American Artists, American Stories
Philbrook Museum of Art
Through December 29, 2024
When people talk about being American, they’re inevitably talking about the flavor of American that they themselves are. Being an American is different for the recently-arrived Hmong mother of two than it is for the white suburban housewife whose British ancestors colonized Native land. So much is America the melting pot it claims to be that to say “American” tends to beg several qualifiers of description.
Philbrook’s swaggering, massive exhibition “American Artists, American Stories”—a title as broad and cumbersome as the country it seeks to emulate—takes on this challenge with a wild resolve, more success than failure, and a few curatorial befuddlements. I left both proud of and excited about the American project and disappointed by the pigeonhole into which the word “American” is so often forced.
The imposing and irresistible “The Artist in His Museum” by Charles Wilson Peale (1741-1827) greets the visitor first. It’s a suggestive opening. What curiosities will we see inside, and what violence is insinuated by the comparison of America to a treasury of historical specimens? The show is drawn from the collection of the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), an early nineteenth century project of Peale’s own founding that sought to “promote the young country’s burgeoning artistic identity.” That early identity was unsurprisingly white and male.
As time went on, however, the institution began collecting the art of women and Black artists. The dynamic of white and Black is a bell rung often in the first half of “American Artists, American Stories”—to the exclusion, across the show, of artists of Native, Asian, or Latino descent, an exclusion which the text of the exhibit, admiringly enough, admits. It sets early Black works next to early white works and allows the viewer to consider the uneven power dynamics inherent in those early relationships. One of the more visceral moments comes from a side-by-side pair of portraits: Peale’s portrait of George Washington next to James Brantley’s (b. 1945) “Brother James,” a sober self-portrait that drapes the Black artist and veteran of Vietnam in the colors of a subdued American flag. In Peale’s portrait of Washington there features, at the President’s side, one of his purchased slaves.