The New Rubell Museum in D.C. Is a Work in Progress

Lovely building, but jettison the junk. The Potomac’s nearby.

A couple of weekends ago, I visited the new Rubell Museum in Washington, D.C. It just opened in October. The Rubell showcases the contemporary art collection of Donald and Mera Rubell and their son, Jason, all living in Miami. Together they’ve assembled 7,000 objects by a thousand artists, opened an art center in Miami in 1993, and premiered a second museum in southwest Washington.

There are many things to like about the Rubell. I’m never inclined to diss philanthropy, and the Rubells have refurbished an old public school into a very good space for art. Built in 1906, it served black children in what was then a rigidly segregated Washington. Marvin Gaye graduated from junior high school in that very building in 1954. What’s Going On is the inaugural, museum-wide exhibition, and it draws from the lyrics of Gaye’s anti-war, civil-rights tune from 1971.

Old schools are hard to repurpose since they’re built like fortresses. And gyms, classrooms, and auditoriums aren’t suited for offices and apartments. The new museum was designed by Hany Hassan, who works for Beyer Blinder Belle. The firm, which has a Washington office, beautifully revived the Cooper Hewitt in New York, designed the city’s Rubin Museum, dedicated to Himalayan art, and restored the Main Concourse at Grand Central Terminal. They do elegant work, and the Rubell’s an example. There’s a new, handsome glass entrance space for ticketing and a shop leading to an impressive gallery that was once the school auditorium. Four splashy works carry the space.

It’s an effective, grand introduction. Another Man’s Cloth, from 2006, by El Anatsui, the Ghanaian artist, and Kehinde Wiley’s Sleep, from 2008, hold the walls at the other end of the gallery. Both are big names, and Sleep is 25 feet long and a nearly nude black man presented as an odalisque. The subject’s part Sleeping Beauty and part dead Jesus, too, though I thought of the nudes of Titian, Correggio, and Orazio Gentileschi and the tradition that followed them, leading to Gérôme’s harem girls and Cabanel’s Birth of Venus.

I’ve written a few times about Kehinde Wiley. I don’t think he’s a bad artist, but I don’t think he’s an artist of consequence, in part because his work lacks depth. He quotes Titian and Giorgione, both of whom invented the reclining female nude, but so do a thousand other artists since then. The lounging black man in Sleep is a staple of high-end fashion photography. Wiley turns it Technicolor, sizes it for a movie screen, and adds his signature backdrop of flowers and vines. It’s big, gaudy, and decorative.

It’s expensive wallpaper. I like Anatsui’s wall tapestries but have seen a lot of them. They’re all different, and they all look the same. Both Wiley and Anatsui are successful brands.

Vaughn Spann’s Big Bad Rainbow, from 2019, and Christopher Myers’s Earth, from 2020, are on either side of the entrance to this gallery. They’re big. Spann’s work is a 15-foot square, and Myers’s is another 25-footer. Both are textile wall hangings. Spann’s depicts a rainbow with the color black added to the usual colors because he “wants to put the black back in the rainbow” — the metaphorical rainbow. The rainbow also quotes the pack of Skittles that Trayvon Martin had in his pocket when George Zimmerman shot him in 2012.

It’s the stuff of high-school murals. Spann, like many artists, found a shtick to appeal to rich, guilty white liberals. Earth, I read on the label, “explores narratives about hardship, protest, and spirituality in an era defined by racial violence and the COVID-19 pandemic.” It depicts an abstract view of Hart Island, site of a potter’s field in the Bronx.

Not a bad idea. When Judas returned the 30 pieces of silver to the cabal who had paid him to betray Jesus, they used it to buy land to bury the unwanted, unclaimed dead. The theme’s a rich, dark one, and it’s not derivative and dull.

After this space, a flashy but also careerist one, into the guts of the new museum I went. The art’s very uneven, and a lot of it is bad, bad, bad. I worked as a curator at the Clark Art Institute, established by one husband-and-wife team as a gallery for their collection and a monument to their idiosyncratic taste. When I go to a museum based on a family collection, I look for specific themes and taste uniting the art as a coherent whole. I don’t find these at the Rubell. Did the attic or cellar need to be emptied? Were there three-for-one sales at an art bargain basement?

Yes, the paintings tend to be supersized, and that makes for wall coverage, but there’s too much junk. The Rubells own 7,000 works of art. Surely they could have found better things. Washington’s the Swamp, and people in politics have remarkably bad taste in art, but it’s the nation’s capital, and the Rubells — bravely — are in the edification business. They paid for a lovely museum building, admittedly hitched to new rental housing they’ve developed and across the street from a hotel they own. Washington’s not a big contemporary art town. I like small museums.

