The Whiff of a New Blacklist

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 12, 2015

The Whiff of a New Blacklist
by James Panero

Recent protests at the Met Opera and Carnegie Hall signal a new turn in the relationship between art and politics.

With his ties to Vladimir Putin , the government patron and old acquaintance ultimately behind his St. Petersburg-based Mariinsky Theatre, conductor Valery Gergiev has become, for some, a proxy figure representing the anti-Western turns of the Russian state, both in human rights and geopolitics. These tensions first took center stage in 2013. Following Mr. Putin’s suppression of gay rights, protesters lined up outside Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House with signs that read “Gergiev Choose: U.S. Dollars or Putin’s ‘Morals.’” Inside, just as Mr. Gergiev raised his hands to conduct, they shouted him down, yelling “Valery, your silence is killing Russian gays!” Performances were halted until security could remove the disrupters.

With the 2014 Russian incursion into Crimea, Ukrainian sympathizers have joined the chorus of dissent. The Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili publicly declined Mr. Gergiev’s invitation to perform in St. Petersburg while also indicting Western audiences for supporting his music. At the premiere of “Iolanta” at the Met two weeks ago, a Boston-based, pro-Ukrainian protester even leapt onto the stage at curtain call with a banner depicting Mr. Gergiev, the Russian headline soprano Anna Netrebko, and a Hitler-inspired image of Mr. Putin with the slogan “Active Contributors to Putin’s War Against Ukraine, Free Savchenko” (after the parliamentarian and former Ukrainian officer imprisoned by Russia in 2014).

Protesters shouting down concertgoers; musicians silenced by hecklers; agitators taking the stages of our performances. All this represents a new turn in the relationship between arts and politics. There’s even the whiff of a new blacklist. At the continuing picket line outside the Met, protesters are distributing fliers that accuse Mr. Gergiev and Ms. Netrebko of using “their artistic standing to support and promote war and aggression... We call upon the institutions to review their policies and to consider appropriateness of allowing vocal supporters of aggression to perform on their stages.”

Current events have now claimed a front seat on the culture, and it’s time to stop them at the gate. Let’s put aside the obvious security threats that political agitation can pose to audiences and performers: It was in a Moscow theater in 2002, we should remember, that Chechen militants left 130 people dead. In 1987, members of a radical group known as the Jewish Defense League pleaded guilty to a series of bombings that targeted Russian performers as they toured the U.S., including the firebombing of a stage door of Avery Fisher Hall and releasing tear gas into the audience at the Met, an attack that hospitalized 20 people.

A banner today may be a weapon tomorrow. Concert houses clearly need to do more to keep us safe, and the Met has since increased security for subsequent performances of “Iolanta,” which have proceeded without incident. But more than that, they must speak up more forcefully for the integrity of the arts and its performers outside of politics. As Russian-American relations continue to deteriorate, it may be tempting for those of us who are justifiably critical of Mr. Putin to join the protests. But by blacklisting artists over not professing the right beliefs, the only guaranteed victim is the art itself. Moreover, such censorship is bad policy toward the causes we might hope to advance.

Mr. Gergiev’s response to such interruptions has been to focus more intensely on his music. “I cannot comment. It’s a silly, silly new invention, silly, ugly, what else can I say here?” he said as he boarded a flight south to conduct in Florida. “People come to the concert hall, the opera house. They are searching for beauty, for a very exceptional journey with the artists. They want to hear great music played well, sung well, staged well. I think that’s all they expect.”

And that’s the point. During the Cold War, when both tensions and the stakes were even higher, culture was used as a bridge, not a wedge. Between 1958 and 1988, 50,000 Soviet citizens visited the U.S. through our initiatives of cultural exchange. While some Americans at the time feared this Soviet influence, Oleg Kalugin, then a KGB general, later said such exchanges were a “Trojan Horse” within the Soviet Union. As Soviet performers brought their Western stories back to Russia, “They played a tremendous role in the erosion of the Soviet system. They kept infecting more and more people over the years.”

Today, no Russian figure promotes cross-cultural exchange more than Mr. Gergiev. Last month, he brought 300 members of his Mariinsky Theatre, which included over 75 musicians, 50 chorus members, and just as many dancers, to a residency at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and various appearances in Chapel Hill, N.C.; Ann Arbor, Mich.; Palm Beach, Naples and Miami, Fla.; and Washington, interspersed with his own conducting for the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra. He had a role in bringing “Iolanta” and “Bluebeard’s Castle,” the new Tchaikovsky-Bartók double bill, to the Met in partnership with the Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera. Tens of thousands of people will see him conduct during this latest American tour, which Mr. Gergiev notes marks his 25th anniversary performing in the U.S.

