Peabody Essex Museum’s Summer-Season Sputter

A superb museum in Salem, Mass., unevenly does hair, the U.N., Bahamian fashion, and witch trials, oh, my.

O n my way back home from Mount Desert Island in Maine a few weeks ago, I spent an afternoon at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem on the North Shore of Massachusetts. I hadn’t visited in a couple of years. Salem’s known for the 1692 witchcraft trials, but, in happier days, it was the hub for the China trade. The Peabody Essex Museum’s (PEM) first-rate collection of maritime art and Asian art springs from this era, but there’s so much more.

It was still peak season but, as peak-season exhibitions go, the soufflé fizzled into triviality and fads when it should have expanded into grandeur. This happens sometimes. I’ve seen plenty of great shows there. I’ll write about its summer exhibitions today before cold weather makes summer seem passé. In a few weeks, I’ll write about the museum’s history, collection, and new strategic plan.

Gio Swaby’s Fresh Up is a beguiling exhibition about fiber art, fashion, and élan. I’d never heard of Swaby, born in the Bahamas in 1991 and now living in Toronto. “Fresh up” is a Bahamian compliment paid to women looking spruce and full of confidence. It’s a fun, spot-on phrase I didn’t know.

Swaby’s mother is a seamstress who taught her daughter sewing skills that launched her as an unusual, very good artist. Her portraits of black women are made mostly from thread, though she quilts, too. Her surface is canvas, and her genre is often portraiture.

At 40 objects, many life-size, full-length portraits, Fresh Up isn’t a small exhibition. Swaby develops details such as hair, jewelry, shoes, and scarves so each figure projects the sitter’s own idiosyncratic sense of style. She draws freestyle with a needle, using a special sewing machine that sews in any direction.

It’s a very different look, and I love it. Sometimes she’ll consider the work of art to be the reverse of the canvas. There we see the stitching process, with all its irregularities and loose threads. We’re all tangles beneath the surface, but most of us try to present not only snappily but with a look that says “This is me.” Her bust portraits, made mostly of thread, are great line drawings. And I liked her portraits made from appliqués of boldly patterned and colored fabric with lots of color.

I learned about the three different wardrobes a young Bahamian woman would have: yard clothes, church clothes, and going-out clothes, which I’d call attire. A section of full-length going-out-clothes portraits is wonderful, with dramatic nighttime backgrounds and slinky dresses. Her subjects convey a sassy pride that’s very appealing.

A section concerns the “microaggression of touching black women’s hair,” which, evidently, people do, intrigued as some are by its texture. I can’t think of many things that are more intrusive or rude. Before this section, Swaby says her art is about love and bonding among black women. It’s an awkward transition to “Get outta my hair,” literally.

Swaby says she’s “interested in restorative forms of resistance,” which reads like a cliché. Who knows what she means? Resistance to what? The default answer among left-wingers is “oppression, of course,” but that favorite stage isn’t set. This isn’t an exhibition about racism or misogyny, as far as I can see. Does everything have to involve a resistance or a reckoning?

There’s a very fun roster of tunes playing in the background. This works well with the art and the wall colors — mostly pink — to make an upbeat, relaxing mood. Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” and Bill Withers’s “Lovely Day” are songs I actually know. More curators should program their exhibitions with music.

I have a few other quibbles with Fresh Up. I liked the art and have nothing against love, joy, empowerment, or sewing. I love fiber art. That said, a little of Swaby’s work goes a long way. An exhibition half the size would have been ample.

Fresh Up is beautifully presented, with lots of niches that make the space feel at times like a fashion-show walkway and at times like a beauty parlor. The emphasis on love and sisterhood among women, alas, made the show seem lighter and more unserious than it needed or deserved to be. There’s nothing fatal about this. The PEM wants to get new people in the museum. Still, the exhibition could use an edit.

Speaking of hair, Gu Wenda: United Nations is an immersive installation of flags — one for each of the U.N.’s 188 nation members — woven from human hair. Wenda (b. 1955) is Chinese and has a studio in Shanghai, but he lives and makes art in the United States most of the time. During the ’90s, he collected hair from barber shops and beauty salons and from volunteers. Hair, as we saw in Fresh Up, is a personal thing, so much so, I read in United Nations, that a single strand’s DNA is enough to distinguish one individual among a billion others. So the project, finished in 2000, is about individuality and division on the one hand and unity and collaboration on the other.

I loathe the United Nations. It’s gone from purposeful and principled to scabrous and minatory and, today, to an idle, bloated walrus. Still, Wenda has created quite an ambitious thing. I’m not sure the limited points it makes was worth the trouble. Art, or at least great art, needs to be poetic and enigmatic. This isn’t.

The PEM displays the flags in the vast atrium of its new, 40,000-square-foot wing, which opened in late 2019. I’m not sure the lighting’s the best since the color of the material — human hair that’s dyed the colors of each flag — seems to pale in natural light. It’s a challenge to distinguish one from the other.

The concept’s daring and grand, like the U.N., but the reality doesn’t work, like the U.N.

A few years ago, I reviewed a bigger version of The Salem Witch Trials: Restoring Justice, the PEM’s look at the 1692 fiasco during which 24 locals were hanged. One, from whom I’m descended, is still the only American legally pressed to death. I thought it was a bad exhibition, weepy and whiny and packed with documents from 1692 that were impossible to decipher given the small, archaic cursive of the era. It was a treat to see these archives — the PEM owns many of the court records — but a mean trick to present what no one could understand. If a museum’s going to show archival images, it needs to provide a transcription of key points.

Well, it’s back. The exhibition is leaner, profiling fewer of the players, with the original documents replaced by enlarged wall graphics. It’s still a bad exhibition, and even weepier and whinier.

