president William Donohue after Donohue had issued a press release regarding what he called, "the vile video that showed large ants crawling all over Jesus on the Cross." In light of what he considered to be the blaspheming of the Christian religion by a public institution Donohue asked that the House and Senate Appropriations Committees "reconsider future funding" for the National Portrait Gallery, who had included the video in question "A Fire In My Belly" by the late artist David Wojnarowicz in its exhibition "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture." Donohue is, of course, no stranger to uninformed highly inflammatory public remarks. Among other things he has previously blamed the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal on homosexuality and claimed that a number of individuals previously and continually abused by priests when they were young were in fact not abused; since they repeatedly allowed the abuse to take place they must have enjoyed it according to Donohue. So we should not be surprised that this self appointed religious watchdog is again rabidly on the attack.


I was in Washington ironically enough serving as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal agency who had come under attack two decades earlier from Senator Jesse Helms and other conservative religious groups and politicians for having given funds to an institution that had exhibited Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ," a large scale color photograph of a crucifix submerged in glowing yellow liquid. From Christ in urine to Christ with ants, the connection was an uncanny one. The National Portrait Gallery furor indeed echoes the controversy surrounding the exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe's work at the Corcoran Gallery (also in Washington, DC) in 1989, an exhibition which was closed after conservative intimidation and then mounted by the WPA Gallery, also located in DC. The Endowment itself was subsequently eviscerated by increasing funding cuts and its individual artist program--which also came under severe conservative scrutiny--was eliminated entirely. The arts have been vulnerable and drawn apart from the larger society ever since. As an artist who lived through that earlier moment the eerie feeling of déja vu was unmistakable and unnerving.












On the first day of business during an extended lunch break, on the recommendation of Endowment staff, I decided to visit the National Portrait Gallery to take in the exhibitions, including "Hide Seek." Little did I know that it was the very day in which the Wojnarowicz video work had been removed from the exhibition. I sensed that something was up because the overzealous security guards appeared to be on high alert when I arrived in the exhibition space. Unlike the other exhibitions I had passed through, the gallery containing the show seemed staffed by a few museum guards too many, one of whom seemed to always appear, hovering too nearby as I moved around through the exhibition. My first thought upon taking in the work was that this was decidedly unlike any exhibition I had ever seen at the NPG before. An accompanying exhibition "The Struggle for Justice" (which one passes through on the way to the "Hide/Seek" show) was equally provocative. Indeed it was that show, with its incisive texts panels, that first clued me in to the fact that this was a very different kind of NPG, one with a more revisionist and inclusive reading of the many objects it was showing, particularly those of the modern and contemporary eras.


Looking at a portrait of the blues singer Bessie Smith (one of a large group of African American portraits made by Carl Van Vechten that I am very familiar with) I proceeded to read the accompanying wall text: "Van Vechten's descriptions of African Americans were of the romantic racist variety, in which they represented elemental and primitive qualities absent in the falsity of modern society. Yet in his photographs he recovered and preserved the dignity and humanity of people such as the great blues singer Bessie Smith..." Well, I'll be! What a straightforward critical dissection of one man's varied intent. Other labels introduced a similar level of criticality into ones encounter with the works. Strategically placed near the small and elegant portrait of Smith is an imposing portrait painting of Van Vechten by Romaine Brooks, here brought down to a more manageable and humanly imperfect size by the aforementioned text which separates Van Vechten from Smith. It appeared to be yet another institutional situation where younger and more critically responsive and ambitious curators were being allowed to step forward and shape the viewing experience and rewrite art and cultural history in less than benign ways. So I was primed by the time I moved on to the next gallery where "Hide/Seek" was installed.