And the conductor is also responsible for promoting cultural exchange back in Russia. In June, he will helm the next Tchaikovsky Competition, the same international contest that Van Cliburn, an American pianist, famously won at the height of the Cold War in 1958. Today, “big countries like the U.S. and Russia are sending competitors,” says Mr. Gergiev, “but also smaller countries like Georgia, Uzbekistan, Armenia. Last time, an Armenian cellist took gold. Armenian. It’s not a huge country, as you know. It was a surprise.”

What unites all of these initiatives is great music. Two weeks ago, I was at Carnegie Hall as Mr. Gergiev led his Mariinsky Orchestra through Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 4. Despite vocal protests outside, it went off without interruption. In fact, after a gripping hourlong performance that sounded like an approaching subway train, he held the packed audience in silence for nearly a minute before the house erupted in applause. “Symphony No. 4 requires concentration. The audience was really good,” he told me. “This symphony, somehow, naturally, goes to some mysterious world, which cannot be interrupted.”

Exactly. Such music deserves to be heard for what it is. Most of us still understand this is possible only by putting differences aside in the communion of a concert hall.

Heartland Art

Artist and scientist Isabella Kirkland depicts an imaginary rainforest canopy (Isabella Kirkland, “Emergent.”)

PHILANTHROPY MAGAZINE
Winter 2015

Heartland Art
by James Panero

A new exhibit at Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum showcases the full range of American artistry. An extended look at "State of the Art." 

Tucked in the northwest corner of Arkansas, in so-called “flyover country,” the town of Bentonville may not be the first place that comes to mind when thinking about innovation. But take a closer look. There’s the bustle of the glistening airport next door in Fayetteville, where 50 flights a day now converge from 14 cities coast to coast. There’s a healthy population that looks as if it’s been making good use of the town’s network of hiking and biking trails. There’s the sparkling town square.

And facing the town square is an unassuming storefront that reads “Walton’s 5-10.” This is where it began, when Sam Walton opened a discount store in 1950. His enterprise has since grown into the world’s largest private employer—with 2.2 million people on the payroll across 11,000 stores in 27 countries. And just up the road from the original discount store, Walmart continues to maintain its home office.

Behind its working storefront, the Five and Dime today leads into a small Walmart Museum. Featuring a re-creation of Walton’s office, one of the pickup trucks he used for hunting, and banners and brochures bearing the slogans that informed his personality and sense for business, the museum is a reminder of how Walton worked against the grain as one of the twentieth century’s most revolutionary market disruptors. Before there was Amazon or Uber, there was Sam Walton on a mission to give his customers the nation’s lowest prices, which he saw as a liberalizing force for good.

Walton had a friendly, open, small-town personality that was reflected in the culture of his stores. He cared little for establishment thinking or the trappings of trendy acclaim. “Swim upstream,” Walton wrote in his 1992 autobiography, published the year he died. “Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.”

This spirit lives on in Bentonville’s latest innovation. The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in 2011 less than a mile from the original Five and Ten. Founded by Alice Walton, Sam’s only daughter, and constructed with funds provided by the Walton Family Foundation, Crystal Bridges bucks the conventional thinking on who, where, when, why, and what a major museum should be.

Even before it opened, there was the name. By identifying the institution after the natural water source that bubbles up beneath its patch of hill country, rather than after the patrons, the museum signals the middle-American modesty of the gift. A Walton museum could have gone anywhere—to Alice’s adoptive state of Texas, to expanding some famous existing institution, to creating a new edifice in one of the urban areas already known as a locus for art. Instead, Alice Walton brought her American treasures to the Ozarks, to a densely wooded ravine, and gave north of $1 billion to erect a striking new museum (designed by Moshe Safdie) for them.

Meg Hitchcock, “Subhan’ Allah: The Lord’s Prayer,” 2013. Letters from the Koran and Bible on paper.

Sam Walton once wrote that his daughter was “the most like me—a maverick.” A hint of confirmation comes from the fresh and unexpected exhibition that has just been shown at Crystal Bridges. “State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now” looks to ­America’s two-million-odd working artists in an attempt to uncover those whose “engagement, virtuosity, and appeal” have gone underappreciated.

