Portland Museum Fumbles, Sex Tattle Derails, and an Art Historian to Run Yale

Plus why do woke scolds at Boston’s MFA hate Native Americans at prayer?

A few end-of-month art news stories. The Portland Museum of Art (PMA) in Maine is a lively expression of the best of Maine’s distinctive culture and displays wonderful art. I’ve written about its plans for a $100 million expansion doubling its size, focusing on more art space, more space for community gatherings, and an entirely new, captivating look. That story, now nearly a year old, raised a few red flags, some of which I’d like to revisit. No, not merely red but carmine or candy-apple or scarlet. Speaking of red, send fire engines to extinguish the dumpster fire that has been the project’s marketing. “It’s torn the community apart” isn’t a headline I want to read about a museum I like and a project that’s worthwhile, but that’s the take in Portland.

The good news, delivered last month, is City Hall’s approval of the museum’s plan to demolish the old carbuncle next door that once housed the children’s museum in Portland. The PMA owns it now.

It’s an 1830 building that’s Federal-style, though it’s been repurposed to oblivion. Portland has dozens of similar Federal-style buildings in its Old Port neighborhood. The City Council agreed that the PMA could raze it. Part of the PMA’s addition is planned for that spot. That’s important. It’ll give the place a more attractive façade. The one it has now is beyond charmless. It’s ugly.

Alas, one of the arguments the PMA offered in support of the demolition amounts to the dumbest thing I’ve read in at least a few weeks. Since we live in an era of dumb things, and I read constantly, I’m blitzed. The PMA argued that because the children’s museum building “was erected during the Jim Crow era” — doofus chronology — and because it has white columns, it carries “unfortunate legacies of the past into the future.” Now, why don’t we raze the White House? No sane person, looking at this building, is moved to long for the bad old days of Tara, Mammy, Big Sam, and Prissy.

Last year I also reviewed the PMA’s reimagining of its high-end American-art collection, rich in Winslow Homer’s work, Hudson River School art, and Federal furniture and silver. The museum enlisted interest groups and consultants from Maine’s Wabanaki tribes to interpret the art using oppression-and-genocide ideology, the kind Hamas uses. A more opportunistic, warped, and disgusting result is hard to conceive, even in our time, when grievance is a religion. Sad to say, the same Wabanaki team is advising the PMA on its addition, and not, I’m sure, gratis.

The very good and longtime director, Mark Bessire, has suggested that the look and feel of the museum are “elitist,” a loaded word. He may not have intended to insult his regular museumgoers, but almost all PMA’s visitors probably like the museum, its comfortable galleries, the welcoming vibe, and its quirky, Down East collection. He says the place is “too traditional” and that “people need to see what’s inside” and see it from the street. “People need to feel they belong.” It’s a museum, not Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

Are those among us who like tradition, or an art museum that’s about art, elitist? I don’t think so.

The place needs more space. The PMA’s four buildings are an awkward maze. The rendering, which, aesthetically, is Native-inspired, looks great. Portland could use a jolt of great, new architecture. That’s the pitch. Let’s leave out the ideology.

The big problem for the PMA’s addition has a name, and it’s “a hundred million dollars.” Portland and the coastal towns north and south of it are, newly, a millionaire magnet. They’ve got history, salt air, and good, sound locals. They’re attracting people of means from Boston and New York. Still, even with lots of fresh money, $100 million is a clipper ship load o’ wampum. Maine’s and Portland’s problems are many. It seems tin-eared and la-di-da to compete with these causes, or at least compete using the PMA’s quiver of boutique diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging twaddle. I’d regroup and retool.

I asked the PMA how much money it has raised. No response.

*****

I don’t know a lot about the painter Kehinde Wiley or the architect David Adjaye. Wiley is a painter famous for his portrait of President Obama but also for portraits, some imaginary, of black men posed in the style of Old Master portraits of kings, generals, and popes. His work is expensive, much coveted by museums desperate for flashy black subject matter. Overall, he’s too much of a one-trick pony.

Adjaye and his firm designed the brilliant, beautiful National Museum of African American History in Washington, D.C., which made for high demand from high-end clients.

Both men were at a hot moment in their careers when hit by charges of sexual harassment and assault — Adjaye last year by women, Wiley last month by men. No one knows whether or not these are true. Both had many projects in the works that, only days if not hours after the charges hit the headlines, were nixed.

These days, the standard isn’t “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” It’s “too hot to handle.” Understanding this, I still can’t help feeling that museums nixing Wiley exhibitions and Adjaye building projects are rash and unfair. No one has filed a complaint with the police, and no one has been arrested. Accusations are flying via press release and social media. The Pérez Art Museum in Miami, the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art redlined Wiley faster than a speeding bullet, exposing themselves, I would think, to a defamation lawsuit. Wiley says he’s innocent. If he is, I hope he sues his accusers, too.

Museums, obviously, aren’t morality police. Their calling is the display and interpretation of art. That they’ve wandered into the realms of social-justice warfare and artist biographies shows how bored curators and directors are with art or how ill-equipped they’ve become in even dealing with it.

*****

Appeal to the Great Spirit is a life-size equestrian bronze sculpture of a Native American looking up to the heavens in prayer. Sculpted by Cyrus Dallin (1861–1944), it sat in front of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston starting in 1912. It’s a stately, exquisitely conceived and cast work of art, spartan and complementing the MFA’s Beaux Arts building, opened in 1909. For years, Matthew Teitelbaum, the MFA’s director, and a cadre of woke wackadoodles have itched to send it to the smelter. A couple of weeks ago, they made their move.

