Los Angeles County has spent years considering what to do with its cramped and decrepit Men’s Central Jail. Over the past year, with the inmate population dropping due to the pandemic and criminal justice reform, the idea of replacing it with a new jail facility has given way to the pursuit of closing the facility completely in 2021, and perhaps tearing it down. County supervisors have discussed using the site for diversion programs that provide mental health treatment, housing, and other community supports to keep people out of our jails and prisons.

That’s a worthy idea, given our desperate need to stop wasting billions on caging people and to end the vicious cycle of arrests, homelessness, and recidivism. And the temptation to tear down this large and bleak building is understandable. It sits near the end of a dead-end street so bleak that it feels like an above-ground cave.

But progressive diversion facilities can be located on public land anywhere. To tear down Men’s Central Jail would be to risk forgetting what the place has meant, and to miss a historic opportunity to turn this torture chamber into a vital center for California’s future.

The Men’s Central Jail—the largest jail in the nation’s largest jail system and the site of repeated scandals and abuses since its 1963 opening—may be the best artifact we have of California’s extreme history of human caging. It’s also a symbol of how Los Angeles has been a pioneer in incarceration for more than a century.

In her book City of Inmates, the UCLA historian and MacArthur genius grant winner Kelly Lytle Hernández documents how L.A. became “the carceral capital of the world.” It’s a history of caging waves of people—including the Indigenous, Chinese migrants, white vagrants, Mexican migrants, and Black people. In some ways, L.A.’s jails built the city; Los Angeles had one of the largest jail systems in 1910, long before it became a metropolis, and its local governments sometimes locked up people so they could be used as laborers in infrastructure projects.

This shameful past deserves a museum to document its lasting impact, and an institute for deeper study. So why not turn part of the Men’s Central Jail complex into a Museum of Human Caging? Such an institution would be a natural, West Coast partner for Montgomery, Alabama’s Legacy Museum, which sits on land where enslaved Black people were warehoused, and documents the legacy of racial inequality from enslavement to mass incarceration.

And if we want this space to truly serve as a force for change, it should also be devoted in part to making our state more democratic. Turning part of the jail into a forward-looking center for democracy would spin the illogic of incarceration on its head.

We often think of dictatorship as the exact oppose of democracy, but that’s not exactly right. Dictatorships and the 21st-century republics that we know as democracies are both ruled by elites, elected or not. But real democracy, in its essence, is everyday people governing themselves. Democracy’s true opposite is detention, which removes everyday people from participation in governing their own lives and communities. You can’t govern yourself from jail.

In this light, California’s history of caging, and its failures of democracy and equality, are just two sides of the same coin. Which is why part of the Men’s Central Jail should be transformed into the California Center for Democracy.

This is not a new idea. Many places on this planet have recognized just how fitting it is to turn old prisons and jails into centers for advancing democracy.

I’ve seen two outstanding examples of such transformations. In Bern, the Swiss capital, the Käfigturm, a prison tower dating to the year 1256, is today an open forum for democracy and politics, supported by different levels of government, civic groups, the Roman-Catholic Central Conference and the Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches. (Dungeon doors, and inmates’ scribbles on them, have been preserved.)

And in Donostia-San Sebastian, in the Basque Country, the former military detention center for Francisco Franco has become a highly innovative city office for citizen participation, where people can get assistance in turning their ideas and perspectives into laws and official actions.

“Here people were tortured because of political action; now they are supported in exactly doing this,” the office’s head, Amaia Agirreolea Gomez, has said.

In the U.S., you will often find institutions that call themselves democracy centers, but they often are merely stalking horses for ideological programs of left and right. Other democracy centers are unfocused community spaces that rent themselves out for events.

A California Center for Democracy should be devoted to assisting people and groups who don’t have the funds or size to participate in our state’s money-soaked politics. It should be a place where you can walk in and get expert assistance in how to make your voice heard in a current dispute, or to turn an idea you have into law or regulation (it would be the perfect home to help grow the city of L.A.’s fledgling public participation office). This center also should have staff from various universities, and from the state’s legislative counsel, which could assist regular Californians in drafting state legislation or ballot initiatives.

Having such a center would immediately make California and Los Angeles the American leader in democracy support. The combination of a museum and democracy center would fit two state goals of L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti: better memorializing L.A.’s past, and convincing more American cities to collaborate with each other to advance democracy.

The Men’s Central Jail location is full of potential. The site is just a block from Union Station, Southern California’s most important transit hub, which has a master plan to better connect itself to the surrounding neighborhood. That area includes Chinatown; the historic public space known as La Plaza; the renowned Homeboy Industries; a signature new state park that needs improvement; the Los Angeles River; and L.A. offices of the California Endowment, which supports California communities and makes its space available to citizens’ groups.

Smart redevelopment around the station—including removal of bail bonds businesses (if the state eventually manages to end cash bail) and the construction of pedestrian and bike connections over train tracks that now divide the neighborhood—could link existing institutions with the new California Democracy Center and Museum of Human Caging.

In the future, this awful jail could be transformed into the hopeful linchpin of a centrally located, riverside neighborhood that Californians could visit by bus or Amtrak, or, perhaps someday, on our voter-approved high-speed rail system. I think we should call it the Democracy District.

