Toward Joy Goes Off the Rails at the Brooklyn Museum

Angela Davis, the Nap Ministry, drag queen Miss Cracker, and a surreal, new take on American art

I love visiting the Brooklyn Museum. It always seems like adventure travel, though the No. 2 or No. 3 train from Penn Station takes the intrepid to nearly its front door in 30 minutes. Its grand museum, a splendor-in-the-rough, is 200 years old this year, more or less, since the Brooklyn Museum has had multiple incarnations and it started in 1825 as a library. That said, an anniversary is when a museum says it’s having an anniversary. By all means, get yourself there. It’s among the crowning glories of American culture.

I would recommend a visit to Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art, the museum’s new presentation of its distinguished American-art collection along with, here and there, Latin American and South American art. It displays around 400 works of art, including stars such as Louis Rémy Mignot’s Niagara and Bierstadt’s Storm in the Rocky Mountains, both blockbusters from 1866; Edward Hicks’s Peaceable Kingdom, from 1833; John Biggers’s Web of Life, from 1958; favorites by Hassam, Prendergast, Twachtman, and Ernest Lawson; Herter Brothers furniture; and two great painting by Eakins. The quality’s there.

The heart and soul of a museum is its permanent collection. How it’s displayed shows us a place’s curatorial vision. The Brooklyn Museum’s American art is superb, and though the museum feels at points like an alternative art space, it helps set a standard.

Alas, Toward Joy is still beyond-the-scope-of-human-imagination bad. It’s a black feminist perspective on Anglo America and its horrors, with a dollop of what’s called radical care. That’s hope and love and hugs in the face of dark times. It’s weepy, solipsistic, tiresome, lazy, dopey, and derivative. The staff of the Terra Foundation, which funded it, should be fired for putting big bucks behind a bad project. It’s a dumb show.

Here’s the plot, as it appears in Toward Joy’s introductory panel.

Feelin’ the joy yet? It’s Bye, Bye Birdie, The Lion King, and Anything Goes rolled into one full-metal, happy-clappy bundle of warm fuzzies and efflorescences. Pain and joy? Is this an S&M show? The problems — they are limitless, and I pondered them as I sat in the introductory gallery’s comfy leather easy chair. Another panel tells us that “instead of centering trauma and oppression, these galleries champion healing, freedom, and possibility.” I’m afraid settler colonialism, global imperialism, genocide, enslavement, violence, and trauma sour the pudding and put me in a questioning frame of mind. “Who, what, when, where, why?” any good reporter asks, especially when the rhetoric comes directly from the playbooks of Hamas, Black Lives Matter, the 1619 Project, Antifa, Green Scare, and all the mini-me Talibans in the world.

There’s plenty of preening in tough words coming from rarefied perches like the Brooklyn Museum’s curatorial office, but there’s a lot of sloppy, addled received wisdom among people who should be more precise, thorough thinkers. It also sounds very passive-aggressive, sullen, and hostile, disguised as it is by that veneer of joy and care, those efflorescences. It’s hard to make a second, new and improved, good first impression. The introductory panel acknowledges the curatorial staffers who gave us Toward Joy, judging from their first names all women, or men parading as women, except for one curatorial assistant, who might very well have fetched the jumbo cracked matcha latte every morning.

We’ve heard these grievances and grudges over and over for so long. Most have been totally debunked, and where there’s some truth in them, it’s clear they’re far from uniquely American and, more to the point, far from essential to the works of art they shackle or to the viewers they taunt and belittle.

The first section of the exhibition is Trouble the Water. It “explores the powerful links between water and notions of freedom, life, spirituality, and transformation” in the context of “colonialism, displacement, and the changing environment.” The museum tells us that “the act of curating might trouble the waters — and offer a bridge for safe crossing” and suggests in a one-word paragraph that we “wade.” And then: “Get clean. Get free.”

The music from Jaws went through my head.

The walls are deep blue. Is it Brooklyn Dodgers blue or the blue of the Devil and the deep-blue sea? It suits the art and does indeed soothe. Frederick Waugh’s The Great Deep, from 1909, anchors the gallery with immensity — 69 by 81 inches — and its sweep of inky, roiling ocean beneath a narrow, cloudy horizon at sunrise. It’s awesomely attractive. Mignot’s view of Niagara Falls, Martin Johnson Heade’s Summer Showers, from about 1865, and Thomas Moran’s Sunset at Sea, from 1906, are there, too. There’s axe-grinding, lots of it silly and gratuitous. That “black people can’t swim” is a white-supremacist slur, explains Consuelo Kanaga’s Boy with Toy Sea Lion, a photograph from the last 1940s, and I’d never heard they couldn’t, but it introduces the theme of segregated swimming pools.

Alaskan hunting implements, an Aztec water-god sculpture, a porcelain water filter from 1882, Andrea Chung’s disembodied resin hands jutting from the walls, labels by art conservators, and a poem by Stephanie Williams, Toward Joy’s curator, aren’t bad in themselves but clutter the space with too many messages and tangents. It’s rich, by the way, for a curator to jam her own work in her own exhibition. The gallery doesn’t seem like a committee’s work. It’s not deadly. It’s soupçon art history, with a little of this, a little of that, a little oppression, a little climate change, a dig at Huck Finn, a slap at the Hawaiian Pineapple Company using a nice Georgia O’Keeffe painting. Together, it all tells me that the curators can’t deal with depth of inquiry. Nonetheless, visitors will be amazed by the collection’s richness. The gallery is designed and arranged with élan.

