{"id":329890,"date":"2025-10-24T19:54:19","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T19:54:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/329890\/"},"modified":"2025-10-24T19:54:19","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T19:54:19","slug":"mfa-and-many-other-museums-challenging-the-trump-era-with-exhibits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/329890\/","title":{"rendered":"MFA and many other museums challenging the Trump era with exhibits"},"content":{"rendered":"

Deeper into the show, \u201cGuernica to Wounded Knee,\u201d a riotous 2012 canvas by the Shoshone-Tatavian painter Stan Natchez, glowers in the corner in a flash-frozen fury. A fiery mash-up of commercialized appropriations of Native American symbols and Pablo Picasso\u2019s 1937 epic, its point can\u2019t be missed: It conflates the Nazis\u2019 bombing trial run of the Spanish town \u2014 a favor to dictator-in-waiting Francisco Franco \u2014 and the savage 1890 murder of hundreds of Native Americans by the US Army in South Dakota \u2014 most of them children and women, some pregnant, killed as they fled for their lives after an order to cease fire. <\/p>\n

\u201cCounter History\u201d wasn\u2019t made for this moment, but it\u2019s impossible not to see it through the prism of a culture under widescale threat by a federal administration openly hostile to virtually everything the show holds within it. Trump\u2019s full-force assault on culture and history in the nine months since his inauguration has been broad, aggressive, and highly particular, brazenly rejecting diversity in race, gender, and even idea. After taking aim at the largely-government-funded Smithsonian museum complex, he vaguely threatened that independent museums would be next. Whatever the administration\u2019s powers to do that \u2014 not much, it turns out <\/a>\u2014 it was fair to expect a broad chilling effect. But \u201cCounter History\u201d is one among countless hopeful examples to the contrary. While institutions nationwide are hardly unfazed \u2014 clawbacks in grants from the National Endowment of the Arts have cut funds for things like public education and diversity programs \u2014 their work of revealing and celebrating the dynamic, diverse, fraught evolution of American culture goes on. <\/p>\n

Most importantly, maybe, it\u2019s a timely reminder of how culture, broadly, is both kept and advanced in this country \u2014 and the limitations of unilateral edict, no matter how high the office, to squelch it. <\/p>\n

The Natchez painting at the MFA is a particularly poignant example, tethered as it is to the immediate now. Just a few weeks ago, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made a showy announcement: that the 19 soldiers who carried out the Wounded Knee massacre would retain the Medals of Honor awarded to them after the attack. A century later, in 1990, Congress apologized to the Sioux people for the killing. In 2024, a federal review considered whether the medals should be rescinded. In September, Hegseth, affirming the soldiers\u2019 honors, said \u201ctheir place in our nation\u2019s history is no longer up for debate.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"SteveSteve Locke, “Homage to the Auction Block #70,” 2020. (Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston<\/p>\n

Debate \u2014 and complexity, nuance, curiosity, and conflict \u2014 of course, is the lifeblood of culture, and \u201cCounter History\u201d offers plenty. But I\u2019m sure it never expected to be quite so on point. Philip Deloria, a Harvard history professer and member of the Dakota Nation, told the Associated Press that the Hegseth assertion of military valor at Wounded Knee \u201creflects the way that this administration thinks of history \u2014 as something that one person can somehow determine through a magical proclamation.\u201d It\u2019s as though the Natchez painting was made to illustrate that very point. <\/p>\n

The painting enjoys pride of place in a slate of artworks that defy that agenda just as openly. The show is a beacon of how easy it is, frankly, to notice how different the America reflected in the nation\u2019s independent cultural institutions is from the vision now in firm view at the White House. <\/p>\n

\"AmyAmy Sherald’s “Trans Forming Liberty,” 2024, on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in April 2025. After the artist pulled her show “American Sublime” from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in September, it was relocated to the Baltimore Museum of Art. Murray Whyte<\/p>\n

Last Sunday \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d under a right-wing assault of its own<\/a>, aired an interview with the painter Amy Sherald<\/a>, best known for her portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama. In July, she pulled her triumphant career-spanning survey<\/a> from the Smithsonian\u2019s National Portrait Gallery amid mounting assaults from the administration on trans people (one of the many portraits in the show is of a trans woman). By September, it had been picked up by the Baltimore Art Museum<\/a>, just down the road. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s no stretch to read that for what it is: that out of easy reach of a hostile administration, independent institutions remain committed to their missions. That\u2019s just one example among countless others countrywide, but even just in New England, there are too many to mention. In Boston, the Institute of Contemporary Art just opened \u201cAn Indigenous Present<\/a>,\u201d an exhibition of contemporary Native American<\/a> artists\u2019<\/a> engagement with abstraction; one of its co-curators, the Choctaw-Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson<\/a>, is a bona fide art star<\/a> and the official United States\u2019 artist-rep to the Venice Biennale<\/a> last year<\/a>. At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum \u2014 home to notable Titians<\/a>, Botticellis, Manets, Sargents, and Whistlers \u2014 the fall marquee event is an exhibition of Boston<\/a> painter Alan Rohan Crite<\/a>, who spent a lifetime painting the Black community around his South End home. \u201cCounter History\u201d will continue with several rotations of new works well into 2026; but the museum is also hosting the first major survey in almost 20 years<\/a> of the work of Martin Puryear<\/a>, a senior American artist, who is Black, and whose most recent signature work is a tribute to the enslaved woman who bore Thomas Jefferson six children, Sally Hemings. <\/p>\n