Entering the gallery I immediately located a number of works by artist friends, including Lyle Ashton Harris, Catherine Opie, and Glenn Ligon along with works by artists ranging from Duane Michals, Keith Haring, Nan Goldin, Beauford Delaney, Paul Cadmus, Agnes Martin, Charles Demuth, Thomas Eakins (whose Salutat graced the exhibition entrance wall), Berenice Abbott, Marsden Hartley and others from both the modern and contemporary eras. Wojnarowicz was represented too, both in his own self portrait photograph (Untitled/face in dirt) and in Peter Hujar's portrait of him. And while much of the work was familiar, it was here contextualized in ways that foregrounded what had long been left out of the discourse surrounding the work: the sexuality identity of either the artist, the subjects or both, and the ways in which the work simultaneously embodied an aesthetic of both the object and the sexualized self; identity here became as much subject as the actual and nominal subject of the work itself creating a much richer and provocative experience of these objects. It was a lively, freewheeling, and thoughtful show, with the theme of difference and desire providing a thematic anchor that allowed it to hang together coherently. Indeed it was the lifting of the veil of sexual identity--particularly with the earlier works that had seldom been thus contextualized--that provided the rationale for the show itself to be brought into existence. As such co-curators Jonathan Katz and David Ward have produced a long overdue breakthrough exhibition.

And then came William Donohue, roused by a story about the exhibition from CNS (Conservative News Service). After being duly alerted incoming House Speaker Boehner and incoming House Majority leader Eric Cantor proceeded to issue their own separate but consistent hyperbolic and opportunistic statements...without either one having ever having once set foot in the museum or the exhibition, which neither seemed to have thought an odd thing, as if having and airing opinions about things one hasn't actually experienced is the norm. Said Boehner, "American families have a right to expect better from recipients of taxpayer funds in a tough economy. Smithsonian officials should either acknowledge the mistake and correct it, or be prepared to face tough scrutiny beginning in January when the new majority in the House moves to end the job-killing spending spree in Washington.” Cantor followed up with, “This is an outrageous use of tax payer money and an obvious attempt to offend Christians during the Christmas season,” said Cantor. “When a museum receives taxpayer money, the taxpayers have a right to expect that the museum will uphold common standards of decency. The museum should pull the exhibit and be prepared for serious questions come budget time.” The Smithsonian's Secretary G. Wayne Clough then responded to this attack by removing the offending video from the exhibition, with the consent of NPG's director Paul Martin, saying that it was creating an unnecessary distraction that was taking attention away from the rest of the exhibition. Director Martin himself issued a statement attempting to explain the true nature of the exhibition and offering reassurance that nothing more would be removed from the exhibition, which continues through February. So with this attack by the right and the tepid response on the part of the museum the next round of the culture wars--and the unfortunately muted instiutional terms of engagement--were initiated.

I found all of this out when I opened my hotel room door the morning after my visit to the museum and picked up The Washington Post laying on the floor in the hallway. Reading the front page article by Post art critic Blake Gopnik (who has done a very admirable job in continuing to report this story while bringing a high degree of critical acumen and much needed perspective to the conversation) over breakfast the palpable tension at NPG the previous day now made sense. I wondered too what the art world response would be. Other than Gopnik, who seemed to fully grasp at once the full dimension of this attack, public response was initially oddly muted in relation to the level of the offense. Into this breach stepped Transformer Gallery, a small Washington, DC alternative space headed by Victoria Reis. With perhaps 100 square feet of exhibition space and a window "project" space to their name, Transformer didn't let its small size stop them, becoming "the little gallery that could." While others dithered (cowered?), Transformer immediately sent out a call to action, asking supporters of the arts community to assemble at the gallery on Thursday evening to march in silent protest to the National Portrait Gallery where a vigil would be held. They also started a continuous screening of the banned video in their window, vowing to keep showing it in a continuous loop until the NPG reinstates it in the show. Their call to arms resulted in approximately seventy-five artists and others meeting at the gallery for the evening march to the NPG. I was there at the announced 5:30 assembly time as people slowly arrived. Picking up a few others along the way, the group eventually numbered maybe 100 by the time we had marched from 14th and P Street to 7th and G, the front of the National Portrait Gallery. With news cameras, reporters, and photographers bearing witness the silent vigil was held.

