The National Gallery’s Afro-Atlantic Histories Is Too Big and Loses Focus, but the Art Is Great

Curatorial screeds distract from good artists, many from Brazil, unknown to Americans.

T he National Gallery of Art’s new exhibition, Afr0-Atlantic Histories, explores the history and cultural legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. It’s a tweaked version of a bigger exhibition organized by the São Paulo Museum of Art in Brazil in 2018 focusing on black culture in Brazil. After its run at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the show is now in D.C.

I recommend it. I learned a great deal, and the art’s very good. A greenhorn from the Green Mountain State, I knew next to nothing about Brazil aside from “The Girl from Ipanema”; the Line of Demarcation in 1493, in which the pope, of all uninformed, self-interested people, used a ruler and a straight line to divide the New World between Spain and Portugal; and the movies Black Orpheus and That Man from Rio.

But is it even about Brazil? Yes and no. Afro-Atlantic Histories, like Pope Alexander VI, is arbitrary — not in setting boundaries but in jumping from one place to the next. The American version of the exhibition comprises 130 works of art from Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe from the 17th century to our time. This in itself explains why it’s such a muddle, not entirely incoherent, since it has a storyline, but so diffuse that it’s a “something to think about” exhibition. Afro-Atlantic Histories raises rich, timely issues, but it’s as shallow as it’s complicated. The show in São Paulo was 400 objects, so the NG did heroic work in whacking it, but focusing on two or three countries rather than more than 20 would have made more sense.

I think marquee museums like the National Gallery, rushing to pack their calendars with racial themes, look at words such as “slavery,” “racism” and “resistance” and believe that they’ve struck programmatic gold rather than the dross and glitter they’ve actually found.

The first section, Maps and Margins, tells us where we’re going. I isolated the core works in this section, and reading the catalogue helps, to divine a controlling theme. Hank Willis Thomas’s A Place Called Home is a black stainless-steel wall sculpture showing an outline of the continent of North America but substituting Africa in place of South America. It’s one of the first works we see. Since it’s a map, and since we look at maps for direction and a sense of place, I’d call it the exhibition’s lead.

Thomas longs for a connection to Africa, which he makes by moving it into our hemisphere. He proposes that the African diaspora, subjected to bondage and then exclusion and erasure, needs to assert itself as an integral part of our past, present, and future. A Place Called Home is cryptic, which helps make it a good work of art. Thomas longs for something he can’t explain, like an adopted child seeking the mother who bore him. He’s grabbing a tangent of the 1619 Project, which argues, among its many false claims, that African slaves made America what it is, for better or worse.

Next to A Place Called Home is Frank Bowling’s Night Journey, a big painting depicting the Middle Passage. That’s the group of routes in the ocean used by the Atlantic slave traders. Bowling uses diluted acrylic paint, so the forms are murky. South America and Africa are ghostly outlines. There’s art depicting slave ships, too. Emanoel Araújo’s The Ship, from 2007, is a wood wall sculpture shaped like an African ceremonial mark with figures in relief suggesting slaves in a cargo hold.

Maps and Margins and the next section, Enslavements and Emancipations, cover gruesome and brutal subjects, too. Jacques Arago’s Slave Punishment, from 1839, is a best-practices guide for dealing with slaves who misbehave. Prints and watercolors from the 1830s and 1840s depict slaves in stocks and braces and lynched slaves. The notorious 1863 McPherson and Oliver photograph of a slave with welts on his back from whipping is there.

The art’s compelling, many of the artists are new to me, and, as is always the case at the National Gallery, the spaces are arranged with unparalleled finesse. With Cliff Notes efficiency, viewers see slavery whitewashers in action. Slaves in a Cargo Hold, a German lithograph from 1838, shows black men chatting, lounging, and napping.

The exhibition moves from historical to contemporary art. AKOSUA SOM BI. 2014 (2019), by the Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama, is a large burlap wall hanging made from old, used cocoa-bean bags. The dark, already textured burlap has been dinged and dragged so much that it’s got the look of rough experience. It’s from 2019 and evokes the misery of Ghanaians sold into slavery.