The post Don’t Tear Down L.A.’s Notorious Men’s Central Jail  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In Venezuela, I was a professor, but as the economy fell apart I found work as a freelance journalist, covering my country’s current events despite dealing with blackouts and failing communications. Since October, whenever I haven’t been working on a news story in Madrid, I’ve either been taking a small rest from my previous beat or thinking up my next one. My life has been my job, and I love my job; otherwise, I wouldn’t be a journalist.

On the day of the announcement, I didn’t buy Death in Venice. Still, the image of Aschenbach, Mann’s novelist protagonist wandering a Mediterranean city abandoned by cholera remained with me as Madrid changed suddenly from a vivacious European capital into a state of solitude and uncertainty. Restaurants and bars in the trendy districts of Malasaña, Chueca, and the main venue of Gran Vía emptied. Like Mann’s early 20th-century Venice stricken by cholera, the once-gentle streets and squares soon acquired a more menacing appearance.

By evening people had gathered at their local supermarkets in long lines to buy canned goods and toilet paper. Many left the city, with more than a few probably carrying the virus themselves.

The day after, instead of doing any of the necessary things like shopping and laundry, I went to the Prado Museum.

The visit offered me a rare moment to think. In my case, focusing on my work helps to keep other concerns at bay. There’s a time and place to think and worry about Venezuela and my family there, but that’s usually late in the evening or during the weekend. For me and many of my classmates, having a virus suddenly open up so much free time to think is unnerving.

Those of us who are non-Spaniards and, like the protagonist of Death in Venice, foreigners, marveled at the opportunity of being part of a beautiful, historical metropolitan city, only to find ourselves stranded and isolated in a moment of crisis. Many of us had come to Spain to find new opportunities, to discover our own new worlds. Now we were in a lockdown, desperately trying to make the most out of the limitations.

And so, perhaps in the spirit of Aschenbach, I went to the Prado seeking something that felt beautiful and eternal before the viral outbreak put a stop to life as we know it.

The Prado is an excellent place to visit in a crisis because it has had such a convoluted life itself. When the museum opened its doors in 1819, the then-recent Napoleonic invasion had destabilized the country. Long decades of war between liberals, conservatives, absolutists, and opposing royal bloodlines were soon to come.

I entered the museum through an atrium with a triumphant statue of Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire by Leone Leoni. It stands over a chained figure, called The Fury, which has been interpreted either as the Ottoman Empire or Protestantism.

It’s a proper introduction to the Spanish Hapsburgs and the Siglo de Oro, the zenith of imperial grandiosity and cultural influence, the era of Miguel de Cervantes and Diego Velázquez. However, knowing what lies behind all the splendor, you discover a strong warning about the false reassurances of opulence and power in front of disease and social strife.

As a result of the priorities of its rich patrons such as the Hapsburgs, countless portraits of aristocrats and saints fill a great part of the main floor of the Prado. It’s interesting how these paintings, in most cases meant to exalt the figures they portray, are celebrated, while their subjects have drifted off into oblivion. A few paintings by El Greco, for instance, feature distinguishing-looking men—Portrait of a Nobleman, Portrait of a Doctor, and most famously The Nobleman with His Hand on his Chest. Whoever these gentlemen were has become irrelevant in comparison to the great El Greco himself.

In a room filled by royal portraits painted by Diego Velázquez, the work that stands out is his subversive masterpiece, Las Meninas. There, Charles V’s great-grandson Philip IV is reduced into a small, blurry figure in the background while granting the foreground to the painter and other members of the household staff—all the people who made this royal opulence possible.

Despite the Hapsburgs’ wealth and power, the art that they financed ultimately outlived them, but only by surviving a fire that destroyed the royal residence in Madrid in 1734. Hundreds of invaluable works of Da Vinci, El Greco and Raphael turned into ashes. Las Meninas was among the few paintings that were saved, but it could have easily turned into dust.

During my visit, the museum appeared to be half empty. Most of the visitors were tourists who probably wanted to make the most of their time in the city before it shut down. An elderly couple, both in wheelchairs, stopped and contemplated Renaissance art. A school group moved along quickly. Young art students commented on this or that piece. Despite the fear and the tension in the world outside, here there was a sense of routine and calmness. Maybe it was a temporary distraction, but for a moment there was the illusion of disconnection from the rest of the world.

Maintaining the illusion of being a distant witness, unaffected by your surroundings, is also part of being a journalist. Some of my professors in the Master’s program have covered train accidents, plane crashes, and terrorist attacks. When they talk about these things, their usual cool, professional, generally friendly manner sometimes changes, taking on a more distressed tone when a particular nerve is touched.

One artist who thoroughly shatters the illusion of disconnection is Francisco Goya. I remember growing up and being intrigued by his Disasters of War illustrations, which used to decorate the walls of an elderly uncle who lived in Caracas. Penitents wearing conic hats standing trial, tormented figures haunted by demonic-looking birds. I didn’t expect art from so long ago to be so nightmarish.

Goya pretty much has his own wing. His earlier paintings are mostly picturesque scenes of gentry life, with young aristocrats playing the blind man’s bluff, allegories of the seasons, lots of hunting. But the special attention he gives to the poor, the old, and the disabled in the margins is noticeable.

