Under Pressure: Revered American Academic and Cultural Institutions in the Cross Hairs
Did you ever wonder why powerful people love art? Let’s rephrase that. Society’s elites have not necessarily shown a love of art. However, what they have done, consistently and undeniably, is demonstrate a knowledge of its role in their quest for and execution of power. Let’s zero in on one “high art” genre (of many), portraiture. A portrait is not merely an image of a person, it is a representation of a historically specific individual. Unlike most, the genre is characterized by an economic relationship between an artist who has typically been commissioned and paid by a patron, the person who hires the artist to make not merely a likeness, but a flattering one of the sitter, the person being represented. It is due to this financial relationship and the power that the patron wields over the artist, that the sitter (who has often also been the patron) can demand to look good. Is it any wonder then, that emperors, kings, queens, presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, and celebrities (from the notorious to the infamous) have laid out large sums to memorialize themselves, their loved ones, business and political affiliates, and families?
But the power of representation does not merely reside in images of human beings, but also across other genres like landscape art, religious and historical images, nudes, still life, and allegorical works. Indeed, many genres of art have been used to impose geographical boundaries, to bolster or undermine political allegiances, to secure property, and to displace populations. But they have also been exploited to determine national belonging through representations of ideal(ized) citizenship, while delegitimizing some populations as alien, illegal and often, less than human. Transatlantic Slavery could never have transpired for four hundred years without the European textual and visual control of definitions of blackness.
All of this is more important than ever as the federal government of our southern neighbour wields the levers of power against cultural institutions like the Smithsonian Museums and the Kennedy Center and academic ones like University of Pennsylvania, Brown, Columbia, and Harvard (for starters). While it is obviously true that many universities and colleges in the USA, Canada, and elsewhere have aligned themselves with liberal politics, it is also factual that the overwhelming lack of racial diversity in their upper administrations and tenured and tenure-track faculty ranks (the most secure and powerful positions) belies their supposed universal democratic values and unwavering commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. It is also true that there are other ways to equalize the balance of political allegiance on university campuses beside clawing back funding.
One such way is how the rich have always done business, through their pocketbooks. Plainly put, if rich Republicans (in the USA) and or Conservatives (in Canada) want to influence campus politics they can easily do so not just by devoting philanthropic contributions to their universities of choice, but by directing those dollars into the work, research, and causes which they hold dear. But this is not the only way that things are unfolding now.
Instead, we have seen a heavy-handed government intervention in some of America’s most revered, lauded, and celebrated arts and cultural institutions, interventions which (depending upon the outcomes) will almost certainly cause reputational harm (national and international) as well as diminish and potentially destroy programming, performances, and collections. These interventions are aimed at dismantling research, programming, and exhibitions which accurately represent American (continental and national) histories of imperialism, thereby ensuring an ignorant populace who is incapable of understanding Transatlantic Slavery as a part of American (Canadian, Mexican, fill in the blanks) history and connectedly, the centuries-long tentacles of racism against black populations, and the need for atonement, redress, and reconciliation.
If you have ever visited the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., you know that its lower floors are devoted to a rigorous exploration of Transatlantic Slavery. (By the way, despite the parallel Canadian history of imperialism, colonialism, and Transatlantic Slavery, and the related history of African presence in Canada since the 1600s, no comparable institution exists in Canada. Not even close!) As you rise through the imposing building, moving through time and themes, you also inevitably encounter narratives about the pervasive institutional and everyday racism inflicted upon black populations in the USA through the racial violence of segregation in education, sports, music, and transportation and the domestic terrorism of lynching. To narrate these histories without reference to racist brutality and violence would be to lie!
Of course, federal governments consistently use their power to direct, intervene in, and manipulate national cultures, supposedly for the good of a nation. Canadians would not have ended up with such a limited national art canon full of a certain type of (white male) landscape painter unless the first director of the National Gallery of Canada, Eric Brown, had orchestrated the phenomenal rise of the Group of Seven. But such interventions inevitably create outcomes which (re)produce prejudice by elevating some artists, cultural forms, art objects, and histories, while blocking and silencing others. They also interject bias by hiding objects and erasing histories which recall troubling historical events and by refusing to relate complex narratives that accurately place their nation’s histories in a difficult light.
But this is not the first time the American federal government has battled over art for the nation. Prior to the Civil War, one of its leading artists, the neoclassical sculptor Hiram Powers (1805-1873), was commissioned to create a work for the Capitol. From his Florentine studio, the Vermont-born Powers conceptualized an allegorical female figure of America (c. 1850-1854).
Hiram Powers’ America (c. 1850-1854)
It stood, partially draped in classicizing robes with one arm raised, poised to hold a liberty cap (pileus), symbol of manumission for enslaved peoples in ancient Rome. But the liberty cap was a problem. Why? Because for the southern enslavers who did not define black people as humans or citizens, slavery was not an injustice that had to be rectified and the liberty cap was not an appropriate symbol to marshal for the cause. Combined with the chain under her foot, the allegory’s symbolism set off a fire storm amongst the slave holding southern politicians in Washington, D.C. Powers’ impossible task was therefore to sculpt a national allegory of America without reference to the stain of slavery which they had yet to relinquish. And so began a nine-year battle through which Powers was repeatedly forced to justify and reconfigure the allegory’s symbolism in a bid to get the federal government to accept his sculpture.
As the paper trail of his nineteenth-century correspondence demonstrates, the delays and challenges that ensued under northern President Franklin Pierce transformed Powers from a fence-sitter who wrote disdainfully about the rabidness of Garrisonian abolitionists (a slight against the influential white abolitionist William Llyod Garrison), into a rather outspoken abolitionist himself. Where he had once thought that the evil of slavery would “die out on its own,” the pain of having one of his most beloved sculptures repeatedly rejected by his countrymen provoked his disgust and motivated his political transformation.
The lesson? Dramatic political transformation arises in the most trying of times.