As I suggested near the end of my previous post, my enthusiasm for the Museum of Modern Art’s profoundly illuminating, entertaining (thanks to its rich musical component) and deeply researched One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Works was tinged with a drop of disappointment.
During her opening remarks at the press preview, curator Leah Dickerman noted that one of the reasons for rehanging Lawrence’s epic 60-panel account of the Great Migration of African-Americans from South to North was “to understand how it can speak to new generations, how you can find new meanings.”
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
In light of the widespread furor over three recent deaths of unarmed black men in confrontations with police, this exhibition has now become even more timely than MoMA’s organizers could have imagined when they conceived it. Yet the only way in which the exhibition itself alludes to the present moment is in the last two cryptic sentences of its introductory wall text:
The story of the Migration, as Lawrence recognized in his Migration Series, was crucial to understanding the issues confronting Americans in 1941. It is crucial to understanding those that confront us today.
Nowhere in the exhibition does MoMA make good on the implied promise to explore today’s issues in the context of Lawrence’s achievement. Such crucial connections are strictly DIY.
In my public interchange with Dickerman and MoMA director Glenn Lowry during the Q&A portion of at the press preview, I expressed my dissatisfaction with this controversy-averse approach. Dickerman began her response by referring to the final sentence in the above-quoted wall text.
Here’s how the conversation went:
ROSENBAUM: Leah mentioned to us that this work can speak to a new generation. I walked into the show wondering if you were going to make some direct analogies to the present and to the fact that, at this very moment, we’re dealing with issues that Lawrence highlighted in his work.
You made the decision not to do that and I’m wondering why you decided not to bring this into the present.
DICKERMAN: The wall text makes it clear that the Migration and the issues that he [Lawrence] is addressing here were absolutely central for Lawrence in 1941. And they are central for us today. So I want people to think in that direction.
I don’t want to be overly didactic in the galleries, but we also have panel discussions, like the one that Khalil [Gibran Muhammad] is running on Apr. 15 [today], that will directly address the long history of Lawrence’s concern. That’s something that also comes up in Steffani Jemison’s “Promise Machine.”…
I think one of the things that a museum can do is to set a contemporary moment in relationship to history—to test our thinking in relationship to an earlier moment and maybe to be a bit transformed in the process. So the long history of these concerns is very much the point. But I don’t want to collapse the two and say that there are no differences either.
LOWRY: It’s an excellent question, because I think any time you do an exhibition whose subject matter reverberates in the present, you have to strike a fine balance between insuring that you’re not shirking it and avoiding it, but at the same time, really doing justice to the works of art that you are concentrating on and not turning them into something that they weren’t meant to be.
I think the lessons to be taught by the “Migration Series” alone, but also of all the works [in the show] is that they are powerful; they speak to the present and, in a way, you can think of them as prophetic. I think we’ve tried to be very calibrated in how we’ve done that, so that you can appreciate them for what they were and you can think about the stories they tell and the issues unresolved that remain.
This sparks a conversation. If it keeps us talking about this, if it makes us super-aware that so much of what is on these walls is a current condition, although it’s not identical to the past, will have done one little thing in keeping our attention on one of the greatest issues of the day.
When I returned to the galleries after the remarks, Lowry approached me and again praised my question, adding that some of the works in MoMA’s wide-ranging new installation of contemporary art from its permanent collection do address issues of racial justice.
As far as I could see, there’s just a smattering of such works, including this familiar, in-your-face Kara Walker, immediately encountered in the first gallery:
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
The Lawrence show includes a gallery of works from the early 1940s (contemporary with the 1941 “Migration Series”) by other black artists, such as Charles Alston (Lawrence’s teacher), William H. Johnson and Romare Bearden. It could have easily been updated by a “postscript” gallery, presenting a small selection of later works by those who have shared Lawrence’s social conscience and/or were influenced by his work.
For all of its impressive merit, the not-to-be-missed “One-Way Ticket” missed its opportunity to make explicit the important connections and continuities of concern that we can only infer from MoMA’s play-it-safe presentation.