What Really Makes America Great

You wouldn't necessarily expect a renowned research library to embrace an artist who cuts up books with a power saw to make sculpture.  But Robert The pulls more than one trigger with a WTF?-work that should also fire up Americans who defend the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution with the same fervor that they embrace evangelical Christianity.

"Holy Bible: King James Version" (1995)

It's included in "Declaring America: 1776 and Beyond," a commemoration of the nation's semiquincentennial that leaves the patriotic chest thumping to the MAGA crowd.  I left the quirky exhibit wondering if the New York Public Library received any federal funding.  It does, but very little, so my former employer may be less vulnerable to extortion than my alma mater or the Smithsonian.  That's a good thing, because the curators understand that being American means different things to different people.  California-born Kara Walker's lineage of violence and oppression informs "African/American" (1998) 

. . . just as "Power Bidder" (2015) reflects the white privilege of Shepard Fairey, a prep school kid from Charleston (once the site of the nation's biggest slave market).  Both artists attended the Rhode Island School of Design which cultivates "elastic thinking," anathema to the Trump Administration.

No doubt, economic insecurity shaped David Hammons, one of ten children in Detroit raised by a single Black mother before moving to California. Fond of mixed metaphors, he created a potent one for deprived neighborhoods, filling a honey jar with red, green and black jelly beans, the colors of the Pan African flag. Marcus Garvey, the early 20th-century father of Pan-Africanism, believed that people his color could never achieve equality in the United States unless they pursued their capitalism separately which, by the time Hammons created this work, must have seemed like utter folly. 

"Marcus Garvey Vitamins" (ca 1983)

But in this futuristic print, Kerry James Marshall, who moved from his birthplace in Alabama to California as part of the Great Migration, clearly believes that achieving financial success doesn't necessarily mean giving up your identity or your past.  African influences are apparent in this family's furnishings and attire, and the "dark continent" faces the viewer In the globe hologram floating above the coffee table.

"Keeping the Culture" (2011)

Two Silent Generation artists from the New York metropolitan area bucked their cohort with elongated critiques of democracy.  Barbara Kruger's feminism is evident in a 1986 print series that declares "We Will No Longer Be Seen and Not Heard."  Five years later,  Vito Acconci envisioned "Wav(er)ing Flag" as a public art installation in St. Louis with neon lights to make partying conventioneers stop and think about the meaning of the words they pledged by rote, hands over hearts, as school children.  It works even on the much smaller scale of the library's walls.

Edward Snowden helped expose the level of federal government secrecy and citizen surveillance conducted in the wake of 9/11.  His leak of classified material included the release of more than 400 code words used by the National Security Agency.  Massachusetts-born baby boomer Annie Bisset, using an ancient Japanese way of making woodcuts, illustrates 26 as an ironic alphabet primer for kids. The activities they conceal are far less whimsical than names suggest.

"Secret Codewords of the NSA: A Primer" (2013)

HERCULES refers to a terrorism data base developed by the CIA after it was criticized for failing to "connect the dots" prior to 9/11.

"hercules" (detail)

A flying monkey connects the dots between TINMAN and the data base that NSA maintains to track air warning and surveillance.

"tinman" (detail)

I usually find the work of Glenn Ligon, a gay African American from the Bronx, a little too conceptual, but these lithographs illustrate the journey from chattel to artist in a uniquely personal way.  Inspired by ads that used names, ages, and physical characteristics to identify and reclaim people who had escaped enslavement, Ligon asked ten of his friends to describe him instead.

"Runaways" (1993)

Their responses subtly convey the differences between owning and knowing.

RAN AWAY, Glenn. Medium height, 5'8", male. Closely-cut hair, almost shaved. Mild looking, with oval shaped, black-rimmed glasses that are somewhat conservative. Thinly-striped black-and-white short-sleeved T-shirt, blue jeans. Silver watch and African-looking bracelet on arm. His face is somewhat wider on bottom near the jaw. Full-lipped. He's black. Very warm and sincere, mild-mannered and laughs often.

RAN AWAY, Glenn. He is black. He has very short hair and eye glasses. He has quite light skin tone (faded bronze). Not tall. No noticeable accent. Wearing a plum-colored shirt, long-sleeved, and shorts. Very casual and stylish in appearance. He is wearing a bead bracelet (stones - a mixture of black-and-white). He has big hands and fingers. When he walks his feet cross each other a little bit. When he talks, he usually has a big smile towards you, yet he faces you from a slightly different angle. He looks at you from the corner of his eyes. His voice is very calm.

The Jim Crow era made the journey from chattel to artist a very long and arduous one. Nearly seven decades after the passage of the 13th Amendment--which finally banned slavery--African Americans still had to fear lynching in addition to suffering discrimination. It took the Scottsboro Boys to expose the systemic racism of the American legal system, particularly in the segregated South where pre-trial vigilantism remained common. According to the NAACP, nearly 5,000 people--72% of them Black--were lynched from 1882 to 1968, though the practice continued sporadically until 1981.  

Hugo Gellert, an immigrant from Hungary, illustrated this poster for International Labor Defense, a legal arm of the Communist Party (the "red" arm grips a hammer to drive a spike through the skeletal hand of capitalism, represented by a dollar-sign ring, about to clutch the Scottsboro Boys who are a comradely red!). For a less politically-charged but even more powerful visual representation of this American atrocity, visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

"Spike Lynch Terror" Poster (1934)

I spent another half an hour keeping cool in the enormous Salomon Reading Room which was restored to its original function as a place to hang the library's art in 1986, three years after I left. Many of the all-white and mostly male portraits lining the walls belonged to the library's founders and reflected their 19th-century tastes.  Two others, of "heritage Americans" who could not be more disparate, caught my fancy.  One could never tell a lie  

George Washington by Rembrandt Peale (1850)

. . . and the other, who donated his archives to the New York Public Library, did nothing but lie if you believe Gore Vidal.

Truman Capote by James Whitney Fosburgh (1971)

Our differences, not our bloodlines, make us American and our history, like our art, should reflect both the good and the bad.  Cheers to NYPL for recognizing that when our government increasingly refuses to do so!