On the upper floor of the wing, its walls painted in dark gray under dim light, is where you can see some of Goya’s most famous and haunting creations. The soft, placid art meant to decorate drawing rooms and hunting lodges would hardly recognize the faceless Napoleonic soldiers and the blood-stained corpses of The Third of May 1808.

But even this painting is overshadowed by Goya’s Black Paintings—surrealistic and esoteric images he painted directly on the inner walls of his house, named later Saturn Devouring His Son, The Witches’ Sabbath. By then, Goya was in his 70s and was traumatized by war, embittered with politics, and alienated from a Spanish society that rejected the constitution and embraced the absolutism of Ferdinand VII and the Catholic Church. His favorite subjects became witches, madmen, half-human beasts.

The faces are darkened and distorted, the brush seems quick and choleric—though it’s impossible to know how much those effects are Goya’s and how much are from the transference to canvas and the modifications done by the museum staff decades later when they brought it to the Prado. The New York Times once described it as “at best a crude facsimile” of Goya’s original artwork. We are fortunate to admire it, as we are fortunate to see Velázquez’s Las Meninas.

Art is a reflection of the artist’s mind—and the time and place they lived. In this sense, walking around an art gallery is roughly similar to the pleasure I get from browsing books in a bookstore. I can lose myself inside the minds of others without focusing too much on my own.

Being a journalist, I’ve learned that you either try to divide your professional and your personal mindset or your job will encompass the entirety of your life. Coming so recently from Venezuela, I find the adjustment to being in Spain now similar: I have to define a headspace for the country I come from and another for the country I am in—and making these two headspaces is a slow, painful process. When I look at Goya’s Black Paintings I see what happens when all those hatches collapse and you’re flooded with anger, sadness, and outrage.

I continued to the lower main area of a lower floor and joined the little crowd of tense onlookers in front of Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death. Looking at an army of skeletons rounding up and massacring the living—kings, beggars, maidens, and gamblers—it is hard not to think that our fears of worldwide epidemics aren’t new. We visitors eyed each other uneasily and then moved on.

But one piece in this section that captured everyone’s attention, and had the museum staff yelling at us to stop taking pictures, was The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, a large triptych of connected wooden panels filled with strange, dreamlike imagery.

On the left panel, Adam and Eve are with Christ in the Garden of Eden surrounding a strange pink structure that could be the Tree of Wisdom. On the right panel, a twisted and somewhat playful vision of hell is filled with puzzling demons and musical instruments and other objects of pleasure turned into torture devices, with a burning city in the background.

The middle and largest panel has been variously described as the world, a perfect utopia free of sin or a false, terrestrial paradise filled with mundane pleasures. Naked, sensuous figures frolic in a pasture filled with wondrous animals and strange, colorful edifices that imitate the pink “tree” seen in the Garden of Eden.

I suppose that Bosch’s painting could be interpreted as an indictment of the frivolities of ephemeral, empty joy in contrast to the eternal salvation offered by God and the Christian faith. However, under that logic, then those of us who came to the Prado to admire the painting for its masterful craft and imaginative design instead of its religious message would be falling into the false, terrestrial paradise that Bosch warns us about.

Maybe those of us who aren’t particularly religious obtain the same comfort in paintings, architecture, books, and movies in our modern, secular era that others get from religion. The sensation that art, skill, and imagination are something majestic: bigger and more lasting than our short, common lives.

I left the Prado with a poster of The Garden of Earthly Delights. That night, I met up with my fellow journalism students and had a few drinks at a terrace near Gran Vía. Later, I went down to a 24-hour supermarket in Plaza de Tirso de Molina to get provisions for the quarantine.

In the 10 days since, I have been self-isolating due to the coronavirus, only going out of my apartment to do shopping and laundry. The Spanish government has established fines of up to 600,000 euros for going out without a motive, so it’s not like I have much of a choice in the matter.

The first official cases of coronavirus have just been reported in Venezuela a few days ago, so I’m more concerned for my family over there than for myself in Madrid, since I know that my country’s decayed healthcare system isn’t properly prepared for an outbreak of this scope.

I don’t know what will happen in the following months. I hope things don’t end as tragically as they did for Aschenbach in Death in Venice, who was consumed by cholera while looking at the unattainable beauty of the young man who had become his obsession. But in these times of uncertainty, I have the satisfaction of having stood in the building that for over two centuries has been a sanctuary for Velázquez, Goya, Bosch, and other beautiful things that still endure, despite the chaos that has sometimes surrounded them.

The post A Letter from Madrid, Where Impending Quarantine Permits a Last Look at Goya appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That was the conclusion of panelists, including two museum executives and a futurist who studies museums, at a Zócalo/National History Museum of Los Angeles County event titled “Is the Digital Age Making Museums Obsolete?”

Zócalo Public Square publisher and editor-in-chief Gregory Rodriguez moderated the event, which was held at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in downtown Los Angeles. He started the evening by expressing puzzlement over what it means to be a museum these days, listing all the institutions he had visited in the past year that are labeled museums—from the Jefferson Davis Memorial Site in Georgia to the Ateneum Art Museum in Finland to the Harwich Lifeboat Museum in England—and wondering what they really had in common.

Over an hour of fast-paced conversation, the panelists suggested there are dozens of roles that that museums now play, as they struggle, simultaneously, to embrace technological change and provide a respite from it.