So, piecing it all together, viewers get the exhibition’s basic chronology. Subjugation, slavery’s rationalizers, its brutality, and its legacy. The catalogue is part of the exhibition, and though most visitors, understandably, don’t read catalogues, I do. In olden days, the scholarly catalogues and the exhibition on the walls were tightly connected, as they should be. Now, they can be two separate creatures altogether. Afro-Atlantic Histories is tuned to the exhibition in that the objects in the show are nicely illustrated.

There are five short essays in the catalogue, four or five pages each, and, separately, two or so pages on each of the show’s sections. The five short essays are polemical and rarely enlist the art. The art in the show isn’t even illustrated there. The pieces dedicated to each section of the show give each object a sentence or two.

My problem with the catalogue involves the short essays, which are entirely polemical. There’s lots of sloganeering and plenty of lamentation but not much depth. The writers fault art history as colonialist. Yawn. The art-history canon, that consensus-driven group of objects considered masterpieces, excludes the folkloric, the primitive, the indigenous, and the tribal. This is slavery’s inheritance and erasure at work. I note here that the art-history canon, those masterpieces blessed by the great and the good among art historians, excluded American art until the 1980s. Even American art historians specializing in European painting thought it was derivative, if not junk. The canon excluded women artists, too.

The catalogue insists that an amorphous villain called culture suppresses Afro-Atlantic history in favor of a single, hegemonic history that ignores slavery’s horror and pain. The catalogue’s writers seek, instead, a view of the past that’s “plural, open, impermanent, and speculative.” Every good historian wants this, too. Chasing that kind of past explains why, in the lobby of the education center for Ford’s Theatre in D.C., there’s a tower made from the 5,000 books about Lincoln written since his death. They don’t, each and every one of them, say the same thing.

The things I like the most about Afro-Atlantic Histories are the artists I didn’t know and the high level of quality. I don’t really believe in canons because I don’t like gatekeepers, but I know I was thrilled to see Mahama’s wall hanging. Paulo Nazareth, Barrington Watson, Luiz Braga, Carlos Vergara, Vincent Rosenblatt, Dalton Paula, Samuel Fosso, Barkley Hendricks, and Flávio Cerqueira — each has wonderful work in the exhibition.

Much of their work is in the Portraiture section. It covers two galleries, and they’re two of the most exquisitely arranged galleries I’ve seen. There’s a perfect balance of size and palette. It’s so hard to hang portrait galleries, especially those with historical and contemporary art. Done clumsily, the portraits start to fight.

The Portraiture rooms deal with black identity. Fosso’s Self-Portrait (as Liberated American Woman of the ’70s) is fantastic. It’s from 1997. Fosso made the dress-up self-portrait after he fled war-torn Nigeria for Paris. The French department store Tati offered him an artist’s residency in which he had the run of the store in selecting props. The photograph is light and serious and wonderful. I loved Osmond Watson’s Johnny Cool, a portrait of a boy in his native Jamaica from 1967. Hendricks’s George Jules Taylor, from 1972, is a first-rate swagger portrait.

The anchor in this space is Zanele Muholi’s Ntozakhe II (Parktown), a floor-to-ceiling wall mural made from digital file from 2016. She’s a South African artist whose work promotes positivity, confidence, and self-awareness among her generally marginalized subjects. The National Gallery just acquired it. It doesn’t belong in the exhibition, since Muholi’s work doesn’t involve Afro-Atlantic history, but at that point I didn’t care. The exhibition had become so muddled that I was simply reveling in all the good art. I did indeed read all the labels — twice — but didn’t take them seriously. That’s allowed.

We all lose something when curators harp on “art historical imperialism” and “false narratives of progress.” The legacy of slavery “can’t be course corrected,” I read, as well as “inclusion doesn’t work.” Before long, I decided that the exhibition is only a disguise for a curatorial screed, leaving the art as an illustration at best, a bystander at worst.

The last section of the exhibition is Resistances and Activisms. It’s protest art mostly. In the catalogue and in previous incarnations of the show but not in the NG version, Afro-Atlantic Histories ends with a poster demanding freedom for the hideous Angela Davis, now a tenured professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Nothing says “oppression” louder than lifetime job security, summers off, and a gig in one of the most affluent cities in California, and with a view of the Pacific to boot.

