Visitors who stop by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Wing will be greeted not only by the exciting, challenging newness of the reinstallation—undertaken to mark the Wing’s hundredth anniversary—but given the opportunity to look beyond surfaces, with the help of two many-voiced audio guides that unravel the foundational myths of American art history object by object.
America had spoken. That’s how it felt, back in early November, in the wake of an unsurprising yet still somehow shocking electoral result. Yet had the nation really revealed a new truth about itself ? Or had the election, and the whole excruciating campaign, merely proven something we already knew all too well—that partisan politics brings
out the very worst in us?
For those wanting another version of our national story, one based not on acrimony and either/or judgments but diversity and complexity, the reopening of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is an extraordinarily welcome event. For thehundredth anniversary of its opening in 1924, the spaces have been thoroughly overhauled; they’ve never looked better, and have never told such rich and rewarding stories. What’s more, you don’t have to make it to New York to explore it all. Earlier this year, when I spoke with Sylvia Yount, curator in charge of both the Wing and its reimagination (see the March/April 2024 issue of The Magazine ANTIQUES), she talked not just about the rearrangement of the galleries and period rooms, but also the “display and interpretation of those historical spaces, including in digital form.”
That promise has now been realized through a pair of ambitious audio guides, keyed to the exhibitions The American Wing at 100 and The Calculated Curve: Eighteenth Century American Furniture and featuring thirty-two contributors across thirty-nine stops, each focusing on a single object in the Metropolitan’s collection. It’s not the first time the American Wing has explored this format. Back in 2016–2017, it welcomed as an artist-in-residence the master storyteller Nate DiMeo, who created a richly atmospheric series best listened to on-site, in the galleries. (And if you’re a reader of ANTIQUES who hasn’t heard DiMeo’s wonderful podcast, The Memory Palace, you have a gift awaiting you.) Curators at the American Wing have also occasionally found themselves in front of the microphone, sharing their expertise directly with the public; these recordings can be accessed through the Met’s online collections page for any given object.
The one hundredth anniversary audio guides, however, are something new. Presented on separate pages on the Met’s website, they have been conceived not as a delivery system for the museum’s own voice, but an open forum in which artists, activists, and historians can offer their own personal responses. The difference can be measured in reference to a pair of presentation vases made by Thomas Fletcher and Sidney Gardiner in 1824 and 1825 (Figs. 1a, 1b). They were commissioned by a group of New York merchants as a gift to Governor DeWitt Clinton, to thank him for supporting the construction of the Erie Canal. The old audio stop, featuring curators Peter Kenny and Beth Carver Wees, is a genial and informative chat about the ancient source for the vases—the Warwick Vase, excavated in 1770 near Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli—and the precision of its sculptural detailing.
The new stop begins with this rhetorical question: “These silver vases . . . are clearly intended to celebrate a triumph. But at what cost?” Environmental historians Lemir Teron and Renée Barry take note of an Indigenous man depicted on the vase looking melancholically at a felled tree and use that motif to enter into and discuss the displacement and deforestation necessary to the project’s completion.
Not all the stops on the new tours offer this sort of corrective—but most do. And high time, too. For a century, the American Wing has offered visitors a version of US history so sanitized, so scrubbed, so narrow in its demographics, that it barely approximated real history at all. The preponderance of the voices on the new audio tours are Black and Native American, and collectively they bring great nuance, imagination, and insight to their interpretive task. My own favorite stop may well be artist Glenn Ligon’s discussion of a storage jar by Dave the Potter—the one inscribed “when you fill this Jar with pork or beef/ Scot will be there; to get a peace” (Fig. 3)—in which he makes an unexpected but entirely apt analogy to Lebron James. Dave’s poetry, he argues, exemplifies an “extra-ness” typical of Black culture, just as the virtuosity of James’s dunks have a value far beyond the two points he’s putting on the board.