“You’re starting to see where museums are not feeling threatened by new technology,” said Nicole Ivy, a futurist and George Washington University public historian who is former director of inclusion for the American Alliance of Museums. Instead, museums are liberated to try new things because your smartphone can deliver so many of the images and facts that always used to be at the heart of museum content. “Museums are really taking up this idea of being experimental,” she said.

Lisa Sasaki, director of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, said that before the digital age, “museums used to be the quiet places. You weren’t supposed to talk.” But now, she added, “if you’ve got a museum that’s utterly silent … how long are you really going to stay?”

Sasaki, who previously worked at the Oakland Museum of California and the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, said that many museums spent big money on apps and other digital initiatives a decade ago, but have found that such investments are not always useful. “The theory was … by digitizing all the archives and all the paper, we were freeing knowledge,” she said. “What we did was we flooded the internet with databases of images that nobody looked at.”

Sasaki said that museums, after becoming more academic and serious in the 20th century, are now going back to their origins as less specialized places, delivering emotion and wonder. “Museums are places of inarticulate love,” she said, adding: “There was a fear when digital was new that people wouldn’t want to come to your museum anymore, but over time, we’ve found the power of the actual object, the actual place.”

Gretchen Baker, vice president of exhibitions at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, recalled that, a few weeks ago, her museum was free to all, and so she joined other staff in helping large crowds navigate the place. “The question I got all day long… was ‘Is that real? Is that real?’”

People could not believe they were touching real fossils, real rocks, real objects. She found herself wondering if that feeling—I can’t believe you’re letting me touch this—“is amplified because we’re so used to digital.”

At the same time, Baker said that museums are doing more with technology, and companies often are pitching the museum on virtual reality and other new technological ways to tell stories. One recent virtual reality pitch was designed to make you feel like a seed in the rain forest that grows into a tree, and then is brought down by fire.

But such technologies aren’t cheap, or always necessary. Studies of visitors, she said, shows that people are coming to the museum “to spend time together. They are coming to have a social experience. And now you’re plugging them into a headset.”

Ivy, the George Washington University public historian, talked about getting married in a museum (the Fleischer Art Memorial in Philadelphia), and said the digital age, by giving museum visitors a computer they carried in their pocket, had “put pressure” on museum curators to “open up the idea of expertise” and take chances. Ivy said museums should do more listening, to visitors and to their own front-line staff members who interact with the public.

During the question-and-answer session with the audience, the panelists discussed the power of museum donors, the challenges of communicating with younger people, and all the new entities now call themselves “museums.” (A recent pop-up, the Museum of Ice Cream, was mentioned).

Popular culture, the panelists noted in response to one audience question, had also drawn people into museums. The Ben Stiller film Night at the Museum led museums to open up for overnight slumber parties.

And the museum scene in the film Black Panther, when a main character takes back an artwork stolen from the ancient and fictional Wakanda, had a big impact on museums, bringing popular attention to questions about how museums have obtained and displayed artifacts from various parts of the world.

“That opened up museums,” Ivy said, “as a place of controversy.”

The post The Digital Age Was Going to Kill Museums. Then It Saved Them. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s true that Rome, which has never been an easy place to make a living, is struggling these days. The economy is stagnant, I’ve never seen so many homeless people and beggars on the streets, and many Romans look visibly frustrated. It’s no wonder that populist parties are riding high. 

So why be here? Leaving aside the city’s superficial delights, like its superb climate and wonderful food, my own answer is simple:

History.

I am aware of no other great city whose past has been so well-recorded for so long. We have some idea—and often a very good idea—of what Rome was like, and what happened there, during each of the last 25 centuries. Nor, in any other great city, has so much survived physically from its past, through buildings and objects. If you know where to look, you can find souvenirs of the events that shaped Rome, allowing firsthand connections with great moments hundreds or thousands of years past.

I can give a few examples. In a modern hall at the back of Capitoline Museum are what look like weathered stone walls. One has been excavated, and you can see it descending deep into the ground. These are the foundations of classical Rome’s most important temple, to Jupiter Best and Greatest, which dominated Rome’s skyline for a thousand years. Created 2,500 years ago by the last of Rome’s early kings, Tarquin the Proud, the temple was partly responsible for his being the last king. Romans became so aggravated by the building costs that they rebelled and took power. Look at these piles of stone and you are looking at the moment the Roman Republic was born. 

Another temple built five centuries later—the Ara Pacis, or Temple to Peace—is in a much better state, having been painstakingly reassembled in the 1930s from scores of fragments. By the time it was built, Rome ruled the Mediterranean world, and the republic was dead. On the side of the temple, you can see a relief depicting—in their best and most fashionable togas—Rome’s ruler Augustus, his sidekick Marcellus, and their families and helpers walking in procession. It is a portrait of a new elite: the people who dismantled the Republic. In its place rose an unstable military dictatorship, whose administrations would often be decided by civil war.

If you visit the Museum of Rome near Termini station, you can capture the panic and anger during one especially important such regime change. A decade ago, during excavations of the emperors’ Palatine Palace, a scepter and two imperial standards were found. They had been carefully wrapped in silk and placed in wooden boxes. Dating work showed they had belonged to Emperor Maxentius, who at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge just north of Rome, was defeated by Rome’s first Christian emperor, Constantine. Looking at these objects, one can imagine the desperate moment when pagan Maxentius’s courtiers, learning that their emperor was vanquished and dead, hid his regalia of power to spite his successor. 