So what happens next? That is the big and most meaningful question. The Republicans have let it be known that the arts are once again squarely in their sights. They intend to once again isolate the arts community from the rest of the larger social community, making them out to be the odd and perverse miscreants of society, rather than as much a part of the social fabric as everyone else. That is why it is imperative that this assault be framed not as merely an assault on the arts or an attack on a particular institution. It needs to be loudly proclaimed for what it is: an all out assault on the American people. The exhibition had been seen by over 10,000 people without a single complaint before it became the latest political football to be kicked around. Yet Boehner and his ilk do not believe that the American people have the wherewithal to determine for themselves what they do or don't want to see. They would make themselves the self appointed de facto curators of the American creative and intellectual imagination. There can be no "us" and "them" this time. That is what Boehner and the conservative right are attempting to do, to divide the American people along their own self serving fault line. It is no coincidence that this assault is taking place at the very same moment that Washington is wavering on repealing "don't ask don't tell" in the military. As long as any of us can be made to appear to be less than a part of the American family none of us are safe. That is the only story. Let's hope the art community gets it right this time and doesn't participate in its own self isolation. We need to assert our rights as Americans, not merely as artists. In that way we leave no loose threads in the social fabric for Boehner, Cantor, and Donohue to then use to rip us apart from our neighbors, doing the ongoing dirty conservative work of divide and conquer. The right speaks with one voice and from one script; we need to start doing the same.

Statement from the Association of Art Museum Directors on the NPG Censorship Imbroglio

The Association of Art Museum Directors, which oversees practices in North American museums and develops guidelines for art museums, issued a response Friday to the controversy at the National Portrait Gallery.

The Gallery, part of the Smithsonian Institution, removed a video from its current exhibition "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" on Tuesday after it received protests about its content from Capitol Hill, Catholic and conservative critics. The video by the late artist David Wojnarowicz contained an 11 minute view of ants crawling on a Christ-like figure. Local artists have marched outside the museum to show their disapproval of the action.

The AAMD statement said: "It is extremely regrettable that the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery, a major American art museum with a long history of public service in the arts, has been pressured into removing a work of art from its exhibition "Hide/Seek."

"More disturbing than the Smithsonian's decision to remove this work of art is the cause: unwarranted and uninformed censorship from politicans and other public figures, many of whom, by their own admission, have seen neither the exhibition as a whole or this specific work.

"The AAMD believes that freedom of expression is essential to the health and welfare of our communities and our nation. In this case, that takes the form of the rights and opportunities of art museums to present works of art that express different points of view.

"Discouraging the exchange of ideas undermines the principles of freedom of expression, plurality and tolerance on which our nation was founded. This includes the forcible withdrawal of a work of art from within an exhibition--and the threatening of an institution's funding sources.

"The Smithsonian Institution is one of the nation's largest organizations dedicated to the dissemination and diffusion of knowledge--an essential element of democracy in America. We urge members of Congress and the public to continue to sustain and support the Smithsonian's activities, without the political pressure that curtails freedom of speech."


Photographs (from top): Demonstration at National Portrait Gallery, photograph © Jacquelyn Martin/AP; House Majority Leader designate John Boehner; the late Senator Jesse Helms; installation view, "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture;" "Bessie Smith" by Carl Van Vechten, courtesy Library of Congress; Lyle Ashton Harris, "Brotherhood, Crossroads, Etcetera," © Lyle Ashton Harris; Bill Donohue, courtesy CNN; Transformer Gallery, photograph © Jacquelyn Martin/AP


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November 21st, 2012

Birmingham on My Mind

September 15, 1963 - Fifty Years Later

One night, many years ago, a book appeared in my suburban Jamaica, NY home. My parents had attended a lecture that James Baldwin had given at our church, Calvary Baptist Church, and had returned with the book in hand.

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On The Passing of Two Giants

This has been a difficult month, what with the loss of poet and activist Louis Reyes Rivera, and even more recently the esteemed artist Elizabeth Catlett.

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Reshaping The Art/Museum/Public Experience

The past few months have been interesting ones for those interested in the ways in which art practice, public institutional practice and their various audiences interact.