The stories of how Crystal Bridges curators discovered these artists are part of the exhibition. The works on display were assembled through a 100,000-mile coast-to-coast-to-coast search that led to nearly 1,000 studio visits, with 102 of those artists represented in this show.

“The vision on which Crystal Bridges was founded, and its mission today, is to share the story and the history of America through its outstanding works of art,” Alice Walton tells me. “That’s exactly what ‘State of the Art’ is about—sharing works that are being created in artist studios all across the country, in our own time. They tell the story of America and enrich our understanding and appreciation of our nation.”

“State of the Art” stands in contrast to the existing “biennial” exhibitions that have purported to survey what’s going on in contemporary art and decide who’s in and who’s out. It cast its net far beyond the small subset of name-brand and trendsetting artists. “The mainstream is very narrow,” says Don Bacigalupi, the museum president who spearheaded the initiative with Walton. “Our exhibition is outside the mainstream structure of the art world.”    

”Bacigalupi says the inspiration for this project dates back to 2009, with the unorthodox location of the future museum serving as an impetus. “Since we have a new museum of American art in the middle of the country,” he told his board, “we have a vantage on what’s happening in the American scene that’s less biased, perhaps, than a New York perspective, or an L.A. perspective, or even a Chicago, San Francisco perspective. We might have a more open feel to what’s happening.”

The hard work began in early 2013, when Bacigalupi and his assistant curator Chad Alligood hit the road. Following the tips of 65 recommenders—curators, critics, collectors, academics, artists who run art spaces and programs—they worked their way across the country, region by region, in “a grassroots outreach effort.” At the heart of the search were their visits to the working studios of artists.

“Knowing the artists we all know wasn’t enough,” Bacigalupi writes in the exhibition catalogue. “We wanted to locate those who are not known to all of us. We would have to invent a new approach, or perhaps return to a long-gone, seemingly obsolete way of working. We’d have to get out there and see what art was being made, not just what art was being shown.”

The travel statistics from the ensuing year and a half illustrate how broadly the pair hunted for indigenous talent: 218 flights. 2,396 hours in rental cars. Temperatures ranging from 104 (San Antonio) to -16 (Omaha).

“We’d get to the region,” says Bacigalupi. “We’d rent a car, and we might see 12 artists a day for the next five or six days.” One time they covered 368 miles of territory in a single day. They were methodical in logging what they found, recording 1,247 hours of audio conversation and extensive video.

Bacigalupi was excited to return to the front lines of art. “I haven’t been a curator in 20 years. I’ve been a museum director since then. To be back in touch with so many artists, and to see the generation come up after me, new practices, new approaches, new artists, it’s incredibly exhilarating. Of course, it’s also exhausting to do all that work and all that travel,” he says, but it “makes me optimistic about the future of both art and the country to see these folks and ideas and the ways they are communicating and interacting.”

Bacigalupi characterizes the project as a “call to action—to ourselves and to our colleagues elsewhere—to get out and pay attention to the artists among us, in all our communities, big and small.” 

The grassroots process of conducting studio visits and face-to-face conversations across the country—rather than just tapping existing art networks and personal connections, art fairs, and websites—is as much what “State of the Art” has contributed to the art world as the work the curators unearthed. Their selections skew to art that evinces social engagement and tells a story beyond itself. Bacigalupi says they were particularly looking for “works of art that have a generosity of spirit, that open themselves to conversation, rather than works that are closed or hermetic.”

Take, for example, the three pieces from Meg Hitchcock. Born into an evangelical Christian household, Hitchcock has expanded her spiritual inquiry and devotional practice into her art. She constructs intricate collages of words cut from religious texts and reassembled into elaborate black-and-white geometric designs or organic patterns. “Meg’s work is incredibly evocative. It’s powerful,” says Bacigalupi. “It’s brilliantly made and executed, and it has a kind of immediate appeal.”

Then there’s Isabella Kirkland, an artist based in Sausalito, California, who doubles as a research associate at the California Academy of Sciences. Working in a houseboat studio—with a cat whose hair forms her finest brushes—Kirkland paints astonishingly verdant scenes of nature in hyper-accurate, highly staged detail. She portrays species that live so far out of human sight—200 feet up in the canopy—that they have only recently been discovered. “I don’t want to be a scientific illustrator,” she writes. “I really want to talk to a different audience with this work. I want to celebrate this stuff and get people interested in it.”