Rome has preserved its own defeats. In the city’s ancient Aurelian wall you can see the Asinarian Gate with its tall round towers. There, on a December night in A.D. 546, soldiers defending the city shimmied down a rope to search out the commander of their enemies, the Ostrogoth Totila, to ask how much he would pay for them to open the doors (he paid enough). Across the city, you can see the raised walkway leading from the Vatican to Castel Sant’Angelo, where, in early May 1527, Pope Clement VII ran for his life as Spanish and Lutheran German soldiers below took pot shots at him, and their comrades turned Rome into a slaughterhouse. And you can see the Papal Walls on the Gianicolo Hill, where in June 1849 Garibaldi’s soldiers heroically defended Rome in a hopeless struggle against a much superior French army. Though Garibaldi lost the battle, he won the war right there, as his forces’ courage gained sympathy around the world. Within a few years his dream of a united Italy, free of foreign rulers, was reality.

Or you can see the Balcony of the Palazzo Venezia, where, on the 10th of June 1940, Mussolini announced that Italy was at war with Britain and France (the crowd below was so unenthusiastic that a patriotic newsreel of the event had to be dubbed with cheers from sports events). And you can see the Museum of the Liberation of Rome, which was used as a torture center by the SS during Rome’s Nazi occupation. Now preserved as a warning from the past, you can read desperate messages scratched into the walls by those held there. 

For all this history, today’s Romans still aren’t impressed. “What use are monuments?” is a comment I have heard more than once. “Monuments are what’s dead and gone.” I disagree. I don’t believe that history repeats itself, as every age is different—but I do believe it can offer useful clues about human behavior. 

Romans have lived under every kind of political system, from oligarchy to theocracy, and from dictatorship and monarchy to democracy. Frequently they have lived under more than one at the same time. One can see Rome’s past as a vast case study of humankind and politics.

What can be learned from spending time among these relics? For one thing, they tell of the frightening chanciness of events. We like to think that great changes happen for important reasons—that they’re all but inevitable—but it’s rarely so. Huge and enduring transformations can come from the equivalent of a throw of a coin.

If Maxentius had defeated Constantine at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and had hung on to his imperial scepter, Christianity might never have dominated Europe as it did, and instead might have remained one religion among many. If Mussolini had not been tempted into war in June 1940 his dictatorship might have endured, ever more sluggish and corrupt, for another decade or two. And if river fog had not risen from the Tiber early in the morning of the 6th of May 1527, hiding the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s starving soldiers from Rome’s guns, Charles’s army would never have broken into Rome, the city would not have had to endure a horrific 10-month occupation, and Italy might not have been dominated by Spain for the next two centuries.

Rome’s monuments also hold warnings. However infuriating democratic government can be, beware of chucking it away. Once you start down the path to dictatorship you never know who you might get. Rome has been ruled by a paranoid schizophrenic (Caligula), a talentless wannabe singer (Nero), and murderers far too numerous to list—including some popes. For all their claims to efficiency, dictators rarely govern well. Mussolini despised the elected rulers who preceded him and yet, for all their faults, their rule was far more effective and less corrupt than his. Under democracy, Italy thrived economically and was well prepared for war. Under Fascism the economy stagnated and the country’s military was in a hopeless state.

Another warning that seems especially relevant these days is that democracy’s worst enemy is inequality. At the heart of Rome’s first Republic was a patriotic alliance between rich and poorer Romans. When the greed of the rich transformed Rome into a slave economy and the poor lost their role in society, they also lost a sense of connection with the Republic, and it died. 

But Rome’s monuments have some good news for us, too. Somehow, out of all of these wars and tyrannies and destruction there has emerged an extraordinary, fascinating, and beautiful city. The most important thing about Rome is that it endures. There is nowhere else on earth I would rather be.

The post Why I’m Staying in Rome, Even While It Crumbles  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What makes some artwork timeless?

History shows that neither high prices at auction nor gallery attendance figures are good predictors of how artists, artworks, and art movements will be viewed in decades to come. The Guggenheim’s landmark exhibition 1900: Art at the Crossroads was noteworthy for revealing that the artists we lionize today were far from acclaimed in their time.  The Guggenheim’s 2000 show reprised the Paris ‘Exposition Universelle’ of 1900, which featured works by the likes of artists now forgotten—Leon Lhemitte, Fritz von Uhde, Alfred Guillou, Ferdinand Khnopff, and Franz von Stuck—but lacked works by the Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and modern masters we now love like Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, and Henri Matisse.

Today, major museums still follow the whims of the art market. The trustees who foot the bills often collect market favorites, and are not disgruntled when the museums they govern reflect their taste. Exceptions abound, but so do reputation-enhancing monographic shows of artists represented by the most powerful galleries on both coasts. And so the carousel built by talent-affirming players in the art world—dealers, curators, critics, and collectors—spins and spins with minimal friction. But is this really the art that our era will be remembered for?

The Atlanta-based Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which I serve as its president, seeks to get art that matters into major museums, while enhancing audiences’ ability to appreciate it. We want to enlarge the canon of American art history to include dozens of artists whose contributions have not heretofore been noticed, let alone embraced, by the market, critics, or museums.

