On View at Mt. Holyoke and Amherst College

 

Lewis Hine

 

The Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts has numerous colleges and universities with art museums. As befits educational institutions, many of the exhibits change–for good or ill.

 

Mount Holyoke College Art Museum is celebrating its 150^th anniversary through May 25 with an exhibit titled Relaunch Laboratory. It showcases work that challenges old conventions. As you’ve probably noticed, Eurocentrism and colonialism have come under critical scrutiny, as have elitist perspectives on “fine” art. This includes both creative people in the West who find beauty in street perspectives and those from non-Western cultures whose work collapses outmoded ideas that anything “functional” is, at best, craft. 

 

Berenice Abbott

 

Thomas Hart Benton

 

Mt. Holyoke was ahead of the curve in collecting photography and recognizing how it tells otherwise forgotten tales. One such shutterbug was Lewis Hine, who fancied himself a reformer with a camera. His shot of a shirtless worker inside Holyoke’s Paragon Rubber Company is dynamic, but gritty. You can almost feel the heat and smell the raw rubber and well-worn machines. You can also imagine how many generations of young men toiled just like the central figure. Likewise, there’s nothing intrinsically beautiful about a hardware story captured by the lens of Berenice Abbott in 1938. Yet somehow it’s hard to look away from this potpourri of plebeian utilitarianism. Work is celebrated on heroic scale by a 1930s work by muralist Thomas Hart Benton. You might notice that some are working and some are “supervising” or that figures on the right seem imperiled. 

 

Ismael Randall Weeks

 

Dancing Ganesha

 

Peruvian artist Ishmael Randall Weeks challenges how we see in a work titled Código atemporal, which means “timeless code.” At first it’s little more than brick dust, cement, dirt, and black quartz placed upon a beige background. Yet it too invites you to look at its arrangement and imagine those whose hands touched the materials. Form meets function in a dance mask from Sierra Leone created in the 20^th century to evoke older rituals. Speaking of which, how about the timelessness of Ganesha who is still revered in both Hinduism and Buddhism. This one dates from either the 9^th or 10^th century. If you carefully on the bottom right you’ll see a mouse under Ganesha’s foot. Mice represent the need to control ego. Maybe we should send a box of them to Congress! 

 

El Anasui

Vanesa German

 

I was enthralled by Bird from Ghana’s El Anasui because it is made of wood and he is an artist I associate with giant metal “curtains” made from discarded liquor bottle bands. I was also taken by a work from African American sculptor Vanesa German. Her The Father Shoe has nails and shimmery metal, each with wings. One for is for coming and other for going. 

 

Charmion von Wiegand

 Charmion von Wiegand asks a question we should always consider. Her 1957 work titled 42^nd Street New York City is lines and color blocks. Do we need anything else to evoke a bird’s eye view of a city throughway?

 

 

I wish I felt as charitable about work currently on view at the Mead Art Gallery of Amherst College. The most interesting thing you can there at present are galleries being readied for an exhibit of global indigenous peoples.

 

Current exhibitions titled Trópico es Politico: Caribbean Art Under the Visitor Economy Regime and Like a Slow Walk with Trees: Alicia Grullón evoke adjectives such as obvious, preachy, and boring. 

 

 The first has juxtapositions of how people live in places such as Panama and various Caribbean islands versus visitor pitches. Footage of tourist advertisements are of pristine playgrounds inhabited by rich jetsetters–casinos, white beaches, golf courses…. As you know, that’s not how it is on the ground. Key phrase: As you know. It’s the kind of thing used to drive home the built-in imbalances of colonialism and then move on to discussion. Instead of driving home, the exhibit takes backroads and ends up where it started.

 

This is even more blatant and dull in Like a Slow Walk with Trees. Thesis: Trees are good, people are bad. In case you don’t get that, cosplay figures hold up signs or pose with props that tell you what you are supposed to conclude.

 

Agitprop art delivers messages, but the most effective invites dialogue rather than delivering a sermon. Once dogma enters the scene, dialogue dies and we are left with just two options: acknowledge our sins or walk away. The latter is unfortunate but the first is a dead end. Forced conversions seldom work. Add unproductive to the list of adjectives for these exhibits.

 

Rob Weir