The beefs are many. It depicts a Native American, but the artist isn’t Native American. One critic says the subject’s arms are outstretched “in a classic victim’s pose.” He’s praying. Evidently this critic has never been to church. The sculpture suggests “Indigenous erasure,” so saith the MFA’s own website. It’s in front of the freakin’ building.

The figure is dressed in a mix of Lakota and Diné regalia. These are Western tribes. Evidently inappropriate attire is a woke faux pas. He should be dressed like the local Mohawks, Wampanoags, and Pequots. And I thought the MFA wasn’t provincial.

For some, “it erases the story of living Indigenous people, especially those in Boston.” Do the MFA’s Sargent portraits erase the story of living Joe and Judy Sixpacks, especially those in Southie? Sargent’s ladies wear couture gowns. Joe and Judy wear Walmart sweats.

I could go on and on. So much idiotica, so little space.

In 2019, the MFA sponsored a symposium on the sculpture. Stereotype, intent, and appropriation were on the docket. What a bore, and what a waste of money. The MFA brass hoped the road to the scrap heap was paved and ready.

Then Covid hit. Cop killers and Confederates were the new Ishmael-on-steroids.

Indians on horseback? Not so much. Then the MFA staff unionized. The MFA insisted on the postponement of the Philip Guston retrospective to recontextualize his Ku Klux Klan figures. The trustees there grew tired of brouhahas.

It’s not that Appeal to the Great Spirit is bad art. Everyone agrees it’s very good art. Dallin was a distinguished Boston sculptor. He’s best known for his iconic sculpture of the Angel Moroni topping the Church of Latter-day Saints’ Salt Lake Temple. He was also a Native-rights advocate.

Sane people and those not on the payroll of grievance groups probably see Appeal to the Great Spirit as reverent and ecumenical, not preachy or proselytizing. It’s the MFA’s unofficial greeter. It puts people in a contemplative frame of mind. No one wants to be greeted by the sound of grinding axes.

The museum, under Teitelbaum’s direction, has commissioned Alan Michelson, a New York artist and a Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, to create two works of art perched on the museum’s façade, on either side of the entrance to the building. Michelson’s work is in On This Ground, the Peabody Essex Museum’s permanent-collection galleries showing its American collection and emphasizing its Native American art. His Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer), from 2018, depicts a copy of Houdon’s bust of George Washington superimposed with Iroquois villages wasted, on his orders, in 1779. All British sympathizers, including the big population of very-not-Native Tories, saw the homes and land pillaged.

Breaking news. There was a war — the American Revolution — in progress, and the Iroquois backed the British.

As always, I’ll keep an open mind. Teitelbaum announced his retirement last week after ten years. I’ve met him, but he arrived at the MFA just as I was leaving the Addison, which I directed for years and which is north of Boston. He was the director of the Art Gallery of Ontario for years before he came to the MFA.

He’s Canadian, and Canadians are obsessed with how First Nations Canadians were treated. He is not leaving for a year and is desperate to outlast Appeal to the Great Spirit. People in Boston and its suburbs — the MFA’s core audience — like the sculpture. It’s been there for more than a hundred years. Removing it seems sulky and vindictive, and, the frugal Yankee in me notes, it will not be cheap.

There’s no guarantee that whatever goes in its place will uplift, much less impress visitors with its beauty. A safer bet is that it will do neither and will stupefy or repel or both. The bottomless-pit people pushing for it to go won’t be less aggrieved. They wake up aggrieved and live, breathe, and eat aggrieved. Oy, they all must have ulcers.

*****

Two weeks ago, Yale, where I went to school, announced that an art historian, Maurie McInnis, will be its next president. She and I both were Ph.D. students in Yale’s history of art department at the same time. She’s now the president of Stony Brook University, part of the State University of New York system.

She calls herself a cultural historian now, and I barely knew her. She was already working on her dissertation when I started and wasn’t even based in New Haven. Her dissertation was on the political and cultural meaning of classical art and architecture in Charleston before the Civil War.

McInnis was the provost at the University of Texas before her time at Stony Brook, so she knows how to maneuver in a large, complex organization. She was a Yale trustee, too, so the board knows her as a peer and likes her. Peter Salovey, her predecessor and president for the past ten years, was befuddled and derailed by racial angst at Yale and, now, a long-brewing wave of antisemitism. Salovey cleans up nicely, but at heart he’s a hippie and a squish.

We can only hope for the best. Among the many pregnant moments McInnis will face is a steeping, stinking scandal over Yale’s failure to disclose to the feds the gifts it received from foreign governments or private groups with outsized ties to foreign governments. Groups fighting antisemitism in America claim that Yale has gotten, as one example, $15,925,711, likely much, much more, from donors aligned with the ruling regime in Qatar, headquarters of the “Huzzahs for Hamas” fan club. The university disclosed only a tad under $300,000.

Cornell, Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon, and Northwestern have each reported hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts. Though they have branches in Qatar, which Yale doesn’t, it’s inconceivable to me that Yale has received as little as $16 million, or $300,000, possibly less than what the emirate spends for whips for its slave camps!

NR’s eye is on this unholy ball. Our elite universities will do anything for a buck, riyal, rupee, and yuan, and Qatar doesn’t give for pleasure. If Yale has hidden its emirate largess, McInnis needs to do some defenestrations. Harkness Tower, I’m told, is 216 feet tall from the tippity top to the hard, unforgiving sidewalk at its base. McInnis might be a Yalie, but she’s also an outsider. Lifers have been president for 30 years. A good shake-up is in order. No one’s happy with what’s been happening there.