What unites these artists is that they are all African Americans from the Southeastern United States. But their individual contributions are just that: individual. The objects themselves are undeniably ciphers of our time that come from this particular stream of the American experience. The quilts of Gee’s Bend, Alabama; assemblages by Thornton Dial; and sculptures by Lonnie Holley are today recognized as fundamental examples of American art.

The Foundation’s goals are not to entreat art world leaders to acknowledge that these artists merit inclusion by virtue of race or class. Our aim is instead to place important objects in permanent collections of leading art museums, so as to allow curators, scholars, and critics to situate them in the greater narrative of art history for public benefit.

Jessie T. Pettway, Bars and string-pieced column; 1950s; Cotton; 95 x 76 in.; Collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Photo by Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio. Courtesy of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation from the William S. Arnett Collection.

The project has its roots in the prescient life’s work of William S. Arnett, an Atlanta collector who devoted decades to assembling thousands of objects by almost 200 artists from the Southeastern United States. He identified artists whose achievements had never made it out of their home states to arbiters of art world success in major cities in the Northeast, Midwest and West. And he sought, through books and exhibitions, to tell their stories.

These stories are related by means of powerful and insightful artworks, drawing on the artists’ faith and from their awareness of major events on the world stage. As African Americans in that part of the United States still coping with stubborn traces of the Confederacy, they bear first-hand witness to racial injustice and overt discrimination. But their contributions are universal, not parochial. And while the formal attributes of their works are varied, from assemblage to painting to sculpture to textiles to site-specific projects, there is nothing in their art not found in mainstream art practices from the combines of Robert Rauschenberg to the mise-en-scène installations of Edward Kienholz to the heroic testaments of Anselm Kiefer.

That said, the acceptance of these artists and their artworks over the generation since Arnett set his sights on them has been episodic and conditional. Consider the works of Thornton Dial, shown at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1993. Dial’s assemblages at this time invoked representations of tigers—avatars for African Americans making their way through the South’s jungle of racial strife and exclusion.

But acclaim for the exhibitions was cut short by a slanted segment on the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes, which cast doubt on Arnett’s efforts by suggesting that his motives were born not of advocacy but of greed. Many gatekeepers of the museum and art market establishments were loath to countenance the unconventional Arnett or his championing of previously unknown artists, and the producers fed the storyline of exploitation of African Americans by an eccentric white collector. While there are grounds to question the fairness of the patronage system he implemented in assembling a comprehensive collection of thousands of objects, no one who knows him can question his intentions.

A better chapter began nearly a decade later with the pioneering exhibition The Quilts of Gee’s Bend in 2002, that earned accolades from the chief art critic of The New York Times as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.” The repurposing, by black rural women, of scraps of worn work clothes and other textile remnants into functional bedcovers became expressive, formally sophisticated testaments of the African American struggle. Once considered outside the mainstream, the quilts are now timeless since the US Postal service issued stamps. With that imprimatur in place, other exhibitions followed with appreciative evaluation of the oeuvres of Thornton Dial and Ronald Lockett.

A second obstacle to acceptance of these artists has been the assertion that a lack of credentialed training should by definition exclude them from the mainstream. The fact is that a majority of top-tier artists who figure prominently in the art market lack an M.F.A. (Master’s of Fine Arts degree). But as for the Southern artists represented within the Souls Grown Deep collection, their limited formal education has yielded the epithets self-taught, vernacular, or outsider. The ensuing marginalization has excluded them from entering the white-walled enclaves of the art world outside of the South except as curiosities or folk art.

Arnett decided, in 2010, to donate the highlights of his collection to the then newly established Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which takes its name from a 1920 Langston Hughes poem, “The Negro Speaks of River,” the last line of which is “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

This allowed for a fresh start in achieving Arnett’s lifelong ambition. And in fall
2014, the foundation made an initial donation of 57 objects to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This was the start of a planned transfer of hundreds of artworks to dozens of museums. in 2016, the Foundation entered into discussions with U.S. museums, modeling its approach on the methodology of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation by which art purchases are met with donations.

We believe that the willingness of a museum board and staff to commit resources, expertise, and space when making an acquisition offers a greater likelihood that artworks so acquired will become integral to the Museum’s holdings. The recent acquisition of 62 artworks from the Foundation by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco was the first such major commitment.

Audiences living in or visiting the Bay Area now find an open door to the achievements of American artists previously excluded from the art world’s prevailing narrative. The stories told by these powerful artworks should attract new viewers seeing their heritage represented for the first time, and will open the eyes of traditional museum-goers previously unaware of long-neglected artistic achievements.

It is our hope that a century hence, in survey exhibitions of art of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the artworks of Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, the quilters of Gee’s Bend, and dozens of others will be shown alongside works by artists who are today household names—together with other artists whose names have yet to surface.

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For me, the temple that has channeled this divine connection is New York City’s Guggenheim. I was born on the same day it opened—Oct. 21, 1959. Over five-plus decades, I’ve marked the years by my cross-country pilgrimages from the West Coast. In those visits, I’ve seen the direction of my life echoed in the museum’s famous circular design, and my personal story reflected in the titles of abstract paintings—inspired by Chagall and my other favorite artists.