The next section, Several Seats, is two big, long spaces dedicated to American portraits, the first a row of portraits hung low so they can be viewed from comfortable benches. These are “a sea of white faces,” as the curators call them, and drag queens write some of the labels.

It’s shock-jock stuff, as in: “Charles Willson Peale’s portrait of Ann Marsh Forman depicts a white woman who used her lily-white pussy power for no good,” writes Victoria von Blaque, also known as the Perfect Poison. A colonial Mexican portrait of a woman with false beauty spots hiding smallpox blemishes gets an ogling from Chiquitita, a Salvadoran trans woman and drag artist, who tells us that “the world looks a lot more beautiful without the invasion, displacement, enslavement, and murder of any peoples.” No number of false beauty spots can hide this. Yawn. Portraitist Cecilia Beaux is a “Bad Bitch,” Miss Cracker tells us, because she believed in phrenology, which was white supremacy. John Fremont, California’s first governor, was a “surveyor, topographer, politician, colonizer, abolitionist, gold miner, mass murderer.”

A celebratory gallery next to it displays more modern portraits, heavy on black subjects, Salon-style. Titus Kaphar’s Shifting the Gaze, from 2017, starts with a copy of a Frans Hals group portrait he painted. It’s Family Group in a Landscape, from 1646, which shows an affluent Dutch family with its black servant. Using a thick, wide brush, Kaphar covers the family with thin white paint, leaving only the black servant exposed. Double yawn. Eakins’s portrait of Letitia Wilson Jordan from 1888 is installed high on a wall, with the gallery lighting arranged to bleach her face. Below it is a buoyant portrait of Shirley Chisholm, the Brooklyn congresswoman, by Bisa Butler. Butler’s portrait is wonderful, but the lighting’s one cheap shot I’d never seen.

Having multiply yawned, I was happy to visit A Quiet Place, a lovely gallery with deep purple walls and lilac labels inspired by the Nap Ministry, a collective based on the notion that grind culture is a form of white supremacy and that everyone needs to take life more slowly. Living in Vermont — where the pace is slow, the population is as pale as humanity gets, and “silence is presence” might as well be the state motto — I can say with confidence that aversion to grind culture is not unique to the anti-racist Nap collective. At this point, sad to say, the interpretation in Toward Joy lost nearly all credibility, though in this gallery it made the most sense because lines like “don’t let the noise of the world drown out the sound of you” perfectly align with the art, which, again, is too good to ignore.

The gallery is a serene balance of very different things. Sargent’s Dolce Far Niente, from 1907, is the zenith of his art of recumbency, the group of pictures he launched around then of figures, usually friends, in repose. The Gilded Age’s splashiest high-society portraitist had claimed to retire from painting the rich and aristocratic, always standing or sitting, in favor of, among other things, mastering the compositional challenge of the human figure splayed in leisure or asleep.

Hale Woodruff’s Blue Landscape, from 1968, is Abstract Expressionism with the sensibility of Inness’s or Durand’s woodsy Hudson River School scenes near it. A beautiful Native American cradleboard from the late 1800s, decorated with beads and porcupine quills, is in the mix of The Quiet Place. A Florine Stettheimer scene of women at leisure, Herter Brothers furniture, and a Gee’s Bend quilt easily hang in dimmed lighting, with a commodious sofa and an Oriental carpet. I wouldn’t have changed a thing. The space is without rancor.

The To Give Flowers gallery is lovely, too. It’s more or less without vitriol, too, and since it and A Quiet Place are well into the exhibition, I wonder whether the curators simply exhausted themselves. Was there a welfare check? An intervention? Did authority figures empty Brooklyn’s inventory of butterfly nets? Who knows.

The gallery between the two — Counterparts — highlights work in variations of black and white, which is old-hat, but it’s not incendiary, and it doesn’t insult visitors with vacuity. It shows nearly 90 objects in many media, from Malvina Hoffman’s and Louise Nevelson’s sculptures to old silhouettes, Hassam and Bellows snow scenes, Robert Venturi plates, a Saarinen ottoman, and austere, fortifying portraits by George Henry Hall and Kyohei Inukai, an artist I didn’t know. Iago’s Mirror (2009), by Fred Wilson, a mediocrity, is also there, as well as Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave (1866), an icon of white supremacy these days, as is all marble sculpture rooted in Greek and Roman art. It’s a celebration of whiteness, too dumb a point of view to explain, but, here, The Greek Slave, all nearly six feet of her, stands undefiled. All told, this gallery is well done and gives the curators a chance to highlight the museum’s superb collection of American prints and photographs.

