Fragile constructs

Two exhibits at UW-Madison highlight and reevaluate American art

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It’s a challenging time to curate an exhibit of American art. Issues of equity make selecting images and interpreting them a study in reevaluation. But it’s also an opportunity to raise important questions: What constitutes American art and why? What does our art tell us about our nation? These questions have long preoccupied our artists and writers, and haunt them still.

Two exhibits that recently opened on the UW-Madison campus showcase the university’s collections of American art. Picturing a Nation: American Drawings and Watercolors at the Chazen Museum of Art pulls images primarily from the museum’s own collection of works of art on paper, made with pen and ink, pencil, watercolors, chalk and pastel. The UW School of Human Ecology’s Politics at Home: Textiles as American History, at the Ruth Davis Design Gallery, uses objects drawn entirely from the university’s Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection.

Both exhibits feature work that is fragile — works on paper and textiles are both vulnerable to climate and light — and are more often stored than exhibited.

When he started working on Picturing a Nation, Chazen curator James Wehn imagined a small show of watercolors and drawings by fairly famous American artists. But, he says, “We were having a lot of discussions about the museum as a colonizing space, talking about decolonizing the museum and what does that mean? How can we be more inclusive and diverse in the art we’re displaying?”

American art in the 18th century meant borrowing artistic methods and ideas from Europe. That concerned Wehn, especially considering the land that the university stands on was home to the Ho-Chunk.

He and co-curator Janine Yorimoto Boldt worked to shift from “the more typical tradition of emphasizing the greatness of individual white male artists and a male-dominated Eurocentric mode of creating art,” Wehn says. Instead, the show aims to “present these works in a way that acknowledges them as relevant in the history of art, but lets them serve as artifacts of the colonizing process.”

That was not always an easy task, because “the collection is not very diverse,” says Yorimoto Boldt. Most of the artists in Picturing a Nation are European American and only a handful are women. “We had to think strategically about how we could interpret what we had,” she says.

They arranged works thematically to “open up different thinking about who was absent from these galleries and why.”

A sweeping landscape by Nicolino Calyo shows a Native American dwarfed by the scenery, standing among dead trees facing the horizon, in the watercolor “The Outlet of the Niagara River, Lake Ontario in the Distance,” ca. 1835-1850. Wehn hopes the way he and Yorimoto Boldt have presented this and other works helps the viewer “reframe and contextualize them,” Wehn says. “When we look at a beautiful sunset with a Native American staring off into that sunset, it is not some romantic image to just enjoy, but there’s a deeper history that can reveal to us why the artist chose that particular trope.”

The show includes silhouettes of Philadelphians Thomas and Charles Swaringen. Silhouettes were a popular art form in the early 19th century, and in Philadelphia, Moses Williams, a formerly enslaved man, was a well known silhouette artist. This work cannot definitively be traced to him; it is the only work in the show that could likely have been created by a person of color.

There was plenty of detective work to do. Wehn was able to research an intriguing ink and watercolor work called “Markham’s Farm, Roncevalles, Wisconsin,” that depicts a peaceful, almost fanciful farm scene amid the hills of the Driftless Region, with an odd octagonal tower dominating the scene. While Wehn at first thought the building must be imaginary, his research showed it was really the home of Markham, an early white settler in Trempealeau County.

Another mysterious piece is Abraham Frater Levinson’s 1935 watercolor, “Men Working in Granite Quarry, Cape Ann.” Wehn could find out little about Levinson, but his work caught the curator’s attention with its angular, modern figures. Their vitality echoed the New York City pencil drawings of John Marin, also included in the exhibit.

Yorimoto Boldt notes there are many different stories that can be told through one drawing or painting. Ultimately she hopes that visitors come away “with a more critical eye toward historic American art and new tools for looking at historic American images.”

Politics at Home is a large and surprising exhibit at the Ruth Davis Design Gallery. Political motifs used to be part of home decoration — in bedspreads and drapery fabric, for instance, or items not used much any more, like dresser scarves and tea towels. Handkerchiefs and bandanas were also popular items on which to display political sentiments.

The project developed out of a graduate seminar taught by Marina Moskowitz, Lynn and Gary Mecklenburg Chair in Textiles, Material Culture, and Design. Moskowitz and design studies Ph.D. candidate Natalie E. Wright were lead curators.

“We’re thrilled that this exhibit is the reopening of the museum gallery space after the COVID shutdown,” says Moskowitz. Originally slated to coincide with the 2020 presidential election, the exhibit works just as well if not better now, she says, at providing context and sparking conversations.

The exhibit is segmented into four “homes” — “The Federal Home,” “The Progressive Home,” “The Revival Home,” and “The Activist Home,” with Federal covering the early years of the nation through the mid-19th century, Progressive covering late 19th through early 20th centuries. Revival juxtaposes the treatment of the nation’s 100th birthday with items from the Bicentennial celebration of 1976, and Activist covers the 1930s through the present.

An early woven coverlet with detailed design elements like the American eagle, and slogans like “United we stand, divided we fall,” show how patriotism was expressed within the home, says Wright.

While hand-done embroidery, crocheted doilies and quilts depicted sentiments about abolition, temperance and suffrage, often not much is known about the makers of these objects, though they were most certainly women, Moskowitz notes. Wright was able to trace with some degree of certainty a crazy quilt made from political ribbons to Isabella Baker of Portage, Wisconsin, the wife of mayor Edmund Baker, with the clues coming from the political affiliations of the ribbons.

“It’s nice to have a Wisconsin connection. Where we have it, we like to call it out,” says Moskowitz.

Temperance was a hot-button issue. One fascinating piece is a hanging that depicts a map of the United States that marks every memorial named after Frances Willard, founder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

Activism was not always positive. Native American rug work from a Works Progress Administration program on the Lac Du Flambeau Anishinaabe Reservation shows how the program, wanting assimilation, made Anishinaabe weavers use an upright floor loom, rather than their traditional twisting method on a two-stick loom. Even so, Wright notes the rug’s pattern recalls a twined pattern, a show of resistance.

More recent works include 1970s bold screen printed fabric highlighting the women’s movement from Mathilda Schwalbach, who taught at UW-Madison. Other commercially available fabric prints from the 1960s and ’70s use motifs that call attention to the environmental and anti-Vietnam War movements. The exhibit goes to the present day, including a Black Lives Matter T-shirt.

What about COVID-19 face masks? While they’re not included in this show, they are being collected; there’s even an online exhibit of masks, curated by Wright.

Wright notes that there’s been a revival in activism with COVID and the BLM movement and “the exhibit shows a lot of different revivals.” She hopes Politics at Home gets people thinking about “what the nation is and who participates.” Likewise, Moskowitz hopes that the exhibit will prompt visitors to “look more closely at their environments and see what things that they interact with daily are political.”