We have a history, the Guggenheim and I.

Homage to the Circle, 1959

On the Guggenheim’s opening day, traffic and crowds clog Fifth Avenue, everyone eager for a first inside look at Frank Lloyd Wright’s audacious creation.

Originally launched in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the collection had outgrown its previous space, a former automobile showroom on 54th Street. There, the avant-garde paintings that founder Solomon R. Guggenheim began amassing in the 1920s were hung on draperies low to the floor so people could observe them while seated and listening to classical music. From its early days, the Guggenheim provided a full-sensory experience that took people out of their ordinary lives. There was even burning incense.

Some critics pan the new museum’s shell-like structure, claiming its sloped walls make it impossible to display anything properly. One wag dismisses the radical building as “an indigestible hot-cross bun.” Another compares it to a washing machine.

Others declare the Guggenheim a masterpiece, a work of art in itself. Wright, who once called his design a “spiral of life,” died six months before the opening.

While the crowds and critics are making their way through the galleries, I’m born at 2:12 that afternoon on the opposite coast, in a boxy building in downtown Los Angeles that once housed St. Vincent’s Hospital. On my birth certificate, I’m simply called “Baby Girl.”

Square and Circular Forms, 1981

I’m 21, a recent college graduate who’s not too sure what to do with an English degree or where I’m headed in life. My parents take me on a trip to Manhattan, and the Guggenheim is on our list of obligatory tourist sites, like Carnegie Deli or the World Trade Center.

Round where other buildings are square, the museum looks completely out of place amidst the staid skyscrapers. To me, who feels more comfortable with books than classmates, it’s a monument to anyone who doesn’t easily fit in. I love it. Even more as we stroll down the museum’s winding ramp. There’s one—twisting—way forward; you have to trust where it’s going.

At one point, my mother notices me admiring a work by Joan Miró, the Spanish artist who suffered a nervous breakdown in his teens, while working as a clerk. His otherworldly creatures, floating like clouds on the canvas, look familiar. “You liked Miró when you were a child,” Mom explains, and I remember the little book of his paintings I had in second grade. Miró gave up his accounting career to pursue art. Sometimes, finding the right path can be a struggle. I eventually decide to become a writer.

I and the City, 1982-2005

In the years that follow, I return to the Guggenheim whenever I can. I discover mystical Chagalls and lyrical Delaunays. Works such as “Paris Through the Window,” with its curious two-faced man, upside-down train, and soaring parachutist. Or “Simultaneous Windows (2nd Motif, 1st Part),” which makes me feel I’m peering through a stained glass window at something sacred. The museum shows me different ways of seeing. It offers portals to the supernatural. I commune with angels, flying horses, green fiddlers. They teach me that imaginary things can be more real than the parking lots, bland buildings, and other objects outside my office window.

“Paris Through the Window” by Marc Chagall, 1913

 
On other visits, it’s the more ordinary subjects that mean the most. I’m in my late 30s. My father has just died of cancer. I stop before Picasso’s “Woman Ironing”—from the artist’s blue period. How had I not noticed before these aching shoulders and sad eyes, this emaciated form? But she’s always been here. She’s no different. I’m the one who’s changed.

Later, I learn that the woman hides a secret. In 1989, infrared cameras revealed a painting beneath the painting, an upside-down portrait of a man with a moustache. Who was he, and why did Picasso paint over him? Even art historians are perplexed. It’s a mystery, and I’m discovering life is filled with them—like why people suffer, and why those we love leave us too soon.

Lovers on a White Background, 2006

I’m in my mid-40s and touring the Guggenheim with my husband and another couple. We do everything as couples in those years. Lately, though, my marriage has been spiraling downward. I leave the group to wander through the galleries, alone. Before long, I find myself standing before Kandinsky’s “Composition 8:” His black circle with its cosmic purple orb floats by itself amidst all the sharp edges and broken pieces.

I stare at the painting a long time. After more than 15 years, my husband and I have lost each other. The comfortable, secure life I’ve known is slowly coming apart. I, too, feel like I’m floating. I’m scared I might break into pieces.

Woman Before a Mirror, 2009

October 21, 2009. The Guggenheim and I turn 50. The museum is throwing a big party, and everyone’s invited.

I go with my new boyfriend. We hold hands and take the elevator to the top. The building looks beautiful, like a luminous planet, after undergoing an extensive renovation to repair cracks in its walls. I’ve got a few lines of my own I’d like to erase.

In honor of the occasion, the Guggenheim has staged a major Kandinsky retrospective. We make our way along the curved walls, pausing to study each work. This time, I’m drawn to the artist’s more exuberant compositions, like “Fugue” and “Various Parts.” Their free-flowing shapes dance across the canvases like confetti.

“Fugue” by Vasily Kandinsky, 1914

 
I have reason to celebrate. I’ve lost a lot of the things I loved since my previous visit—the husband, the house, the kind of friends you accumulate through a marriage. But I haven’t come undone. I’ve grieved and kept going, walking a long ramp one step at a time. Following unexpected curves took me places I might never have ventured on my own and put me in front of visions my own imagination couldn’t conjure up.

Work in Progress, unfinished

Today, as I approach my 57th birthday, I find myself holding a retrospective of my own. The boyfriend and I eventually parted ways. Five years ago, I met my future husband, and after a dizzying six-month romance, we got married in a simple courthouse ceremony.

