Peabody Essex Museum Bungles American Art

A landmark look at its Native and Anglo-American art gags on victim ideology.

W hat’s happening at the Peabody Essex Museum? It’s one of my favorite museums, not a precious gem but a trove of treasures and not at all well known. Branded as the PEM, it’s in Salem on the North Shore in Massachusetts, not poised on the Atlantic like nearby Gloucester, but a harbor town wedded to the ocean. It’s both peerless and exemplary. Its collection — more than a million works of art — is strong in maritime art and artifacts, Asian textiles, calligraphy, ceramics, Oceanic art, Asian export art, American portraits, furniture, silver, porcelain, Native American art, fashion, and photography. It’s got a good, offbeat contemporary collection, too. Its library has tens of thousands of rare books and manuscripts, most relating to New England. And it owns more than 20 historic buildings and gardens in ye olde Salem, founded in 1626 as a fishing town and only a tad younger than Plymouth.

Little Salem, now having 44,000 people, is notorious for the 1692 witchcraft hysteria and hypnosis, America’s beacon light of prosecutorial abuse of power. Halloween is fun time in Salem, but, aside from that, 1692 still chills and darkens the vibe. Putting aside this hoax-like-no-other and the dangling corpses it left behind, Salem was, years later, a hub in the China trade.

The PEM, a uniquely New England place, is steeped in all things Salem. Its dedication to the culture that developed from the Puritans and New England’s maritime experience makes it peerless. The collection is focused and definitely not encyclopedic. It’s exemplary in that the American museum system is an eclectic one. Unlike in the case of European museums, central governments are rarely owners. Every museum dances to the beat of its own drummer, as does the PEM.

The collection, its exhibitions, and its buildings spring from Salem’s unique zeitgeist. On the collection front alone, among the PEM’s legion of stars are scrimshaw, sumptuous Chinese robes, Samurai armor, a life-size wooden sculpture of Hawaiian war god Ku that scares the bejesus out of Mafia hitmen, American Impressionism, and poor Mary Easty’s pathetic, failed petition for leniency, handwritten from her cell in 1692 as she waited to be hanged as a witch.

It’s a fascinating place and meant for many, many visits, especially since the PEM has expanded dramatically twice in recent years — in 2003 and again in 2019. Right now, the PEM’s in flux. The museum is both venerable — it started as the East India Maritime Society in 1792 — and new, having become the PEM only in 1992 through a merger of rickety, aimless nonprofits controlled by near-dead Yankee grandees.

For years a sleepy place, the PEM caught the eye of Ned and Lily Johnson, he the founder of Fidelity Investments, she his wife and a woman of good taste. The Johnsons gave $250 million. They were attracted by the PEM’s maritime collection and Asian interests. In size, endowment, collection, and budget, the PEM is now in the top ten among museums in the Western Hemisphere. It’s got growing pains, an expansion hangover, and a blinkered, rote curatorial vision.

You’d think that, of all places, the PEM would do 1692 with acuity and panache but, no, the museum blamed the local yokels, ignorant clingers, and first-time exemplars of the basket of deplorables, you know, those settler colonialists who didn’t believe that science was real, that no human was illegal, and that love was love. The curators missed the lobster boat. The poor victims aside, and I descend from two of them, the juicier topic is abuse of power as well as the ruling class’s catastrophic failure to lead.

The PEM is into bourgeois, left-wing fads like victimhood, climate change, and preening over its virtue. Intellectual rigor and discipline are in short supply. Though the North Shore isn’t Boston, the PEM’s movers and shakers live in the same bubble and drink the same water as Harvard’s, Commonwealth Avenue’s, and Brookline’s.

I’m surprised, mostly because Lynda Hartigan, the director for the past few years, is a serious art historian whose work on iconoclast Joseph Cornell is nothing short of magisterial. She’s an old-time American art scholar, as I am, and, like me, ought not to be one who drinks the Kool-Aid when served. I’m surprised, too, that she and the board countenanced On This Ground: Being and Belonging in America, the PEM’s presentation of its distinguished American and Native American collection. I’ve seen it three times and hate it, though it has good features. Mostly it’s a big mess.