Such shifts of perspective recur throughout the new audio tours, whether it’s artist Anna Plesset, in her discussion of landscape painter Julie Hart Beers, pointing out that she had to do her plein-air work “in upwards of fourteen pounds of clothes”; or of Jolene Rickard, a member of the Tuscarora Nation and professor at Cornell University, illuminating cosmic philosophy embedded in the iconography of a Haudenosaunee paddle (Fig. 2). Artist Dawoud Bey is eloquent in his description of the recently acquired painting Bélizaire and the Frey Children attributed to Jacques Amans (subject of a three-episode series of ANTIQUES’ own podcast, Curious Objects). “Bélizaire carries a lot of weight on his young shoulders in this painting,” Bey comments. “He is holding the weight of history on his shoulders, and he looks very relaxed while doing it.”
Two artists included in the new initiative really know whereof they speak, because they’re talking about their own work. One of these is Hugh Hayden, whose American Dream (2023) is directly based on John Quincy Adams Ward’s The Freedman (Fig. 6). Hayden had the original 3-D scanned, then clothed the figure in cargo shorts, a button-up fishing shirt, and flip flops; he also replaced the tree stump of the original with an Adirondack chair, the plastic kind you get at a Home Depot. By remixing Ward’s abolitionist sculpture to his own recipe, Hayden effects a kind of time travel, creating an allegorical Black everyman who stands for the incomplete freedom that was won through the Civil War. On the audio stop, Hayden muses that it’s hard to tell whether The Freedman is actually rising to action; perhaps he’s sitting down, ready to relax. In an era of enslavement, would this not have been its own form of radical agency?
We also hear, on the tours, from Titus Kaphar, whose work William (Billy) Lee: Portrait in Tar is on view in the Met’s galleries (Fig. 5). Unlike Hayden, who rescripts an existing image, Kaphar fills in a complete absence in the record. He depicts George Washington’s enslaved valet, who was never portrayed by an artist in his lifetime. “Those spaces of the unknown are where our imagination is activated,” Kaphar notes, and indeed, his imaginary portrait of Lee has a zone of pure, thick blackness where the face could have been, if only we knew what he’d looked like. “I wish we knew what brought Billy Lee joy,” Kaphar says, “I wish we knew what he hoped for. I wish we knew what he dreamed about. I wish we knew what he feared. I wish we knew what he loved. I wish I knew what he would think of this painting.”
George Washington himself, of course, is all over the American Wing (search his name in the Met’s collection database and you’ll get 877 hits), most famously in Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware—the painting without which the American Wing, not to mention any high school civics textbook, would not be complete (Fig. 7). As Yount mentioned in our interview earlier this year, it is a tourist destination in its own right, the immovable object against which any program of reinterpretation must push. The job of interpreting the painting here was given to Scott Manning Stevens, a professor at Syracuse University and citizen of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation.
He directs our attention to a lone figure all the way in the back of the boat, identifiable as a Northeast Wood lands Native due to his clothing and quillwork pouch. Many Indigenous people, Stevens notes, thought that in helping the United States against the British, they were helping themselves. Of course, in this they were gravely mistaken. “Our term for Washington in our languages is Hanadahguyus, which means ‘destroyer of villages,’” he adds, “and that becomes our term for all US presidents. That becomes the term for the Office of the Presidency, destroyer of villages, and they never disappoint.”
Topical stuff, helpfully extended by the histo rian Jane Kamensky in her remarks on another depiction of an American commander-in-chief, Charles Hogeboom’s bust of Thomas Jefferson (Fig. 8). Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the drift of recent commentary on Jefferson and his legacy, she talks mostly about his hypocritical involvement in the institution of slavery, a practice that he knew was wrong. But like all the other contributors to the audio tours, Kamensky realizes that telling a difficult truth about the past is not the same as passing judgment on it. What would be the point of that? “An important thing to remember about America’s founders is that they did not view themselves as marble men,” she says. “They viewed themselves as fallible human beings—as indeed they were.” The same has been true of all the presidents, past, present, and future, and of the citizens they serve. Fallible is probably putting it too mildly, but still, we have to keep listening to each other, and finding a way to live together. The saving grace of America, after all, is its multiplicity. E Pluribus Unum—not the other way around.
