Trump’s DEI ban dooms show at Art Museum of the Americas
This a case of Trump moving in for the kill. Last month, Donald Trump made clear he not only wants authority over the courts and Congress but also the performing arts. So, he made himself chairman of the board of the Kennedy Center.
Now Trump’s grasping hands reach for the visual arts. As a result of his crackdown on diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) programs, the Art Museum of the Americas in DC, lost federal funding for an exhibition by Afro-Latino, Caribbean, and African American artists.
Obviously, Trump doesn’t know that art in the 20th century owes its existence to African tribal art. But while not knowing art history is excusable in a politician, it's unheard of in an art museum.
Yet, in the last century, the Louvre declined to house African art, contending that there was no room for specialty collections. Never mind that the Louvre is the largest art museum in the world!
Odd that such a museum would forget that Picasso's most celebrated work, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," was inspired by an African art exhibit he saw at the Musee d'Ethonographie. The painter spoke at length of that experience. (More about that in a moment).
Only at the start of the 21st century did the Louvre set aside a room for African art. Likely the hesitation came from curators’ mistaken belief that tribal art is not art but crafts because it was not created for its own sake.
However, artists like Henry Moore saw tribal work differently. He saw it as human experience objectified. And if that's not art, I don't know what is.
It’s a matter of historical record that Modernism in art began in 1907 when Picasso saw African tribal objects as weapons against evil and proceeded to paint "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" with that in mind.
He distorts the classic vision of the female form and, by extension, revolutionized Western art as well as patrons' viewed artmaking.
"Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" gave rise to Expressionism and ultimately non-representational art – all of which were hardly revolutionary ideas in Africa. Picasso explained his reaction to tribal art this way:
“The masks weren't just like any other pieces or sculpture. Not at all. They were magic things… They were intercessors, mediators…All the fetishes were used for the same thing…weapons to help people avoid coming under the influence of spirits…
“I understood why I was a painter all alone in that awful museum (Musee d'Ethonographie). “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon” must have come to me that very day ... it was my first exorcism painting -- yes, absolutely."
Picasso's search for the inner reality in African art also may account for why Sigmund Freud was such a collector of old Nile art. Exotica set free the mind of the founder of psychoanalysis the way African art freed Picasso.
"Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" may have rewritten art history, but African artists had the story first. Something else also needs to be said here.
, Cracking down on diversity, equality, and inclusion programs (translation: anything not white) is verboten) is anti-American. As early as 1845 the philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson called America Utopian for its cultural and racial mix. Banning DEI, then, is a form of ethnic cleansing. Seig Heil!