By Tara Ward

André Malraux, the novelist turned French Minister of Cultural Affairs, postulated that the widespread use of photography would create a “museum without walls,” where the world’s masterpieces were available to all and new relationships would become visible. He managed to create a personal collection of large-scale reproductions and some luxury books, but we have Google Arts and Culture, museum websites, and social media full of pictures and links. 

Finding itself without walls, or at least without walls, it can use, thanks to a two-year renovation project, the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) has inhabited these virtual spaces and more. It has been hosting online happy hours, expanding its blog and other internet resources, and curating a show for the American University Museum at the Katzen Art Center. This seemingly ad hoc response to practical issues provides an opportunity for NMWA and its constituents to have a real conversation (over a few drinks) about what the institution can and should be, one that is worth your time.

Museums, no matter what their walls look like, are built on problematic foundations. Formed as byproducts of colonialist and capitalist aggression, they repeatedly support race, gender, and class biases by turning the complexities of time, space, and identity into overly simplified categories. Purportedly displaying unique examples of beauty and cultural importance, they often end up showing who or what is the master of our culture. At the same time, they expand access to works of art creating the possibility that objects and hierarchies might be rearranged, if only in our minds. NMWA was founded on that hope, at least as far as gender is concerned, and it has been working to address intersecting forms of marginalization as well. But because it now lacks a temple-like structure to impose silence and enforce certain trajectories, NMWA’s offerings (perhaps unwittingly) call even more attention to the complexity of these issues and the necessity of different kinds of interaction.

At a recent happy hour with a theme of surrealist women artists, the tensions of the museum form and longings for different kinds of engagement were productively on display . . . and it was a lot of fun.  Gathering a community of excited participants not just from the DMV but as far as New Mexico and New Zealand, the evening began with a cocktail. Andra “AJ” Johnson of Serenata and White Plates, Black Faces walked the crowd through the production of Goddess, a potable response to the work of photographer Madame Yevonde. If this seems like a silly conceit to justify the happy hour title, it is not. There is certainly art-historical insight to be gleaned by chronicling the bartenders, drinks, and watering holes that influenced artists, but what Johnson’s highball contained was an important reminder to museum professionals and the public that there are myriad ways to interact with art.  A kinship exists between the series of cocktails produced during NMWA’s happy hours and the Baltimore Museum of Art’s recent show organized by its guards in that they suggest alternatives to the top-down curatorial structure of most museum programming. 

Then came presentations by two curators providing overviews of various surrealist women from the well-known, Meret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington, to new inclusions like the Victorian aristocrats who made photo-collage paintings and the Brassai-like photographs of Linda Butler. While informative and accessible, there were moments when these talks glossed over important issues. Why were many of the examples from after World War II when Surrealism is typically dated between the Wars? Why did they display so many different definitions of the movement from mysticism to chance to hybridity to political activism? Why these particular artists with their Euro-American background, especially since recent scholarship on Surrealism has largely focused on tracing its influence and variants throughout Latin America and Asia? These questions are not academic quibbles. They get to the heart of how museums work and how they might change. The curators were highlighting their own collection without acknowledging how it is informed by financial constraints, the different trajectories of women artists’ careers, and the difficulties of using history, language, and value system developed for White men. Thus, when Kathryn Wat, Deputy Director of Art, Programs, and Public Engagement/Chief Curator, mentioned the new acquisition of a work by Madame Yevonde without going into detail, it was an opportunity missed. Her photographs shift the stories we tell about Surrealism by emphasizing its links to commercial photography and a longer lineage of costumed portraits in which women were part of the creative process. To let the public in on that decision-making process would be to invite them into a conversation about the deep necessity of a National Museum of Women in the Arts. And this public wanted to talk! The comments were full of interpretative suggestions, questions about influence, and requests from educators for lesson plans. While I understand the difficulties and dangers of online discussion, it felt like a missed opportunity that there wasn’t more interaction between the curators and this clamoring public. 

A similar opening and closing of conversation can be seen in the museum’s off-site show Positive Fragmentation. Featuring prints by an extraordinary array of contemporary artists, the exhibition displays the exciting possibilities created by moving away from the unique art object. All involving some form of mechanical reproduction, the pieces are, at least in theory, multiples. Additionally, many are serial works and there are a lot of them. As the often large-scale works jostle together connections proliferate. Turning from Julie Mehretu to Swoon through the intermediary of Lorna Simpson pried apart the old binaries of public versus private, gallery versus street in new ways.  It was a delight to see Louise Bourgeois and Judy Chicago decentered and surrounded by women of color, though the isolation and highlighting of Christiane Baumgartner’s work felt conceptually off. Prioritizing the theme of “environments” to balance the “bodies” that are so often displayed marks an important corrective and multiplies the possibilities for positioning all the works not just in terms of gender but also race. Yet, there was also a sense that the exhibition was organized around practical issues as much as conceptual ones. 

Museums are part of the real world. Their buildings must be maintained, their staff must be paid, and the exhausting details of caring for and displaying objects must be dealt with. Yet, they are also spaces where we pause to think and dream.  For very pragmatic reasons, the National Museum of Women in the Arts now exists largely in the imagination, at least as far as the public is concerned. Its happy hours, website, and other activities offer a remarkable opportunity in which an established institution uses its resources to create space for a diverse and changing group of people to engage with art in lots of truly different ways.  That not only generates new connections for the museum, it also has the capacity to produce new ways of understanding art and the world.  The more NMWA’s curators and administration acknowledge that this shared surreal space is as important as the new building, the more likely our collective dreams of a more equitable art world will become a reality.

Positive Fragmentation on view until May 22 at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center.

Upcoming NMWA happy hours:

July 15, 5:30 pm est: Happy Birthday Frida Kahlo!
https://nmwa-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/3016522157613/WN_efTXSwFGSiyb_oTiN_H9vA

September 14, 5:30 pm est: Misattributions in the Art World
https://nmwa-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/7816522796580/WN_Kbno673wRZimPRb0JgFAyA

October 31, 5:30 pm est: Halloween Spectacular!
https://nmwa-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/8516522797015/WN_nJPu3RK6SlK2oqW7cao0xA

Tara Ward is an academic art historian whose research spans from early twentieth-century abstract art to Instagram. She has written for the Oxford Art Journal and the Guggenheim Museum as well as published a textbook on gender and popular culture.