On This Ground is a first. It’s the first permanent-collection exhibition in America to bring together on equal footing what is traditionally called American art — post-Mayflower art by Americans with European ancestry — and Native American art, which is art by Americans with Native heritage. Displaying 250 objects, it tells us, “The United States, while founded on notions of freedom, was realized through colonization and oppression. . . . These brutal legacies continue to shape the nation’s laws, access to resources, and our sense of identity.” Blah, blah, blah.

It’s a dishonest exercise on so many levels. An introductory video featuring Elizabeth Solomon, an enrolled member of the Massachusett Tribe, tells us, “Wherever you are in America, you are on Native land,” which is about as accurate as saying that whenever I’m sightseeing at Stonehenge, I’m a guest of the Druids, or that the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond are Pictish down to the soft purple hue of the heather. It means nothing, at best. At worst, it’s delusional. And manipulative. It seeks to win a point by pretending to lose. She wants us to feel guilty. The Naumkeag, the Natives who once lived on the North Shore, were mostly gone by the 1620s, killed in Native wars or, like tens of millions of Europeans over centuries, dead from smallpox.

The not-so-subtle message is that we gringos stole Native land. But after 400 years, that’s irrelevant even if it were ever true. No one alive today stole any land. A poem by Amanda Gorman, the Youth Poet Laureate in 2017, accompanies the show. She specializes, I’m told, in poetry about oppression and marginalization. It’s a nice enough poem — though she’s not Native American — about people here illegally, the 2017 protest in Charlottesville, “the nonbinary, the trans, the blind,” all their allies, with a shoutout to all and sundry except people of pallor. I thought this was an exhibition about Native American and Anglo-American art, displayed as equals! Sometimes it seems as if it’s about anything and everything but.

Theoretically, On This Ground isn’t a bad concept. Native art is bound to be a niche art since there’s so little of it, materials often degrade, much of it served nomadic cultures, and there’s not a lot of aesthetic development. There’s very little Native art before, say, 1900. Media are limited to textiles, ceramics, beadwork, and a few other materials. But American painting and furniture, especially, alas, blow it out of the water.

I’m not going to fully dissect the exhibition. It’s been there for almost two years, and it rehashes the 1619 Project. It even has a niche for books by hate-merchant Howard Zinn. By coincidence but fittingly, the curators put Zinn’s books next to the section on the witchcraft trials, which, like Zinn, substituted flights of fancy for facts. Walking through the exhibition, I was surprised to see how many works by Native American artists now in the PEM collection were commissioned by the museum while On This Ground was in development. The curators had their bullet points, it seems, and simply looked for art that played to the script.

Some of the comparisons are good. Two Western landscapes, one by John Sloan from 1919 and another by Kay WalkingStick from 1987, seem similar. Both depict broad, brown arroyos and hills. Sloan’s is touristical. There’s a car in it, noting the landscape’s accessibility. It can be captured and framed. WalkingStick’s scene suggests not only antiquity but a spaciousness that can’t be measured. One of the problems with the installation is the quality of the modern paintings by Native American artists. WalkingStick’s painting aside, it’s not high, in part because the work is grievance-oriented and too obvious.

The exhibition makes the salient point that Natives and the early Europeans had opposite views of land ownership. Natives believed that people belonged to the land. Europeans and, later, Americans believed in private, individual ownership. Of these two economic systems, one conquered the other. Such are the ways of the world. Cry if you must, along with the Carthaginians, the Aztecs, and the Visigoths, not to mention vaudeville.

It’s always good to see the PEM’s collection of Hudson River School art, most of which is left unmolested by “they stole our land” posturing. Fitz Henry Lane’s Twilight on the Kennebec, from 1849, is a splendid sunset picture. A 1921 view of Lake George by Georgia O’Keeffe will surprise most people. Art about Nathaniel Hawthorne, his life, and work, including his dreamy portrait by Charles Osgood, stand on their own, and then, boom, a Remington nocturne is excoriated because he depicted Natives “without their input.” Are we making art by committee, too?