Another highlight is Vanessa German, an artist based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who repurposes found materials to make totemic “juju” dolls. “It’s immediately evident that German is a force of nature,” the curators note in the catalogue, “and her presence is one of caring and protection in a notoriously difficult area.” Recently German created Art House in a once-derelict home known for its violent past. Here she now brings together neighborhood children to “create beauty.” As someone who was “surrounded by a lot of death” as a kid, German says, “I am always looking for a way to be the most alive while I’m alive.”  

Amidst the saga of their road trip (finding a studio tucked among weeds and broken glass in the back of a deserted Coca-Cola bottling factory in Mississippi; handling day-old goats with artist-farmers in Gainesville, Florida; meeting creators in a 22-inch January snowstorm that paralyzed Baltimore), Bacigalupi says he and Alligood uncovered “incredible life stories that lead to the work” the artists make.

Tim Liddy, an artist in his early fifties that they met in St. Louis, was a hockey player and “devoted to the notion of becoming a professional.” In “a tragic accident at 16 years old, he broke his neck and became paralyzed.” Left with few gross motor skills, therapists “put a pencil in his hand,” which “set him off on a lifelong course to becoming an artist.” Today Liddy paints exacting trompe l’oeil images, moving around his studio on a Segway.

Such encounters resonated with the mission of Crystal Bridges. “The populist notion of building a museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, in a place where there is no history of visual-arts institutions,” says Bacigalupi, “making this gift to this community, this region, this country, is very much the underpinning of the show.…That kind of openness is a big part of it.”

Dallas-based painter Kim Cadmus Owens illustrates a frenetic digital ruckus.

The intensive travel and research that made “State of the Art” possible could not have taken place without substantial funding, and Bacigalupi had initial concerns when describing the concept to the museum’s broader base of supporters. There were no big-name artists, he notes. “No big themes. No splash. No precedent. No imagery to show them. I had to sit before the potential philanthropists and say, ‘Here’s this idea of unknown artists that we’re going to bring together and build this grand show.’ And I thought I was going to be greeted with blank stares and they were going to laugh me out of the room.”

Instead, the opposite occurred, and the exhibition became a “remarkable lesson in philanthropy. To a person, everyone we spoke to, whether corporate, individual, or foundation, wanted to be involved. They got excited by the notion that we were expanding the field.…We raised all of the money we needed to do this big show in a very short space of time.”

Exhibition sponsors include the Willard and Pat Walker Charitable Foundation, Christie’s, Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs, L’Oréal Paris, John Tyson and Tyson Foods, 21C Museum Hotels, and the museum’s Global Initiative Fund and Art Now Fund. Just as free general admission to the museum is underwritten by Walmart, complimentary admission to “State of the Art” has been sponsored by Walmart and Sam’s Club. Donor support not only created the exhibition, but is now enabling extensive educational outreach. Many of the featured artists are being brought in to meet visitors and lead discussions.

“This region,” notes Bacigalupi, “was once incredibly poor. People had to pitch in together to succeed, to survive. So there is this notion of community sharing, all in, everyone participates. It is part of the fabric, the culture. People want to help, to support each other, they want to share. They want to be a part of it.”

Surveying the 19,000-square-foot show now in place, Alice Walton couldn’t be more impressed with the communal result. “I’m amazed and so proud to see how it has all come together,” she tells me. “We were excited about the idea of ‘State of the Art,’ and firmly behind the concept of visiting artists, in their studios, all across the country. Now to walk through the galleries and see this variety of work, brought together in one place.…The art inspires and moves me.”

How Brooklyn Missed Brooklyn

The best of Brooklyn: Gleich dancers in "The Brooklyn Performance Combine,” produced by Norte Maar in the Beaux-Arts Court of the Brooklyn Museum. Photo: James Panero

THE NEW CRITERION
December 2014

How Brooklyn Missed Brooklyn
by James Panero

For years, the Brooklyn Museum has overlooked the art happening in its own backyard.

“The persons now in this room have it in their power to decide whether in the future intellectual progress of this nation, Brooklyn is to lead or to follow far in the rear.”