We talk about taking a trip to New York from our home in Oregon. When we do, we’ll go to the Guggenheim. I’m drawn to its rings like an orbiting moon. I know it will feel timeless and changed. I know it will remind me of where I’ve been and reveal something new about the person I am now.

Divorce or death or simply the day-to-day grind can leave one depleted. But there are places, like the Guggenheim, to reassure us that’s not all there is. The world includes the fanciful, the “non-objective.” Trains can run upside down. Fiddlers can be green and horses can fly like angels. Buildings don’t have to be square.

Sometimes I think about the day in 2059 when the Guggenheim will mark its 100th year. The museum will look as glorious as it did when it opened, and the line of people clamoring to get in will be just as long. Perhaps, if I’m still around, I’ll be there too—an old woman with her many memories. I won’t even take the elevator. Someone will hold my frail hand, and I will slowly make my ascent, moving up the rings toward the museum’s glowing skylight.

The Guggenheim’s skylight

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Experiencing film, dance, and music is different. They set the terms of engagement in a familiar format, one that addresses a passive and fixed spectator. But the visual arts require the viewer to make the first move, one that can be intimidating for the uninitiated. My former SAIC colleague, James Elkins, points to studies showing that the average viewer spends two seconds looking at a painting and 10 seconds reading the accompanying wall text.

There are exceptions, of course. We cannot deny the excitement of eager audiences in the company of original masterpieces. Nor can we overlook the intense relationships between individual viewers and the works they have adopted as integral parts of their lives, touch-points that draw them back to a gallery again and again. But in spite of the massive outlay of financial capital, public investment, philanthropy, infrastructure, and institution building that goes into a museum, something still seems poorly calibrated. The desired spark between a viewer and a painting is rarely ignited by a quick glance.

James Cuno, the president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, wrote in an essay on the purpose of art museums, “I like to think that by providing and preserving examples of beauty, museums foster a greater sense of caring in the world and urge their visitors to undergo a radical decentering before a work of art.” That is a noble and undeniably correct objective, but it is one with a modest batting average. Despite the exhaustive efforts of curatorial teams to increase the likelihood of a “hit,” many audience members seem intuitively aware of what is missing: more access to the story explaining how and why a work has arrived at this place for their enjoyment.

In 2000, the former director of the Guggenheim Museum, Thomas Krens, demonstrating a full awareness of this deficiency, laid out a checklist of the required components of the contemporary museum experience. These were, he told The New York Times, “great collections, great architecture, a great special exhibition, a great second exhibition, two shopping opportunities, two eating opportunities, a high tech interface via the Internet, and economies of scale via a global network.” Many commentators have quoted this programmatic mash-up with disdain, but no one really doubts the truth of Krens’s assessment. What disturbs many is that Krens gives equal value to the non-art-related functions of the museum, separating them from the high culture items with nothing more than a comma. Indeed, that comma was easily jumped when Krens staged “The Art of the Motorcycle” in 1998, a rare intrusion of consumer products into the carefully defended art world. But Krens had tapped into the interests of thousands of ordinary art-goers, those shuffling through the galleries on “museum legs”, only to become reanimated by the opportunities to engage in eating, spending, and talking on the phone—activities compatible with a sidewalk stroll.

Did Krens really mean to reinvent the relationship between the art world and daily experience, and, by extension, between the museum and the surrounding city? If so, his perspective was in part a function of the idiosyncratic Frank Lloyd Wright building, a famously cylindrical structure within Manhattan’s boxy grid, which Krens occupied during his tenure as director. However alien the Guggenheim might look, Wright was sending a critical message about the socializing function of the city. Wright brilliantly coiled and extended the sidewalk of Fifth Avenue directly into the building, leaving no doubt that the presentation of one of the finest collections of 20th century art would be enlisted as a backdrop for a highly choreographed pedestrian parade. The art is proximate but not insistent; the scene before and behind the spectator is equally compelling. The viewer ceases attending exclusively to the paintings and begins to inhabit and explore the space of the museum as one would the city itself, with all of its distractions and unanticipated discoveries. And, if you begin at the top of the exhibition space—as recommended—every step down the ramp propels you back to the point of origin: the city. Very few museums connect city to museum in such a fashion—but why not?

There is scientific data, too, upon which to build an argument for ensuring that we do better by our museum guests. Kelly LeRoux, an assistant professor of public administration at the University of Illinois at Chicago, using data from the General Social Survey conducted since 1972 by the National Data Program for the Sciences, arrived at the following conclusion: “Even after controlling for age, race, and education, we found that participation in the arts, especially as audience, predicted civic engagement, tolerance, and altruism.”

To be sure, correlation isn’t causation, but her statement is still extraordinary, a compelling encouragement for closer ties between our cultural institutions and their eager audiences. A museum should be more than a civic amenity. It should generate proximity in every way—proximity to our better selves, to our city, and to our greater societal achievements. “[T]he space of the art museum is an inherently public or civic space,” wrote Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, in a recent essay. “Art museums in this context need to be understood as quintessentially urban institutions that play a critical role in defining the intellectual and physical fabric of cities and towns.” We would do well to ask more of what the city can contribute to the conceptualization of the museum, and vice versa.

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