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The recent passing of Dr. Billy Taylor was marked by notices of his contribution to jazz music as both musician and advocate.

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Recent Censorship Recalls Spirit of an Earlier Era

In 1936 Adolf Hitler, German Chancellor, instructed Adolf Ziegler, president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, to put together an “exhibition of shame”, depicting the “deterioration of art since 1910”.

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John Boehner Fires the Opening Salvo

I had the rather auspicious fortune to be in Washington, DC for several days this past week when the opening salvo of a new round in the Culture Wars was fired by Congressman John Boehner.

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A Different Kind of MoMA?

On a recent trip to New York I had one of those rare epiphany like moments where I found myself standing in front of a group of works that spoke clearly to how the work we do as artists might actually matter in the world.

National Endowment for the Arts chair Rocco Landesman was in Chicago recently, holding a series of meetings, gatherings, and conversations with various institutions and the arts community.

I was the speaker at the Yale University School of Art Commencement this past Monday. The School of Art ceremony followed the school wide ceremony on the Old Campus where, among others, Aretha Franklin fittingly received an honorary Doctor of Music degree.

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The Society of Photographic Education Meets in Philadelphia

The Society for Photographic Education held its national conference this past week in Philadelphia.

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Published here are the remarks I gave during my opening Keynote Address at the College Art Association Conference Convocation here in Chicago on Wednesday evening.

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The 60s and 70s Redux: All Power to the People

I could not have imagined when I was sixteen and seventeen years old selling The Black Panther newspaper on Jamaica Avenue in Queens, NY that forty years later I would finally meet the man who not only visually shaped the paper but also created the ico

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A Sublime Experience in Worcester, MA

I had the opportunity during an unusually busy month to catch the curated exhibition project by sculptor Rona Pondick.

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When I was a kid the calm evening air would sometimes be dramatically and suddenly broken by my father's excited shout. "There's a blue on!" he would cry out from the living room.

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[Note: Today I am turning this space over to my good friend the writer and playwright Ifa Bayeza. Ifa's critically acclaimed play "The Ballad of Emmett Till" completed a successful run at the Goodman Theater here in Chicago a year ago, where it premiered.

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Where the Past Meets the Present

I was in New York recently, the East Village actually, and from my usual perch at BBar on East 4th Street and the Bowery found myself reflecting on the rapid pace of change in that neighborhood. I had worked on St.

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Where People Go to Be Themselves in Public

Cities are composed of diverse communities. The makeup of these communities is determined by everything from ethnicity, culture, economics, patterns of migration and more than a little bit of overt and covert social engineering.

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Frank Gohlke's Queens Photographs

Photographer Frank Gohlke was in Chicago recently as my invited guest at Columbia College Chicago.

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When Artists Rock the [Art] House

I was asked to give a presentation for the Education Committee at the Museum of Contemporary Art a few weeks ago. The committee is comprised of educational and curatorial staff, along with a few trustees and patrons.

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Art and Youth - A Powerful Combination

One day when I was in grade school, my class took a field trip to Carnegie Hall, then the home of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

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University Moves to Close Rose Art Museum

That sound you may have heard the past two days rippling through the art world was the sound of a collective shudder, as Brandeis University's trustees unexpectedly announced that it would sell off some 6,000 modern and contemporary artworks in the museum's

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Barack Obama's historic ascendency as the 44th president of the United States certainly signal a huge paradigm shift, one that has numerous national and global implications.

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With Barack Obama's inauguration as the nation's forty-fourth president a scant five days away, excitement and anticipation are building as we enter a moment of profound change and potential paradigm shifts.

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I particpated in an Artists at Work panel discussion at the Chicago Cultural Center three nights ago.

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I was in Nashville, TN for a couple of days last week, where I gave a lecture at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts and spent time at Fisk University visiting the storied Carl Van Vechten Gallery, and viewing some of the partially restored Aaron Douglas murals on campus.

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How One Institution Has Made A Huge Difference

I received the recent issue of Contact Sheet, the publication produced by Light Work that documents its programs, resident artists, and exhibitions.

