{"id":96339,"date":"2025-10-01T06:39:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-01T06:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/96339\/"},"modified":"2025-10-01T06:39:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-01T06:39:10","slug":"philip-guston-painting-sparks-dialogue-in-a-local-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/96339\/","title":{"rendered":"Philip Guston Painting Sparks Dialogue in a Local Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. \u2014 Philip Guston\u2019s \u201cCigar<\/a>\u201d (1969), now hanging in the McMeen Gallery of the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (SLOMA), presents a disconcerting image. One of 33 paintings first shown in Guston\u2019s landmark 1970 New York exhibition, it depicts a pink-hooded, ham-handed klansman gripping a cigar that wafts a ragged swirl of grey impasto smoke. The late Canadian-American artist, a vocal antifascist, often explored difficult questions regarding racism and the social complicity that shrouded and enabled it in his darkly comical paintings of KKK members. Emma Saperstein, SLOMA\u2019s chief curator, told Hyperallergic that she sees \u201cCigar,\u201d in its personification of racism hidden in plain sight, as \u201ca challenging piece that implicates both the viewer and the artist.\u201d<\/p>\n

The painting, which will remain on view through October 2, is the first loan to SLOMA arranged through a project that aims to make notable American artworks available to regional institutions. The program is run by the Art Bridges Foundation<\/a>, started in 2017 by philanthropist and Walmart heiress Alice Walton (who also founded the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art<\/a> in Arkansas) with a mission to expand access to American art nationwide. Guston\u2019s paintings typically hang in larger institutions, making the exhibit of \u201cCigar\u201d an unusual opportunity for the regional museum. The painting is one of approximately 200 objects in the Art Bridges Collection, which it makes available for loan, free of cost. All the expenses of exhibiting the painting at SLOMA, from shipping to insurance, were paid for by Art Bridges, with additional eligibility for educational programming.<\/p>\n

The presence of a painting by Guston in San Luis Obispo, even if only for 10 weeks, has opened up several possibilities for discussion and education. SLOMA recently hosted a talk<\/a> by art historian and curator Ellen Landau that explored Guston\u2019s creative evolution from Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s to representation in the late \u201960s. Last week, as part of an educational outreach program, students taking AP Art History at San Luis Obispo High School learned more about Guston, viewed \u201cCigar\u201d at SLOMA, and shared notes and observations on Post-It notes. \u201cThe dots represent the sewing together of morality,\u201d wrote one student, according to the museum, \u201clike a makeshift, silly costume.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t\tEllen Landau\u2019s talk on Guston and his creative evolution in July (photo John Seed\/Hyperallergic)\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Their programming is part of an ongoing public dialogue about Guston\u2019s work and his series depicting KKK imagery in particular. In 2020, Guston\u2019s traveling retrospective, organized by the National Gallery of Art in DC, was postponed<\/a> in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. At the time, the museum\u2019s Director Kaywin Feldman told Hyperallergic that \u201cin today\u2019s America, because Guston appropriated images of Black trauma, the show needs to be about more than Guston.\u201d Over 2,600 artists, curators, and writers condemned<\/a> the move in an open letter claiming that \u201cthe people who run our great institutions do not want trouble\u201d and accusing the museums hosting the exhibition of \u201cfear[ing] controversy.\u201d In recent years, artist Trenton Doyle Hancock<\/a> has confronted and engaged with Guston\u2019s caricatures of American racism through a Black American Lens, the subject of a 2024\u201325 exhibition<\/a> at the Jewish Museum.<\/p>\n

At the museum\u2019s front desk, directly across from the Guston, Visitor Services Manager Lena Rushing recently collected reactions to the painting from museum visitors.<\/p>\n

\u201cAre the dotted lines neighborhood streets? Like [how] racism and hatred are interwoven everywhere,\u201d commented one visitor named Melodee. \u201cAs a native Southern Californian, I know that although it\u2019s not perceived as a hotbed of KKK activities, you can always find it lurking under the surface everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another visitor, Stephanie B., said the painting is \u201cas relevant today as ever, when so much extremism is being normalized and celebrated.\u201d<\/p>\n

For students, educators, and museum visitors in San Luis Obispo, this loan offers a rare encounter with a prescient work that strongly resonates with current artistic and political censorship \u2014 and that may not have otherwise made its way to the regional museum. In a scathing review<\/a> of the 1970 exhibition in which the painting made its debut, critic Hilton Kramer characterized Guston as being \u201cout of touch with contemporary realities.\u201d Now, the opposite seems true: Guston was ahead of his time.<\/p>\n

Art Bridges will also be lending pieces to support a group show at SLOMA next spring, including works by Robert Gober, Alex Katz, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The Guston loan, Saperstein told Hyperallergic, \u201cis the first of many.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\t\tFelix Gonzalez-Torres\u2019s \u201cUntitled (L.A.)\u201d (1991), comprising green candies wrapped in cellophane, is among the works in the Art Bridges Foundation\u2019s collection. (photo by Edward C. Robison III, courtesy Art Bridges)\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. \u2014 Philip Guston\u2019s \u201cCigar\u201d (1969), now hanging in the McMeen Gallery of the San…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":96340,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[267],"tags":[365,362,363,364,1374,366,18,117,19,17,61854],"class_list":{"0":"post-96339","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-california","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-eire","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-ie","17":"tag-ireland","18":"tag-philip-guston"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96339\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}