The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,33

to the Metropolitan. Conservative art critics such as Hilton Kramer held that such shows had no place in an art museum. “In mounting the Harlem on My Mind exhibition,” he wrote, “Mr. Hoving has for the first time politicized the Metropolitan, and has thereby cast doubt on its future integrity as an institution consecrated above all to the task of preserving our artistic heritage from the fickle encroachments of history.” Jewish, Irish, and Hispanic groups found Candice Van Ellison’s introduction to the catalog patently racist vilification, since in it she wrote, as follows, “Psychologically, blacks may find that anti-Jewish sentiments place them, for once, within a majority. Thus, our contempt for the Jew makes us feel more completely American in sharing a national prejudice.” Patently racist vilification. Hoving himself was reviled for his apparent condescension to his black servants (his “sunny maid,” his black “dour” chauffeur) and his remark that peer relationships between the races were “ludicrous.” Schoener, too, for his assertions that “Harlem is [black culture’s] capital. White mores and values are not universal.” From Hoving’s populist intentions there arose strong class conflicts. Certainly the controversy was heightened by the turbulence of the sixties, yet the implications of what went wrong with Hoving’s multimedia show are resonant today. From insult to cultural injury, artists, politicians, scholars, journalists identified quite serious objections to the intellectual and aesthetic premises of the exhibit. Among these complaints were: no African American representation on the selection committee; near total reliance on photography, principally the work of James VanDerZee, and deliberate exclusion of painters and sculptors; the museum’s promise of a “separate” show never materialized; the theme was more entertainment than art—another example of white voyeurism with a camera set up in Harlem at 125th Street for a closed-circuit viewing, rather like a zoo, for patrons at the museum. The dismissal of such artists as Norman Lewis, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Cliff Joseph, Elizabeth Catlett, Raymond Saunders, and many others, both established and emerging, prompted a protest group, forced Roy DeCarava to withdraw his work and Romare Bearden to leave the committee. Without the full participation of these artists, the focus misled viewers toward sentimentalized and caricatured representations of black life as criminal, impoverished, exclusively sensual. Further insult was perceived in the choice of an African American high school student, rather than a knowledgeable scholar or artist, to handle the catalog’s introduction. Even the show’s title, selected by Schoener, inflamed already raw sensibilities. Borrowed from Irving Berlin’s song, it followed the same pattern Schoener followed: a white man writing knowingly, authoritatively about Harlem culture, the lyrics describing a black showgirl (and perhaps mistress) in Paris missing the “low-down”—that is, licentious—life among urban blacks. “I’ve a longing to be low-down / And my parlez-vous will not ring true / With Harlem on my mind.” Minus local working artists, without board representation, without even an art scholar to introduce the catalog, with no reference to Harlem’s prosperous civic life, what the community believed was the real importance, meaning, and variety of its cultural life was completely, arrogantly dismissed. It appeared to many that Harlem on My Mind was fundamentally an ethnographic exhibition presented in an art museum—one of the leading universal survey museums. Thus it angered those who thought ethnographic displays did not belong there and frustrated those who wanted work by African Americans to be there. The crux of these charges and frustrations seemed to be that the Metropolitan Museum had treated black culture as “foreign,” as the work product of strangers whose home it first appropriated then selectively celebrated. A kind of petri dish for the curious.

The consequences, however, of the Harlem on My Mind show did create opportunity. Among disgruntled “minorities,” the citizens of Harlem and African American artists were not alone. Their experience of being silenced by an exhibition ostensibly about them is duplicated in many places, and the hierarchy of cultures is being intently questioned and refuted. Communities are no longer content to remain passive recipients of museum activities. The Studio Museum in Harlem, with its concentration on African American art, is one of the success stories directly related to the fallout of the controversy. The proliferation of ethnic museums in New York and elsewhere is another. Furthermore, less than a year after the show closed, the black artists who formed the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and protested against Harlem (Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden, Raymond Saunders, Vivian Browne, and Cliff Joseph, among others) met with officials at the Whitney Museum of