—George Brown Goode, “The Museum of the Future” (1889)

On the afternoon of Saturday, November 1, a small U-Haul truck pulled up to the loading dock of the Brooklyn Museum. Behind the delivery was Jason Andrew, the director and curator of Norte Maar, a Bushwick-based nonprofit at the crux of Brooklyn’s artistic renaissance. The Brooklyn Museum’s education department had invited Norte Maar to produce a “performance by sound artists and dancers” for its free “Target First Saturday.” The show, “The Brooklyn Performance Combine,” was a two-hour event Andrew and the choreographer Julia K. Gleich had planned to take place in the museum’s Beaux-Arts Court that evening. Hidden among the cargo that Andrew was expected to deliver in the truck—sound equipment, costumes, and props—were unsolicited canvases and sculptures by Brooklyn artists he planned to sneak into his performance.

The museum brought in the “Combine” to promote “Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond,” its self-described “major survey” of thirty-five borough artists currently on view. Yet for many observers, this exhibition, which opened in October, continues through January, and had been touted as “reflecting the rich creative diversity of Brooklyn,” turned out to be anything but.

“An exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum billed as a ‘major survey’ of Brooklyn-based artists should be exciting and revelatory,” wrote Ken Johnson in The New York Times. “Disappointingly, it’s not.” Led by extensive wall labels, “Crossing Brooklyn” looked almost exclusively to artists working in what’s known as “relational aesthetics,” the art of context over content, some whimsically, others with heavy social agendas. One artist focused “on the need for nutritious food in economically disadvantaged urban neighborhoods.” Another explored “the culture of mass consumption, overproduction, and waste” along with “the exploitation of workers and natural resources.”

“Evidently counted out from the start,” Johnson observed, “were artists who toil in studios making paintings, sculptures and other sorts of objects intended just to be looked at.” In other words: many of the accomplishments you now see in the borough’s open studios and gallery shows had been excluded from the museum. By zeroing in on a small subset of artistic production (mainly created by artists with tenuous connections to Brooklyn at best), “Crossing Brooklyn” accomplished just the opposite of displaying the borough’s “rich creative diversity.” Johnson’s conclusion reflected the feelings of many: “Brooklyn artists deserve better than this too-small, ideologically blinkered exhibition.”

For “Crossing Brooklyn,” the museum claimed the curators Eugenie Tsai and Rujeko Hockley “drew upon their extensive knowledge of the borough, as well as a wide-ranging network of unofficial advisors composed of artists, colleagues, and other creative professionals.” Yet Andrew, who has curated a decade of local exhibitions and programs through Norte Maar, says that no one from the museum came to observe what he does, despite talking to Tsai. “I don’t think those curators have enough pride in what is happening in Brooklyn. That is reflected in their curation. They can’t keep up with the pace, the spontaneity. But in order to keep the historical relevance, you have to keep up with the art.”

Brooklyn artists protest the Brooklyn Museum at “The Brooklyn Performance Combine" with painting by Loren Munk. Photo: James Panero

Andrew’s account of the Brooklyn Museum’s indifference to the studios and galleries of contemporary Brooklyn gets repeated across the borough’s artistic communities. “It’s Brooklyn’s time, now,” the painter, videographer, and art historian Loren Munk told me, but “the Brooklyn Museum is so wedded to their petrified state, they are going to miss it. The community has busted their buns for years. Slowly through the work of thousands of people, people started coming out here. Yet the curators are not familiar with the art community. A lot of their direction comes from academia, so they don’t do the hard-ass work, do the legwork, talk to a lot of people, go to a lot of places. These people don’t have the inclination.”

“There should be studio buzz,” Munk told me of the lead-up to “Crossing Brooklyn.” Instead, there was “nothing. None of that. There was zero outreach. We were frustrated. The disengagement. The elitist approach.” A Red Hook-based artist since the 1980s, Munk believes the Brooklyn Museum has been failing its own creative community for years, and in fact “the museum has gotten worse. A lot of significant people have been ignored by the Brooklyn Museum for decades. People having international influence, and the Brooklyn Museum has blown them off.” The Brooklyn Museum could be at the center of the borough’s creative renaissance, Munk concluded, “but it would take work. They need to reach out to the community.”