I’d quibble with To Bring Flowers’s core argument that giving flowers relates to “stop and smell the roses” and black American funeral traditions. The argument makes no sense, but the gallery is still gorgeous. It seems to be a salute to Brooklyn’s Botanic Garden, next to the museum, and a rousing cheer for the museum’s scenes of nature, whether flora, fauna, or the human fanny. It’s packed with the prettiest flower paintings. Joseph Stella, Kenzo Okada and Chiura Obata — both of whom are Japanese-American flower painters, O’Keeffe, and La Farge are all first-class garden artists, and their work is grounded by labels written by Botanic Garden curators, who aren’t afraid of depth. A Native American man’s buckskin shirt from the late 19th century, embroidered with flowers, is a high point. The walls are dressed with electrifying floral wallpaper designed by Loïs Mailou Jones in 1928.

Toward Joy has many flashes, even passages, of brilliance. A Dorsal View, speaking of flashes, displays the art of the arse, bum, or derrière, depending on how erudite we want to be. I’ve never seen the tuchus so frankly celebrated. The nude is an art staple, but it’s usually cloaked, so to speak, in the lingo of composition, line, and color. Here we get the full, rearview monty. Backside and center are John Koch’s The Sculptor, from 1964, the great male nude, along with Eakins’s just-as-great William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River, from 1908, and contemporary nudes by Laura Aguilar, Sasha Gordon, and Mickalene Thomas, and many other wonderful things. It’s all inspired and different.

I’m not sure whether Toward Joy begins or ends with Radical Care, a gallery that purports to concern “sankofa,” an Indigenous term for caring for the past in order to care for the future; “rematriation,” which asks us to reconsider our relationships to the land, or to right past wrongs, but it’s a made-up, pop word; and “gratitude,” a word we all know. Trouble the Waters logically starts the exhibition, but Bierstadt’s Storm in the Rocky Mountains, the first thing in the Radical Care gallery, is ten feet wide and demands immediate attention. You can’t compete with it, and in the middle of Radical Care is a red, house-shaped gallery within the gallery. Red will always win over blue as a draw, even if it’s Brooklyn Dodgers blue.

It’s all bizarre. The red structure is titled the American Art Study, and art-study spaces normally come at the end of a show, though this space isn’t a reading room. It shows us the sources that the curators used, with books arranged in glass-enclosed shelves. Art is on the walls of the study and throughout the Radical Care gallery. We’re told that the books — and the interpretation drawn from them — push “decolonial” studies, black studies, of course, cultural theory, which means toxic, dishonest critical race theory, and feminist theory. Favored authors include the antisemitic Alice Walker, the charlatan bell hooks, and Chela Sandoval, who wrote Mythology of the Oppressed. And there’s lots of Angela Davis.

Angela Davis? You mean the Top Ten Most Wanted Lister, twice the U.S. Communist Party’s candidate for vice president, Lenin Peace Prize winner, Stasi apologist, Jim Jones’s buddy, “I Like Fidel” button wearer, Hamasnik, BDS club queen, useful idiot, and, first-degree-murder defendant? Yes, that Angela Davis.

The display of all these books shows great insecurity on the part of the curators, as well as creative starvation. “Look at how much I read,” they cry. It’s something graduate students would do.

There are moments of pure good feeling in the Radical Care gallery and, for that matter, in every gallery, like Lilly Martin Spencer’s scene from 1856 of a young, exuberant housewife standing in a kitchen heaping with apples, cranberries, pineapples, cherries, bottles of molasses, and candy. Near it are a massive Severin Roesen still life of fruit from 1860, George Luks’s vibrant view of Hester Street in Brooklyn from 1905, and a fancy Kimbel and Cabus cabinet from the 1870s — lacquered Gothic Revival meets Japanese style meets Arts & Crafts. They were among New York’s best makers of middle-class furniture.

Clobbering good feeling, good nature, and sheer beauty are rants on the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans along the West Coast, the evils of Manifest Destiny, sullying an Asher B. Durand landscape, which is the first American painting in the museum’s collection, and slave-harvested sugar. Damn those lovely silver sugar bowls! Bierstadt’s Storm in the Rocky Mountains also gets the guilt-by-association rap. It “conceals a legacy of violence and colonialism,” because the mountain the artist depicts was named in 1895, 30 years after he painted it, for a Colorado governor said to have fomented the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864.

Is this all the curators think is significant? What a bunch of drudges. It’s a magnificent work. It’s cinematic. If the curators don’t kill frisson, the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address will. It’s five single-spaced columns of text, displayed on a gallery wall. People can worship whatever gods they want, pagan or not, but a thousand-word paean to Grandmother Moon, the Enlightened Teachers, and the Four Winds belongs in a catalogue footnote.

Toward Joy is, I think, the fifth iteration of the museum’s American collection I’ve seen in the past 35 years. While the first two were, more or less, traditional, nice, and harmless, the last three have been dreadful, and this one is the worst, but it’s only catty and choleric. Its many faults are to be expected in a micro-culture laid low by grievance, naïveté, ignorance of history, conceit, and a surfeit of piety. It’ll be on view for years. It really ought to be a three-month show, ruling as it does with so heavy a hand. Permanent-collection displays ought to leave most of the interpretation to the visitors.