Lucky
We woke to an inch or so of new snow, the heavy wet kind that coats every surface, even the vertical tree trunks. Look, I said, a winter wonderland. Jay didn’t miss a beat. Yeah, he said, I wonder how did we land here? He relented and admitted it was beautiful. Everything was white, and the sky was a whiter shade of pale. The old snow had become grubby with road dirt, and this was a welcome covering.
How did we land here is a question we ask ourselves often – usually in the form of how did we get so lucky. Winter and all, we love the choice we made. We know how lucky we were and are to have so many choices. We could have comfortably stayed in Palo Alto or resettled in Jay’s house in Pleasant Hill. We could have moved to Panama, which we love, or to any number of warm, low cost countries. But Cooperstown tugged at us at a time we were ready to be tugged. Jay still idly considers other choices mostly out of habit, but I’m done.
One of the many wonderful resources of Cooperstown is the Graduate Program, an outpost of the State University of New York in Oneonta. The Cooperstown Graduate Program offers Masters degrees in Museum Studies with a generalist approach and special tracks in science and history. It’s a small, lively program with a wonderful director, Gretchen Sorin, the author of Driving While Black, among other books. Gretchen became a member of the League board a little over a year ago, not long after the death of her husband. She and Jay and I connected over the shared experience of loss.
Gretchen mentioned that she was about to teach a class on African American Art a few weeks ago, and when I expressed interest she invited me to audit it. It’s a joy on two fronts, the fascinating content and the lively young students. Gretchen started the course with a look at how African Americans had been presented by white artists over time. She had curated an exhibit on the subject for the Fenimore Museum here, “Through the Eyes of Others.” It was something I had never thought about. But there they are, in classic American paintings, the odd African Americans, servants or slaves as markers of wealth, outsiders on the edge of the action.
The class got me thinking about the visual images of African Americans I grew up with, from Little Black Sambo, to Amos and Andy, Rochester, Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben. I breathed in a racist view of African Americans without considering it. Even when I joined the NAACP in high school, when many of my friends were black, I didn’t consider the assumptions I made or where they came from. My friends were individual people, not people I thought of as members of a group I automatically thought of as lesser. I knew that black people deserved civil rights but I didn’t reflect on how little I knew of their history, the limitations and discrimination they faced, and the way they were portrayed in media and popular culture.
The class is also introducing me to great African American artists I knew nothing about. They were simply excluded from the collections of American and European artists I grew up with. Here is Tanner, with his haunting The Thankful Poor painted in 1894. Here are Robert Scott Duncanson’s beautiful 19th century landscapes, and Edward Bannister’s. They didn’t hang alongside the Churches and Bierstadts I grew up with. They were silently excluded, like the African American painted by William Sydney Mount in 1847, standing outside the barn listening to the musicians inside. I learned about so many injustices, but this is one I never gave a moment’s thought to. I had to come to Cooperstown and meet Gretchen to start learning about it.
The students in the class are predominantly white, but eager to learn. Many of them are history or science geeks and are new to the whole world of fine art, let alone the huge pieces that have been missing from it until quite recently. They grew up with vastly different public images of African Americans than I did, in politics, on the news, in classrooms, in books, movies, and music. It is not remarkable to them to see that some of the scientists on a panel are black. They were children when our first black family lived in the White House. For them, segregation and the civil rights movement I was born into are remote history, as remote to them as the first World War was to me with its quaint looking Doughboys. These students will go on to develop museums that are more inclusive than I could have imagined. They know that they are only part of the story of America. It’s a joy to study with them.
On the first night of class Gretchen asked a simple question: what is African American art? Is it any art done by an African American, even a Duncanson landscape that you would have no reason to know was not by a White painter? Or is it only art which demonstrates, by subject or style, that its creator is African American? And if you are a curator looking to diversify your collection, which African American art do you purchase with your limited funds? It’s tricky. There’s not one answer and none of the answers are easy. How lucky I am to sit in a classroom in Cooperstown with future curators and consider Gretchen’s question.