The exhibition has plenty of good things by artists I didn’t know, and that’s a treat, but artists such as Glenn Ligon, Romare Bearden, and William H. Jackson are there, too. Ligon’s portfolio of prints, Runaways, from 1993, is great, and here’s one thing that makes it great. I’ve used it in half a dozen exhibitions, some about race and some not. It’s an elastic, responsive work of art. Bearden’s 1967 collage, Tomorrow I May Be Far Away, has a place of pride.

There’s nothing wrong with “something to think about” exhibitions. Thinking’s not a crime yet, and I enjoy learning about South American art. The exhibition needed a stern edit, though. Two of the show’s sections — Everyday Lives, dealing mostly with post-abolition genre painting, and Rites and Rhythms, about ceremonies and festivals — are too big. They implicate jazz, the blues, Mardi Gras, voodoo, and African-American Christianity. After a few minutes, so many little figures, color, and partying overwhelms a Vermonter like me, whose palette comes in green in summer, red in the fall, white in winter, and mud-brown in spring.

In these two sections, the show falls off the rails in this crucial way. It covers too many places. A 400-year chronology doesn’t make for focus, either. The exhibition presumes, for all its homage to plurality, that, for instance, Brazil and the United States are interchangeable. Aside from stating the obvious — they’re not — I’d note that the election of Trump in 2016 in the United States and of Bolsonaro as president of Brazil in 2018 isn’t, as the catalogue suggests, evidence that the two countries are functioning on a parallel track. And then there are artists from 22 other countries in the show. Their stories can’t be fungible. Why is there a painting by Frédéric Bazille in the exhibition? And one by Joshua Reynolds, and by Hyacinthe Rigaud? Why is there a portrait of an old emperor of Ethiopia?

Almost all the new artists I listed, artists with strong work in the exhibition, are from Brazil, yet I left the exhibition having learned very little about slavery in Brazil. Brazil didn’t abolish slavery until 1888, the final country in the Western Hemisphere to do so. I know it didn’t take a civil war to do it. What was its story?

Cerqueira’s Amnesia, from 2015, is one of the best things in the exhibition. It’s a bronze sculpture of a black child pouring a bucket of white paint on his head. Rather than sticking, the paint runs in rivulets down his body. I learned in the two or three sentences about the object in the catalogue that Brazil had an official “whitening policy” that encouraged interracial marriage to dilute the predominantly African heritage of the population, making the country less and less black over time. This clearly would not have been a policy in the U.S. I suspect that Brazil has always been a black-majority country ruled by a tiny Portuguese-Brazilian elite. How did this minority rule happen?

A comparative focus on the United States and Brazil would probably have been more useful. More attention would have gone to the Brazilian artists. Brazil, with nearly 220 million people, is second to the United States in population among the countries of the Western Hemisphere. Visitors would have actually learned something, and the curators would have been compelled to write longer, deeper essays. They couldn’t coast using dogma and catchwords.

Big art exhibitions treating race routinely have advisory committees of outsiders. The National Gallery, since it’s part of the federal government, needs two, one of historians and art historians, the other of artists and nonprofit operatives. These two committees supplement an internal three-person curatorial team.

Outside advisers insulate museums from awkward brouhahas should, for instance, a label say something that gives offense, but these committees both sanitize and anesthetize. They’re committees, after all, and committees tend to dilute strong, pungent voices and themes. The two committees working on Afro-Atlantic Histories are all creatures of Washington and, I imagine, keepers of the PC flame. “Don’t forget to include this” and “that’s the company line” make for exhibitions that, like this one, seem so scattered.

Resistance and protest sometimes make sense, but it’s not a lifestyle. The exhibition’s curators think the West is racist in its bones. This is not only false but it’s dispiriting. Isn’t there more art coming from the countries in the show that reflects progress and hope?

Again, I want to emphasize that the exhibition is worth seeing to revel in the art and the National Gallery’s production values. It begins with authority and emotion and at least has a theme in the first two sections, has a big dip caused by diffusion and sameness in the Everyday Lives and the Rites and Rhythms sections, and regains its footing, visually, with gorgeous portraits. I’d ditch the resistance gallery unless you’re a professional protester, as many in Washington are. There’s hope for America in that almost all of us have better and more useful things to do with our lives.

Editor’s note: This story has been emended since it first appeared.