When the painting is provocative but the museum is cautious
Art should provoke emotion, though how much, what type and indeed ownership is a big issue today
The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin knew it had a painting on its hands that required sensitivity: a 10m-wide panorama by Houston-based artist Vincent Valdez that imagined a modern-day Ku Klux Klan gathering. And a string of recent art-world controversies had emphasised the need for such curatorial caution.
A painting of Emmett Till’s mutilated body by a white artist drew protests at last year’s Whitney Biennial, and images of black people smeared with chocolate and toothpaste by another white artist angered African-Americans in St Louis. Last September, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis dismantled a gallows-like sculpture after Native American leaders said it evoked a mass hanging of Dakota Indians in 1862.
So after acquiring Valdez’s four-panel painting in 2016, the Blanton spent two years preparing for the work’s public debut yesterday. To display the painting, the curators had a special gallery built with a sign warning that the work “may elicit strong emotions”.
Such warnings are relatively rare. The National Coalition Against Censorship’s “Museum Best Practices For Managing Controversy”, endorsed by several of the country’s leading museum advocacy organisations, suggests that “written warnings or disclaimers should be informational and not prejudicial”.
The museum even changed its security guards’ uniforms from a sombre grey to a more cheerful blue, a planned update that was expedited because of the show.
The museum’s staff also gave previews of the painting to faculty, administrators and students, hoping this outreach would inoculate the museum against community criticism. Staff members consulted with more than 100 individuals and organisations, including the mayor’s office, the Anti-Defamation League and the Austin Justice Coalition, an advocacy organisation for people of colour.
But even the best-laid plans can go awry. One organisation the museum did not consult until very late in the process was the Austin chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP, since its founding in 1909, led anti-lynching campaigns in the United States among its many civil rights crusades.
Carlotta Stankiewicz, the Blanton’s director of marketing and communications, said a “miscommunication among our staff” was the reason for not contacting the organisation sooner.
Racial violence remains a raw subject in Texas. Earlier this month the state marked the 20th anniversary of the murder of James Byrd Jr by white supremacists in the small East Texas town of Jasper. In December civil rights groups, including the Austin NAACP, unveiled a plaque in East Austin memorialising three African-Americans who were lynched in the area in 1894.
During a conversation in his Houston studio, Valdez said he hoped his painting, titled The City I, would remind viewers that the Klan cannot be safely relegated to the past.
“There are people in the United States of America who refuse to acknowledge that entities like the Klan exist,” he said. “And now we’re seeing the end result.”
One of the hooded figures in the painting is looking at his iPhone; a late-model Chevy pickup is parked in the background. Many of the Klansmen stare directly out at the viewer.
“It’s a lot easier to confront subjects like white supremacy or the Klan as evil villains,” Valdez said. “I’m more concerned about the notion that we all inhabit the same American landscape.”
Valdez grew up on San Antonio’s predominantly Mexican-American south side, where he began painting at a young age. From the beginning, he addressed social injustice in his art. A video taken by his father, a Vietnam War veteran, shows the 10-year-old boy painting a mural of bomber jets dropping napalm on black, silhouetted figures.
The Blanton’s director, Simone Wicha, first encountered Valdez’s work at a 2014 San Antonio exhibition of his series “The Strangest Fruit”, which depicts the lifesize bodies of lynched Mexican-American men in contemporary dress. Valdez wanted to call attention to the thousands of Mexicans who scholars estimate were lynched in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Blanton purchased two paintings from the series, which are currently on view at the museum. Wicha viewed an unfinished version of The City I in Valdez’s studio in 2016, before it was displayed at the David Shelton Gallery in Houston.
Convinced of the painting’s power, Wicha helped raise US$200,000 (6.6 million baht) in private funds to buy it. She
originally planned to unveil the painting last year, but decided to push the opening back a year after the election of US President Donald Trump. She did not want to create the impression that the museum
had purchased the painting as some kind of protest. “It would be as if we had acquired it for a political statement, or the artist had painted it for a political statement,” Wicha explained.
Among all these efforts, however, the Blanton did not contact Nelson Linder, the local NAACP chapter president, until July 9.
“Something like this, not to call the NAACP is fairly ridiculous,” Linder said. “Out of courtesy, they should have let us take a look at it.”
After being made aware by this reporter of Linder’s concerns last week, Wicha invited the civil rights leader to view the painting and take part in one of the programmes that will accompany the exhibition. Although Linder said he appreciated the museum’s finally contacting him, he expressed reservations about the painting itself.
“I would have shown the victims,” he said. “Not just pictures of the Klan, but the end result of their behaviour, the black folks being lynched.”
Responding to Linder’s point, Valdez wrote that images of black victims of lynching are indeed “shameful and should never be forgotten”. For his painting, he said, he was “invoking the sinister yet very real existence of the Klan and white supremacy today, hiding in clear sight among us”.
He added: “All I wanted to do in my painting, the story I wanted to tell was: Look around you; they’re still here.”
‘‘ I’m more concerned about the notion that we all inhabit the same American landscape