This exhibition was collaboratively produced by a team of three curators: Karen Lemmey, the Lucy S. Rhame Curator of Sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Tobias Wofford, associate professor of art history at Virginia Commonwealth University; and Grace Yasumura, assistant curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum who spent five years in conversation. In addition, the curators worked with a team of SAAM educators and a group of students from Howard University and George Mason University. The breadth of those involved is felt in the selection and scope of the work included.
A video early in the exhibit narrated by Dr. Wofford adds to this by setting the stage for a broad audience to see the work. It features interviews with people on the street in DC about what sculpture, power, and race mean to them. It is worth a watch, I missed it on my first viewing, but did watch during the second visit. Some of those interviewed thought sculpture was: making things out of stone that can be touched, objects representing a country, what the U.S. is made of. Some of the answers about power are: inner power, that it should be shared, that it is control, responsibility, and the ability to act. Race was described as: bubbles on the SAT, complex and unique for each person, what empire is built on, identity, love, community, and also turmoil.
My visit to the SAAM also corresponded with reading James Baldwin’s Nothing Personal. In the book Baldwin discusses white people in the United States as both the perpetrator and victims of the myth the country is built on. “It is, of course, in the very nature of a myth that those who are its victims and, at the same time, its perpetrators, should, by virtue of these two facts, be rendered unable to examine the myth, or even to suspect, much less recognize, that it is a myth which controls and blasts their lives.” This inability to see the myth traps people in the past, and Baldwin continues, “To be locked in the past means, in effect, that one has no past, since one can never assess it, or use it: and if one cannot use the past, one cannot function in the present, and so one can never be free.”