\"AllanAllan Rohan Crite, “School’s Out,” 1936. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Allan Rohan Crite Research Institute and Library<\/p>\n

A little farther afield, at Mass MoCA in North Adams, the feature draw is Vincent Valdez\u2019s \u201cJust a Dream \u2026,\u201d a visceral exploration, through his paintings and drawings, of fractious themes of American society like border walls, lynchings, and the Ku Klux Klan. At the nearby Clark Institute, two exhibitions of women artists recently closed after a summerlong run: \u201cBerenice Abbott\u2019s Modern Lens,\u201d on the renowned American photographer\u2019s work in the early 20th century; and \u201cA Room of Her Own: Women Artist-Activists in Britain, 1875-1945.\u201d <\/p>\n

All summer, it seemed, women dominated the art world calendar: A dazzling exhibition of the largely-forgotten Dutch Golden Age master painter Rachel Rusych opened in August at the MFA, following the immersive dread of Chiaru Shiota\u2019s \u201cHomeless Home,\u201d the Japanese artist\u2019s plunge into the traumas of migration at the ICA Watershed. Look north to Maine and you\u2019ll find the Portland Museum of Art\u2019s just opened an exhibition of the work of Grace Hartigan, overlooked among the Abstract Expressionist scene she hung out with in no small part because she was a woman. Meanwhile, at Colby College, in Waterville, Gertrude Abercrombie, a habituee of the Chicago jazz scene at midcentury and a painter of dazzlingly enigmatic semi-surreal scenes left largely out of the American canon, is taking her first ever star turn. <\/p>\n

\"ChiharuChiharu Shiota’s “Homeless Home” at the ICA Watershed in the summer of 2025.PHILIP KEITH\/NYT<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a lot. I could go on. Which says something, I think, about the health of American cultural institutions <\/b>in fraught times, much of it good. Across their dizzying breadth runs a common thread: a defiant curiosity and commitment to continue to be expansive \u2014 to want to know more, and to reveal more about the American experience, despite pressures to the contrary. <\/p>\n

The simple fact that they stand outside government structure as independent nonprofits \u2014 the status of the vast majority of cultural institutions of all kinds \u2014 matters. Among the Trump administration\u2019s first targets were universities nationwide, threatened with funding clawbacks and worse if they refused to hew to its vision. After a handful of high-profile acquiescences, universities have largely re-girded; prominent institutions have recently rejected overtures for preferential treatment<\/a> in exchange for greater administration oversight. Universities stand to lose a lot \u2014 billions, in fact \u2014 but have courageously chosen principles over ease. Major museums receive far less federal funding, but being on the front lines of public culture makes them no less courageous. <\/p>\n

\"WinifredWinifred Knights, “The Deluge,” 1920s. Tate. Included in the Clark Art Institute’s recent “A Room of Her Own: Women Artists in Britain, 1875\u20131945.” Tate Gallery<\/p>\n

Surely, smaller institutions across the cultural spectrum have suffered: A New York Times story recently found that a third of the country\u2019s 35,000 museums have lost some government funding<\/a>; here at home, a survey by MASSCreative<\/a>, an arts advocacy nonprofit, found that 83 percent of cultural organizations in New England that lost federal funding that had BIPOC-related programming. That has left well-endowed large-scale institutions to carry the torch, and by and large, they are. <\/p>\n

The study of cultural history has always been a process of revision and refinement. Those efforts, while imperfect, have been nothing short of heroic, embracing American cultural history as the complex and uneven landscape it\u2019s always been. Among women and non-white artists in particular, this reconfiguration of priorities has provided a bounty of riches; it could hardly be otherwise, given their age-old neglect. As recently as 2019, a study at Williams College found that 87 percent of artists in US museum collections are men, and 85 percent are white. <\/p>\n

\"KayKay WalkingStick, “Chief Joseph Series,” 1974-76, named for the Nez Perce hero who led his people more than 1,000 miles north in an attempt to escape the brutal incursions of the American Army, clearing a path for westward expansion after the Civil War.Mel Taing<\/p>\n

It should surprise no one that there\u2019s no quick fix to that lopsided representation; on its own, it tells a story of America (and not only America) not to be ignored. So, the focus should be not only on percentages and data but the stories these museums tell. They are, typically, compelling. \u201cAn Indigenous Present\u201d ties Native American abstraction to the American Indian Movement of the 1970s, a reawakening of Indigenous culture and its contemporary departure point; the Gardner honors Crite with his first museum show, unlocking the urban history outside its door that the institution spent much of the first century of its existence ignoring in favor of Old Masters. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s a small handful of what we\u2019ve missed, generation to generation, and just a taste of what\u2019s left to come to light as those narrow histories continue to crack open and the light floods in. Whatever the cultural priority from on high, the cracks keep growing wider \u2014 because culture is evolution, with a momentum and will of its own. <\/p>\n

Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com<\/a>. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte<\/a>.<\/p>\n