At the Huntington Street entrance to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is the statue “Appeal to the Great Spirit”, by Cyrus Dallin, cast in 1909. The Museum is not quite sure what to do about it. From Boston.com:
The statue … encapsulates freedom and power for some. For others, it’s a false portrayal of a Native American man who, as one visitor to the museum wrote, is “welcoming visitors onto land that was stolen.”
The museum announced last week a major effort to fight against the image created by the exhibit. As part of an ongoing series, the museum will invite artists to create work that will stand near “Appeal” and seek to recontextualize and “respond” to the statue. …
“Like the art critics of his time, Dallin had a limited perspective on his work. He likely saw ‘Appeal to the Great Spirit’ as different from negative images of Native people, even though it perpetuated the ‘vanishing race’ stereotype with its anonymous, unarmed figure dressed in a mix of Lakota- and Diné-style regalia,” MFA’s website reads.
Over the years, the museum has said publicly that the statue furthers stereotypical and harmful representations of Native people.
“Today, the MFA’s interpretation recognizes that the ‘Appeal’ is based on an inaccurate accumulation of Native symbols and ultimately capitalized on the degrading myth of the ‘vanishing race,’ which portrayed Indigenous peoples as disappearing in the face of modern civilization.”
Their solution is to invite other artists, especially Indigenous American artists, to create works that will “respond to” and “recontextualize” the “Appeal” statue, and which will be placed in juxtaposition.
I’ve seen efforts like this before. When I lived in Saskatchewan there was an exhibition by First Nations artists curated to “respond” to a mural portraying the meeting of Captain George Vancouver and the Indigenous people of the coast, that used to hang in the British Columbia provincial museum in Victoria (for the life of me I cannot find an image of it). And recently in Boston the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum invited a few artists to “respond” to their exhibition of Titian’s “Poesie” collection, in particular the painting “The Rape of Europa.”
One difficulty with such a tactic is that the contemporary artists are at a great disadvantage, as they are being compared - they are being invited to be compared! - to either great artists (Titian) or what has become a familiar landmark (Dallin’s “Appeal”). Altogether, the effect might not turn out to be as intended.
But with the Boston MFA there is a larger question: why continue to exhibit a work that it claims is inaccurate and harmful? I find it very odd when arts organizations present works for which they believe they need to apologize, since there is nothing that compels them to show the work in the first place. If the members of your opera company really think Madama Butterfly is irredeemably Orientalist and sexist, don’t “re-imagine” it (a word guaranteed to make me unwilling to purchase a ticket to a show), just don’t perform it at all. There are lots of other operas.
If “Appeal to the Great Spirit” is so problematic, and they have done the research that one ought to do (Chesterton’s fences and all that), move it to the basement storage. I can find nothing in the Museum’s discussion of the statue that suggests it is actually a fine piece of art (see here and here for suggestions of how inappropriate it is). My guess is that they don’t want to move it because some people like the statue, and have a small-c conservative attachment to it as a part of their city and their museum experience, and enjoy it as a work of art (the Museum, as I note, never comes out and says this - at least people who tend to complain about Madama Butterfly admit it has good tunes).
Contemporary sensitivities, and we are living in a time of great sensitivities to such things, will mean that many works of art from the past get people concerned. Arts presenting organizations have a choice: continue to exhibit and perform the works, or not. This decision precedes any questions about inviting “responses” from other artists. No arts organization has an obligation to exhibit bad art. The only reason to present anything at all, unless we are talking about a museum of history, is that there is some greatness in the work, something compelling. If the Boston Museum of Fine Arts wants to continue to have “Appeal to the Great Spirit” at its entrance, one thing it ought to do is to say to its patrons why: be forthright in saying what is valuable in it, not just what is wrong with it. Enough cringing.