The Salem witchcraft trials are described as “a definitive example of intolerance and injustice in American history.” Well, I suppose intolerance thrived in colonial Salem, but wasn’t that the case, like, everywhere on Earth? “Injustice,” as terms go, has got to be among the squishiest. “Definitive,” you say? Does this ugly blot of an event define us? Not on the curatorial terms I saw.

The specific multi-headed monster in Salem, and I’m thinking more Hydra than the Muppets, wasn’t intolerance and injustice. It was mass hysteria operating in tandem with power-hungry, vain judges and prosecutors. It was intelligence and decency dissolving into brute ignorance when fashion demanded it. Those are among the teachable moments.

Nutty teenage girls invented the scare, egged on by Tituba, who, since she was a slave, doesn’t even get a curatorial slap on the wrist. Undergirding the witch hunt were money feuds between two families in Salem. Judges and prosecutors worked in cahoots. Nimble, icy mean streaks abounded. The witch trials are a Salem story, but they’re a Harvard story, too. Most of the judges went there. It’s the earliest case of Harvard hubris, that smug, callous certainty on parade last week during the on-campus Hamas love fest.

Witch scares were by no means an exclusive New England affair. They happened all over Christian Europe and, of course, in tribal Africa, the Islamic world, and Latin America, which, though acculturated by Catholic Spain, still possessed a pagan whammy.

From a “how the law shouldn’t work” perspective, the Salem court accepted spectral evidence. That’s evidence from spooks that only the accusers could hear or see. Today, the equivalent would be Christine Blasey Ford’s supposedly suppressed memories, the lies that nearly destroyed Duke lacrosse players, and the Jussie Smollett race-hoax-for-hire. It’s the stuff of “my truth,” the “words are violence” crowd, and the gender fairy.

In the wall texts, curators use the language of victimology: “trauma,” “reckoning,” “healing a fractured community,” “shared responsibility, “and reparative justice,” all sprinkled with vague references to “today’s injustices.”

In 1692, my old how-many-times great-granddad Giles Corey was pressed to death in Salem — at age 80 — for refusing to enter a plea to the charges of wizardry. Canny, stubborn, and a rascal, he knew Salem, a Puritan “Peyton Place.” If convicted, his children would be disinherited. If he didn’t plead, there could be no show trial and no guilty verdict. Impressment — piling boulders on the would-be defendant until he couldn’t breathe — was legal. He said nothing except “more weight” until he died.

Corey got a profile and wall panel in the last incarnation of Restoring Justice. Strange to say, this time he’s dropped. Was it because he wouldn’t play the victim’s role? Do the curators believe victims ought to be passive?

I didn’t spend much time in the permanent collection galleries but did enjoy Japanomania! Japanese Art Goes Global, a survey of the PEM’s Japanese-export collection. Portuguese merchants first came to Japan in the 1540s, sparking Europe’s discovery of Japanese style.

The Japonism craze starting in the 1860s brought Japanese luxury goods to America. A lacquerware and mother-of-pearl dressing table made in Nagasaki in 1878 landed in Manchester-by-the-Sea, near Salem, and it’s splendid. David and Mary Gamble, whose high-end Arts & Crafts house in Pasadena, Calif., has many Japanese design elements, traveled to Japan off and on. Pieces from their Yokohama-made peony service are there.

European potentates chased porcelain made in Japan as well as China not with mere passion but with lust. A pair of tree vases from around 1700 makes a statement. By the 1730s, the grand duke of Saxony financed a Manhattan Project–like effort to develop a local porcelain factory — Meissen — that freely robbed Japanese motifs. Bouke de Vries’s Homeland, Blue and White, from 2015, is a wall sculpture shaped like an aerial view of the Netherlands and made from shards of Delftware and Japanese porcelain. Delftware is inspired by Japanese porcelain, though it’s not the real thing. It’s tin-glazed earthenware. The Dutch went gaga for it starting in the 1650s.

Then there’s Hello Kitty. She’s got prime real estate in the gallery, too.

Japanomania is a high-art gallery leavened by Miss Kitty and most informative. The PEM, in its heart and soul, is about connections between cultures and across borders. The museum has a few forbears such as the East India Marine Company, the Essex Historical Society, and the Peabody Academy of Science. Each, in its way, promoted international awareness.

On the Ground: Being and Belonging in America is the PEM’s rehang of its American and Native American collection. I am afraid I left it for last and entered the galleries feeling early signs of Stendhal syndrome. Coined by the French writer of yore, it’s a psychosomatic illness — dizziness, rapid heartbeat, and hallucinations — hitting those exposed to an excess of beauty, originally from too much time in old Italian cities such as Florence and Siena. Since it’s psychosomatic, I’ve felt free over the years to retool it. In my mind, it imperils those who spend too much time in a museum.

On the Ground is a pivotal exhibition since it’s the first time that an American museum with an eminent collection has arranged American and Native American art together, as an organic whole. I’ve advocated this for years in theory but was anxious — as in “filled with anxiety” — about seeing what the reality actually meant. I read the introduction, which claimed that “wherever you are in the Americas, you are in Native space.”

This is, of course, delusional. I hope it doesn’t reflect On the Ground’s philosophy.

After three hours at the PEM walking through galleries ranging from enchanting to soft-in-the-head, whatever few drops of unyielding Corey blood left in my body surrendered to the long drive back to Vermont awaiting me. I want to see On the Ground with ample time and fresh eyes. Stay tuned.

After two expansions in the past 20 years, the PEM campus is big. Way-finding is a problem. It’s easy to get lost. I heard Are we going the right way? I think we’re lost. It’s this way . . .  no it’s that way. Weren’t we just here? and This place is so f***ed up a dozen times from befuddled visitors.