As the “Brooklyn Performance Combine” took shape in the weeks leading up to its November evening, many of its local artists saw the performance as an opportunity to demonstrate the burgeoning energy of Brooklyn that the museum had long ignored. Although the “Combine,” which was let in through the side door by the education department rather than by the curators of “Crossing Brooklyn,” was billed as a live performance, with art works and art making officially excluded, Andrew stretched the invitation into a “mashup of Brooklyn-based poets, painters, and performers.” Mixed in with his performance equipment, that afternoon he brought the canvases and sculptures of artists that he saw as indicative of Brooklyn’s artistic energy but which had been ignored by the museum: Amy Feldman, Ryan Michael Ford, Rico Gatson, Tamara Gonzales, Susanna Heller, Brooke Moyse, Jessica Weiss, Rachel Beach, Ben Godward, and Jim Osman.

For two hours that evening, in an electrifying synergy that was part celebration, part exorcism, all of these canvases and sculptures became the props for the musicians, dancers, and poets of the “Combine.” Carried out and positioned in the middle of the Beaux-Arts Court, the angular sculpture of Rachel Beach resonated with the vectored choreography of the Gleich dancers and the Brooklyn Ballet Youth Ensemble. The artist Jeff Feld and the cellist Mariel Roberts reflected the performance traditions of Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage. Ben Godward built up a towering abstract sculpture of plastic cups and poured materials, which he then sawed up and distributed to the audience. Sarah Schmerler, with deadpan delivery, read the descriptions and sponsor names of the museum’s own stilted exhibition program, contrasting it with the energy of the room and formative personalities such as Deborah Brown and Richard Timperio who were left out of “Crossing Brooklyn.” Before the event, Loren Munk had put out a call to Brooklyn artists who felt “somehow excluded from ‘Crossing Brooklyn.’ ” During the performance, he watched as his work incorporating nearly one hundred names on a painted map of the borough, covered with an X, was unveiled. Titled RE-CROSSING BROOKLYN, “this is a small reminder to the Brooklyn Museum that they are in the center of one of the greatest art enclaves in the world,” he promised his respondents. “They should open their eyes and engage with this unique community.” During the unveiling, the artist William Powhida joined the stage and delivered a monologue on the painting: “I happen to be on Loren’s list of artists not included in the exhibition. I never had a studio visit. And a lot of the artists on that list never had studio visits. . . . This list is long. Take a look at it and study it.” To which an audience member shouted: THANK YOU! Even if the Brooklyn Museum chose not to feature significant elements of the arts in “Crossing Brooklyn,” Andrew and his performers would not let them go unnoticed. “It is a borough of immense creativity,” Andrew explained to me, “and the Brooklyn Museum has missed the boat.”

Brooklyn Museum's stately original building with its Grand Staircase.

For an institution that has long prided itself as a community center and public accommodation rather than an elitist repository of art, such accusations would seem to cut against the promises of the museum’s progressive leadership. Yet the criticism in fact speaks to the Brooklyn Museum’s deep-seated misapprehension around its own history and what a great museum of art should be.

It wasn’t always so. The Brooklyn Museum was born in 1823, in an era of rising civic confidence in what would become America’s third largest city. The acquisitions of American paintings by the Brooklyn Institute, the museum’s forerunner, reflected this outlook. Francis Guy’s Winter Scene in Brooklyn (ca. 1819–20) entered the institution’s collection in 1846 as an immensely popular view of Brooklyn’s bustling and diverse mercantile port, a reflection of the city’s transformation from old Dutch farmland into a modern metropolis—and one that could now fuel its own civic institutions. Today such an acquisition demonstrates how the Brooklyn Museum was once open to local contemporary art, in an age when other nascent museums were fixated on the Old Masters.

Following the Civil War, as great museums took shape across the East River in Manhattan, the call went up for the city of Brooklyn to build “an Institute of Arts and Sciences worthy of her wealth, her position, her culture and her people.” Situated at the intersection of the grand new parks and parkways designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, and soon to be linked by subways, the museum’s new classical edifice designed by McKim, Mead & White in 1897 reflected the ideals of nineteenth-century Brooklyn. It also spoke to the ambitions of the director Franklin Hooper, who planned an institution some four times larger than the museum we see today. The current Eastern Parkway wing is but one side of what was designed to be a square building and the largest museum in the world.

Drawing of the fully realized original plan of the museum.

Yet rather than following through on this grand vision, the Brooklyn Museum has for a century remained one of the world’s great unfinished institutions—with a large parking lot on what was meant to be its footprint. Some of this can be attributed to the changing fortunes of Brooklyn. With Brooklyn’s consolidation into greater New York City in 1898, the once independent city lost much of the energy behind its own civic mandates as it fell into the shadows of twentieth-century Manhattan. But the museum’s leadership is also to blame, especially for a radical shift instituted by its progressive director Philip Newell Youtz in the 1930s.

