The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,32

and rebellious toward its limitations. Low-income people who discover how entangled and held down they are in its divisive economic grasp loathe it. Scholars unintimidated by its cling are disassembling it. We are becoming more industrious in substituting accuracy, other perspectives, other narratives in place of phantom histories, polluted politics, and media manipulation.

I am pleased that my appearance coincides with the exhibition of African American artists whose eyes encountered at every level the stereotyping and visual debasement prevalent elsewhere. Through their art, their taste, their genius we see African American subjects as individuals, as cherished, as understood. Viewing this display of their force, their life-giving properties, their humanity, their joy, their will ought to be enough to forestall the reach of racism’s tentacles. Ought to be enough to protect us from its uninformed, uneducated, relentlessly toxic touch. Just as the commitment of this community ought to be enough. Don’t you think? Thank you.

Harlem on My Mind

Contesting Memory—Meditation on Museums, Culture, and Integration

TODAY’S DEBATE on the place, power, and purpose of museums as reservoirs of cultural memory and/or a source of community integration is vital. Such debates are endemic to museums. The history of the Louvre itself bears witness to radical attacks and passionate rescue, yet it survives as a revered model and indispensable example of the universal survey museum. As Neil Harris writes, “The size, wealth, internal arrangements, and architecture of museums, as well as the inherent decontextualization of museum exhibits, had attracted hostility in the nineteenth century and certainly in the early twentieth century. The gargantuan temples of the early twentieth century were labeled by some critics ‘dignified disasters’; their organization of exhibits…a ‘Minotaur’s labyrinth,’…museum policies were condemned as socially aloof and indifferent. Some educators fumed about museum failures to acknowledge contemporary needs and interests, while others condemned large-scale collecting as the poisoned fruit of capitalism.” Furthermore, he notes, “museums have been labeled racist, revisionist, hegemonic, elitist, politically correct, mercenary, greedy, and self-serving.” Why, then, one wonders, are museums experiencing what can only be called a “boom,” as larger constituencies are solicited, as revenues increase along with the sale of goods and services that “blockbuster” shows produce, as patrons and funding sources compete with one another for standing and generosity to museums? Transitions are taking place, not least of which is recognition that the “foreigner is already home.” And the mission of today’s museums takes into account their claims.

Curators, artists, directors, art critics, and historians recognize the urgency of these deliberations anew. Their articles fill journals; boards of traditional museums reconsider structure and content; recent arrivals in the landscape of museums shape their acquisitions to accommodate the demands of new or underrepresented audiences.

The provenance of one such demand for representation in the United States provides a map that dramatizes both the vulnerabilities and opportunities under discussion.

As the New York scene in the sixties roiled with fresh visions within the art world (abstract expressionism, pop art), the Metropolitan Museum in New York welcomed its new director, Thomas P. F. Hoving. A medieval scholar become city parks commissioner, he was excited about introducing new projects into an institution some believed had become moribund. One of his projects was an exhibit designed to reflect the culture of Harlem—an African American neighborhood in New York City famous for its writers, poets, painters, musicians, and nightclub life. The exhibition, announced in 1968 and called Harlem on My Mind, opened at the Metropolitan Museum in January 1969 as a fifteen-gallery portrayal of Harlem history, identity, and cultural tradition consisting of photographs, murals, slides, films, documentary recordings, music, and memorabilia. Encouraged and directed by Allon Schoener, the visual arts director of the New York State Council on the Arts, Hoving mounted what they both described as a “total ethnic environmental show” covering Harlem from 1900 to 1968. Using the then-radical exhibition techniques including photographs on the ceiling and as murals, soundscapes and television, the show paralleled an earlier one in which Schoener was involved: The Lower East Side: Portal to American Life at the Jewish Museum—a paean to immigration in America. Great as the enthusiasm for the Harlem show was in many quarters and funding sources, there were rumblings of discontent before the show opened: there were accusations of marginalizing the counsel and the advice of Harlemites; of blacks being used as “window dressing.” But the denouement was louder with more virulent outrage not only from the black community, but from a wide range of groups including some of the directors of and donors