The galleries, which are human-scale and comfortable, are on three floors. They can accommodate all kinds of art and vary in size. In this installation, each gallery is devoted to a single artist. The interpretation is very good. Each gallery has an artist statement, some long, some short. It’s a relief to read what artists think. Most curators today seem lost in their own bubbles.

In Hank Willis Thomas’s Unbranded Series, the artist takes magazine ads targeting black consumers from the late ’60s to 2008, the year of the Obama election, scans them, strips their texts, and reproduces them. Thomas, a very good artist, did the series on black men and women between 2006 and 2008. He’s done the same thing with white women. Thomas says he wanted to track blackness in the corporate eye over decades.

I’ve seen these photographs off and on, and I’m skeptical there’s much serious interrogation of race, class, and gender. Humans in 50-year-old magazine ads often look extraterrestrial. Are the men in Thomas’s work hypersexualized, as black men once were? Yes, and they’re mocked and seem, at least in images from the ’70s, concerned about hair. Men and women in ads today will look bizarre 50 years from now. Still, it’s good to see the entire Thomas series on view.

I’d never heard of Miami painter Hernan Bas. He’s very good. His eight works depict teenage-boy adventures in jewel-like colors. Some are weird, and Bas says he’s interested in paranormal activity. I found it hard to stop looking and think they’re a good juxtaposition against Thomas’s work nearby.

There are lots of very good artists, such as Purvis Young, also from Miami, and Catherine Opie represented by minor work. And then there’s truly awful art by Tschabalala Self — big, appalling things — and Sylvia Snowden’s goop paintings.

I’ve seen lots of bad art. Among the worst was a painting I saw in the window of a Santa Monica gallery years ago depicting drowning dachshunds. There’s nothing that wretched at the Rubell, but the hideous portraits of Snowden, Self, and February James are in the running, or should be tossed into deep water. Nina Abney isn’t a bad artist, but too much of her does her no credit. She has a gallery filled with derivative, Ensor-lite paintings, some ten footers. Familiarity breeds contempt.

The Rubells were essential, early boosters of the work of Oscar Murillo, who also has a gallery devoted to his work. Call me crazy, but making an abstract picture and then spraying “LECHE” and “CARNE” on it does not a masterpiece make.

If there’s any climate-change art, I didn’t find it. The Rubells are in their ’80s. I’m timeless, but, if we must be bean counters, I’m old, too. We tend to look at apocalypse art and chuckle. The “climate emergency” is a hoax making millionaires and billionaires. The Rubells have 7,000 objects, so who knows what’s in their vaults but, blessedly, there were no Murillos with the words “demasiado maldita caliente.” Cole Porter would surely have preferred “too darn hot.”

The Marvin Gaye song that provides the theme for the museum —  “What’s Going On” — is described by the Rubell as “a powerful condemnation of the Vietnam War and the destructive realities of social injustice, drug abuse, and environmental negligence.” As is the new Rubell, they suggest. I listened to “What’s Going On” and read the lyrics. Goodness, it’s a pop song and nothing to move the needle. “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” has legs. It’s about going up, not down to victim politics.

I think the Rubells should ditch the social-injustice la-di-da and the bad art and show good things. They strike me as collectors who have a price point and bargain to get art on the cheap.

The Rubell Museum is in the middle of nowhere. The neighborhood’s a no-man’s-land of Iron Curtain–style apartment blocks for low- and mid-level political appointees and lobbyist flunkies. There’s a Whole Foods nearby and lots of fitness centers. I don’t know anything about the Rubells’ taxes. I asked the press person about the museum’s tax status. It’s a 501(c)(3), she said, but I wonder what the total tax deal is. If the family’s getting tax breaks, at least deliver better art.

I admire the Rubells for their charitable impulse and support of artists. If they’re wanting the work of black artists, I’d look at Beverly McIver, Dawoud Bey, Rydell Tomas Jr., Henri Paul Broyard, and Paul Sepuya. The Rubell is a new museum. It’s got a great building and a curatorial vision, alas, informed by the procrustean taste of the collectors.

Al Meadows bought lots of junk in the ’50s and ’60s, not bad art but fakes. Once informed and inspired, he unloaded the dregs and bought like a king. Hence we have the Meadows Museum, one of the country’s best. I have high hopes for the Rubell. I wrote earlier this week about the Phillips Collection’s new show, Pour, Tear, Carve, true to Washington and full of braided unrealities. The Rubells, living in Miami, have the chance to do something different.