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Barack Obama's Election - The View from Chicago 

My son and I went to Grant Park on Tuesday night for the election night Barack Obama rally and victory celebration, standing for hours amongst a veritable sea of our fellow Chicagoans.

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Believe In Change

Sarah Palin (with the complicity of John McCain) is doing her best to stir the pots of racism and xenophobia in the waning days of their failing campaign.

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Young Artists Take the Lead in Making a Difference

A group of former students from California College of the Arts have gotten together to form Art for Obama, an online auction of photographs to raise campaign funds for the Obama/Biden ticket.

A Beautifully Poetic Show

I haven't written anything on the blog for a few weeks, but not for want of things to write about. I recently attended the opening of a wonderful exhibition that prompted this entry.

Photographing Barack

I've had the opportunity over the years to do commissioned portraits of a number of people.

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Opening Up The Curatorial Process

I've been in Baltimore, MD for the past three weeks working at the Walters Art Museum on a curatorial project with twelve Baltimore area teenagers that will culminate in an exhibition at the museum in December entitled The Portrait Re/Examined.

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The Difference Between Making It Up and Seeing It

Richard "Chip" Benson (seen above in an earlier Lee Friedlander photograph) once said something when I was a graduate student in the Photography program at Yale that has stayed with me all these years.

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Photographs of Transformation

I've been looking at the Paul Fusco photographs made on June 8, 1968 which were recently published by Aperture, and exhibited at James Danziger Gallery.

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Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Photo © by Jason Smikle
About Me
About Me
Chicago, IL, United States
I began making photographs in 1969 after seeing the "Harlem On My Mind" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had inherited my first camera the year before from my godfather Artie Miller when I was fifteen years old. I began my first project "Harlem, USA" as a direct result of that exhibition and my own family's history in the Harlem community. Born in Queens, NY my formal training began by apprenticing to local commercial and fashion photographer Levy J. Smith and then later studying at the School of Visual Arts with Larry Siegel, William Broecker, Shelley Rice and Sid Kaplan. I completed my undergraduate work at Empire State College under the guidance of Mel Rosenthal and Joe Goldberg and did my MFA at Yale University in the graduate photography program under the watchful and rigorous eyes of Tod Papageorge and Richard Benson, along with Lois Conner, Frank Gohlke, Susan Kismaric and Joel Sternfeld. Classes with Robert Farris Thompson and Michael Romer significantly rounded out my graduate work. A former Guggenheim and NEA fellow, I am currently Professor of Art and Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where I have taught since 1998.
"What's Going On?"
"What's Going On?"
Marvin Gaye's signature song "What's Going On?"--a musical critique of a world gone off track--provides an apt framework for looking at the role of art and cultural production in the larger society.

With so much art being made at all ends of the market, it's always a good thing for artists to look both forward and back in trying to access the role that art can play in a larger society, a society that actually exists largely outside of the distorting bubble of the Art World. When one of my students recently answered the question of why she was in school in an MFA program with, "So I can be a part of the system," I knew it was time for a reassessment and a forum from which to look at the various histories in my own little corner of the art and "real" world.

Artists used to be the ones who led the charge to challenge the system; they were the proverbial "fly in the buttermilk," the monkey wrench that mucked up the system and made it act, function, and exist in new ways. Artists were the ones who created paradigms of everything the system was not. James Baldwin once said, "Artists are here to disturb the peace."

This blog will range freely over a range of issues, highlighting individuals, events, and ideas that provide a catalyst for thought and reflection. Hopefully for younger artists it might provide a sense of a world both in and outside of the so-called art world, and hopefully provoke a conversation about the relationship between the two while offering a thought or two about just what ones work might be about as one attempts to engage both history and the contemporary moment.

For others this blog might serve as a window into how one particular artist, after three decades of practice, sees and thinks about the vast world of human social and aesthetic experience. Consider this my own small commentary or my brain periodically laid bare for your perusal and consideration.

Feel free to use the "Comments" button to share your thoughts and responses if so provoked.
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