Museums, Art and Thinking About the Past
A visit to the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk struck a chord as I was thinking about race, gender and place and how we bring these themes to life in teaching and public history. The Chrysler Museum is getting ready to close for a year long renovation, and paintings have been removed, and moved to make way for repairs to the building. The result is some fascinating juxtaposition of space and content. Blank space frames rooms of untouched, well-curated art and artifacts. Paintings are paired with sculptures from different schools of thought and centuries. The subjects of gender and race are highlighted in new ways by the juxtaposition of pieces of art that are not usually displayed side by side or framed with empty space. One set of paintings in a half empty gallery set a Degas’ Dancer with Bouquet next to Mary Cassatt’s The Family, which is next to Gauguin’s The Loss of Virginity. The contrast of the innocence of Cassatt’s mother and children with the despair of the Gauguin and the exhaustion and depth of Degas’ ballerina give striking portraits of what it meant to be a woman at the turn of the century: maiden, mother, whore. This tryptic was set off and made more striking by the gaps in the flow of artwork around it. Imagine if we could rearrange art galleries like this on a regular basis? Curators put enormous effort into arranging exhibits to put paintings together in meaningful and provocative groupings, but economy of space means that empty space is rarely used to emphasize the content. As we think about how location can set off content, space and context become increasingly important in highlighting how art and exhibit design can draw our attention the space around an individual item or a grouping. As we begin to imagine a commemoration of 1619, the arrival of enslaved Africans, negative space, silence, and watchful presence, may speak louder than words. We bring some of this attention to loss in the planned libation ceremony, which will close the conference.