Believing that the “museum of today must meet contemporary needs,” Youtz attacked the founding mandates of his own institution as a citadel of artistic achievement. He vowed to “turn a useless Renaissance palace into a serviceable modern museum.” Praising the educational practices of museums under the Soviet regime, Youtz undertook the transformation of his museum from a temple of contemplation into a school of instruction, where the arts were put in the service of progressive ends, and funding would derive from the state rather than private philanthropy. Youtz sought to transform his institution into a “socially oriented museum” with, as he stated, “a collection of people surrounded by objects, not a collection of objects surrounded by people.” He hired department store window-dressers to arrange exhibitions and transformed the collection of his composite museum into a parade of teachable moments.

He then turned his programmatic assault into a physical one. Historians question the ultimate motivation behind his demolition of the Brooklyn Museum’s exterior Grand Staircase, which resembled the entrance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was meant to elevate the museum-goer from Eastern Parkway into the refined precincts of the museum. What is not in doubt is Youtz’s belief that his iconoclasm, pushing the museum lobby down to street level, “improved” upon the McKim, Mead & White design. Recalling this destruction of the museum’s patrimony, Linda S. Ferber recounts how Youtz intended it “as a socially responsible gesture, eliminating the grand ceremonial entry, which literally elevated the visitor to the level of the arts, in order to facilitate public access directly from the street.” Continuing in this way, Youtz went about mutilating much of the museum’s ornamental interior.

Floorplan detailing what has been built of the original museum plan.

As the director of the Brooklyn Museum since 1997, Arnold Lehman has closely followed Youtz’s lead. He has championed exhibitions with either heavy social components or populist appeal—or both, as in the case of 1999’s “Sensation” show. He has taken the lead in demanding public funds while importing demotic displays on the costumes of STAR WARS, photographs of rock stars, and (currently) “killer heels.” He pumped attendance statistics with free late-night weekends filled with fashion shows, jewelry sales, music, and drinks. He gave ticket-buyers free rein to run through his halls, for example by hosting a regular scavenger hunt—billed as “part scavenger hunt, part obstacle course and ALL Brooklyn Museum”—with contestants “competing for classes at StripXpertease and Babeland.” He destroyed the independence of the museum’s traditional curatorial departments—tasked with maintaining what remained of the collections that the museum hadn’t traded away—in order to centralize exhibitions under his administration. He even made his own mark on the museum’s entrance, pushing Youtz’s populist assault out towards Eastern Parkway with a radiating glass canopy. “I like people to think of [the museum] as their favorite park,” he says.

Yet as with Youtz, Lehman’s approach undermined rather than strengthened the foundations of the museum by mistaking the greatness of art for mere programmatic utility. At the same time, an intelligent public that Lehman had underestimated, far from rallying around their own edification, largely stayed away both as ticket buyers and museum supporters. “Brooklyn Museum’s Populism Hasn’t Lured Crowds,” read a New York Times headline in 2010. Trustees resigned. Lehman even disbanded a community committee of supporters that had dated back to 1948.

This posture helps explain why the Brooklyn Museum has been slow to appreciate Brooklyn art, especially those artists who work without clear didactic agendas. For the museum, their art serves little use beyond fodder for contests, such as the reality television program “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist,” or social experiments, such as “Go: A Community-curated Open Studio Project.” To expect the museum to appreciate local art as a connoisseur, studying, guiding, and elevating the best to public attention, would be an affront to this progressive vision.

The once-grand staircase of the Brooklyn Museum has been replaced by a glass atrium.

Yet just as Brooklyn art has flourished, so too has Brooklyn been reborn. The borough has shaken its defensive posture to become once again a leading metropolis, perhaps exceeding its nineteenth-century reach and confidence. This past September, Arnold Lehman announced he will step down in a year, and the search is on for the next leader. Lehman has been a likeable showman, perhaps the only sort of director who could survive in an overshadowed institution of diminishing returns. But the changing fortunes of the borough now call for a director who can draw on Brooklyn’s civic strengths to build the museum into what its founders intended. The time has come for a Brooklyn Museum that is truly “worthy of her wealth, her position, her culture and her people”—and her artists.