The Smithsonian had planned to release tomorrow the names of the panelists for its two-day “Hide/Seek”-related conference. Now they’ve put it off till next Monday, as spokesperson Linda St. Thomas told me. Either they’re having trouble organizing the panels, or they don’t want to invite controversy over their choices until the last minute.
One reason why the planners may be risk-averse: On Feb. 25, Christopher Knight of the LA Times published this piece
naming three panelists whom he said were on a draft list he had seen for a session
on “Media Perspectives on Exhibitions and Controversies.”
Strongly opposed to one of the purported choices, he issued a “smog alert.”
A “Media Alert” was issued today by the Smithsonian for “Flashpoints and Fault Lines: Museum Curation and Controversy,” as the two-day session (Apr. 26, 6-9 p.m.; Apr. 27, 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Freer Gallery auditorium) has been titled.
The only speakers named in this “alert” were the Smithsonian’s own officials and curators: G. Wayne Clough, secretary; Richard Kurin, under secretary for history, art and culture; Julian Raby, director, Freer and Sackler galleries, and senior art advisor; curators from several Smithsonian exhibitions, including the co-curators of “Hide/Seek”—David Ward, National Portrait Gallery historian; guest curator Jonathan Katz, director of the doctoral program in visual studies, State University of New York at Buffalo.
From the announcement, which failed to mention that the panels were still in formation, I drew the erroneous conclusion that those were to be the only speakers. I was therefore poised to change Knight’s “smog alert” to a “snooze alert.” But St. Thomas assured me that “there are non-Smithsonian people on every panel.” Time will tell (or maybe Knight will).
Below is the description of the Washington sessions. (Admission is free in an auditorium with a 300-person capacity.)
The Tuesday evening session will focus in part on the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” Discussion topics will include difficulties in representing sensitive gender and sexuality subjects in public institutions.
The daylong session Wednesday will focus on curation—listening to artists, scientists, public figures and cultural communities; exhibitions in a national museum; and museum stakeholders and curation.
The forum will have several public-comment and Q&A sessions.
Don’t worry, art-lings, if you can’t be there in person. You can watch the whole thing (if you really must) via online webcast, here.
Wait a minute! Where’s Martin Sullivan? Strangely, the director of the museum where the hot-button show took place, who labored so tirelessly to navigate his institution between a rock and a hard place when the storm broke, is not listed among the Smithsonian’s participants. Is this just a press-release oversight?
Fear not. Marty was a dominant presence on last Saturday’s panel, Hide/Seek: Museums, Ethics and the Press, in which I also participated. I’ll spare you my own comments (since my views are already overly familiar to CultureGrrl readers), but I’d bet you’d like to know some of what Marty and Kaywin Feldman, the Minneapolis-based president of the Association of Art Museum Directors (who, to my astonishment, was in the audience), had to say. COMING SOON.
In the meantime, if you really can’t get enough of this topic (I, for one, am starting to feel sated), the Corcoran Gallery has now posted four videos from its own recent “Hide/Seek”-extravaganza. The keynote speaker was Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art.