It’s a throwaway line but if the exhibition is going to consider the thorny issue of one culture appropriating the subject matter of another, it needs to take a deep dive and explain the rules of the modern-day appropriation game.

It’s a flighty exhibition as we move fitfully from the railroads dividing Native land to the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Massachusetts state seal, undisclosed “violence and trauma perpetrated against Native women, girls, transgender, and two spirit people,” Boston furniture whose mahogany was harvested by slaves, Native boarding schools in America and Canada, which is, last time I knew, its own country, and “black female bodies as commodities and implements.” Can teapots be political? You betcha. There are activist ceramics. Fun but silly.

I loved a wall of Native moccasins. They’re joyful and beautifully crafted. The display is toward the end of On This Ground, and at that point I needed an easy chair and some tranquilizing willow bark to chew. Colorful, soft shoes, even in a case, were the closest salves I could find. I don’t know what to make of the final gallery. There’s a lovely portrait by Edmund Tarbell of his grandson riding his horse, Peanut, and a Will Barnet portrait of his wife, young daughter, and their cat, both charming. Near it is a Wendy Red Star photograph depicting the artist and her daughter. I thought we’d get a nice, though sappy, coda about putting the past behind us for the sake of the children. Near it are Native baby boards and colonial cribs.

Instead, I read, Red Star’s work refers to “American genocidal policies against First Peoples,” but I was at a loss to connect the spectral dots. A case displays Native tools, some 10,000 years old, some of which were used in the hunt for caribou. These early people “spent their days living communally and with intentionality.” What does this have to do with the maize in Mattapan?

There are many more obvious problems with this presentation. First and foremost is the juxtaposition of the PEM’s American art, almost all of which is from maritime Massachusetts, and its Native art, from dozens of more than 500 federally recognized tribes. There’s enough discordance in materials and styles but, on top of that, these tribes have a multiplicity of storylines. The one-size-fits-all tale of genocide, oppression, and appropriation doesn’t work. And we’re dealing with hundreds of years.

There are too many voices in the exhibition. There are two curators but also outside commentators. It seems a committee was at work, with every voice needing to be heard. It’s also not fine to drop words like “genocide,” “male gaze,” and “trauma” and run away. That’s rhetorical drive-by shooting. It’s MSNBC scholarship. I like precision. What we get is Fibber McGee’s closet. I like depth. What we get are slogans.

The PEM’s new strategic plan puzzles me. It says that it has “taken advice and feedback from almost 400 regional, national, and international partners and supporters” as well as from its trustees, staff, and visitors. Having gotten all this advice and feedback, and it must have been a cornucopia of diversity, coming from so many, near and far, why does the museum’s strategic plan seem like it was written by AI?

AI programmed by Marmee, the mother in Little Women. It’s very warm and fuzzy, and the meat and potatoes have to be excavated. Human-centricity, caring, openness, empathy, nurturing, belonging, adaptive resilience, dialogue, collaboration, and God forbid that it hurt, exclude, or overlook anybody. Hoovering the blather, one spies a few hard goals. Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging ideology are paramount. This might explain why Ethiopia at the Crossroads, which I wrote about last week, and On This Ground are such a jumble. When an organization emphasizes empathy, collaboration, dialogue, and listening, it’s tough to reach a coherent and compelling storyline without charges of bullying, “you made me cry” theater, Apocalypse Now, and then you have a unionized staff as well as mediocre programming like that in On This Ground.

The PEM’s collection isn’t online and searchable by the public. It’s massive, I know, but making its splendors viewable would be a service to the nation. What it owns is that important. I’d focus time, talent, and treasure here rather than on the diversity, inclusion, and belonging toot.

The PEM’s strategic plan tells us it values the unexpected in inquiry and experimentation, which is good. On This Ground’s debt to Zinn and the outrage industry he begot raises another matter. A People’s History of the United States, his landmark revisionist history, appeared in 1980. It’s stale bread. The questions the PEM asks in this show are as old as Zinn’s atrocity propaganda and as current as who shot JR.