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The United States has a strained relationship with immigration. The basic narrative of our country is that even though our government has excluded different groups of immigrants for centuries, it is a melting pot. The highly praised nickname “nation of immigrants” excludes those who were here before colonization (Indigenous peoples) and those who were brought here against their will (enslaved Africans). In other words, there is a gap between the romantic image of America most of us learn as children and its more brutal realities. “The Arrivals”, a thought-provoking exhibition Katonah Art Museumuses historical and contemporary art to explore this gap.
Curated by the art historian Heather Ewing, the exhibition examines how newcomers to this land have shaped and been accepted. In particular, the exhibition abandons the word “migration” in favor of something more inclusive: “Arrivals” includes those that do not fit the official terminology. The show, in its own way, promotes the idea that the United States is a rare melting pot of peoples and ideas – but it’s not bright-eyed about it.
The exhibition begins with a timeline of US immigration and citizenship policies. It’s a gruesome read—a chronicle of exclusion that mostly makes up Ewing’s argument: xenophobia is as fundamental an aspect of American life as immigration. Ewing punctuates the timeline with reproductions and personal interpretations of contemporary political cartoons by some of the show’s participants, including Edward Hicks, Alfred Stieglitz, Kara Walker, and Cannupa Hanska Luger. The additions make the artists seem like staunch guardians of our national moral conscience, but for every cartoon shown inflating an anti-immigrant faction, I wondered how many were published with applause.
The exhibition is built around seven “arrival moments” in US history. They begin specifically with Columbus’s landing in the Bahamas in 1492 and its effect on the Indigenous peoples there, and gradually expand and end with the satisfactorily ambiguous “Today” category.
Although the show runs chronologically, the moments offer more than the plot; they are also themes. In the first part, works of art that mythologize the famous explorer’s “discovery” of America share the same space with those who criticize the destruction it brought. In NC Wyeth’s painting “Columbus Discovers America (Spain Royal Standard)” (1942), an emotional Columbus closes his eyes as he touches his sword to the ground and embraces his flag. Wyeth looks like a riff on John Vanderlyn’s monumental painting.Columbus’ Descent” (1846) for the U.S. Capitol rotunda in Katonah, represented by a black-and-white engraving by HB Hall from 1856.
Including Hall’s copy helps you appreciate it, although it’s small Titus Kapharlarge “Columbus Day Painting” (2014) nearby. The piece borrows the image of Vanderlyn but replaces the Spanish figures with blank canvas; The gathered and wrapped canvas silences their heroism and hints at their spread of disease. Kaphar is famous for such art history revisions, and they can sometimes feel tricky or over-intelligent. Seeing it next to the originals gives it a rebellious strength.
At its best, “Incoming” offers the feeling of witnessing discussions or conversations between artists in time and place, and allows you to understand the risks of those conversations. One of the strongest examples is the section devoted to the Middle Passage, the gruesome journey of enslaved Africans to these lands between 1619 and 1808. As in the Columbian episode, a small, black-and-white engraving serves as a visual anchor: Made in 1789 by Mathew Carey, a diagram of the inhuman crowd on the lower deck of a slave ship, an American version of the more famous British image spread by abolitionists.
Carey’s print is sobering, but its significance is also symbolic: the image of the slave ship becomes a symbol of history as African-American artists struggled. “Resign” (1997), Willie Cole implying a connection between enslavement and contemporary domestic labor, he transforms it into traces of iron. Keith Morrison He makes us feel this more sincerely with “Middle Passage II” (2010), a thought-provoking painting that puts the viewer in the position of a prisoner looking from the bottom up. in Vanessa germanIn his sculpture named ‘Two ships pass at night or I take my soul everywhere I go, thank you’ (2014), two Black girls created from found objects carry model ships on their heads. Instead of looking weighty, they float on a skateboard. It seems that the Middle Passage has grown from just a burden to an essential part of who they are.
“Coming”, in essence, is about the identity that is trending in today’s art world. What makes it refreshing is that it uses a historical framework to tackle a familiar topic. The show isn’t about race, ethnicity, or gender, but it touches on all of that. It’s about how artists can help strengthen, complicate or perforate national myths through their own stories and observations.
One way to do this is to challenge the state’s authority to certify and issue identity. I was fascinated by the second gallery covering the 20th and 21st centuries. Stephanie Syjuco‘s small but determined “Applicants (Immigrants) #1, #2, #3” (2018) consists of three sets of passport photos with the occupants’ faces hidden by patterned fabrics. Annie Lopez He made his brash and funny piece “Show Me Your Documents and I’ll Show You Mine” (2012) in response to Arizona’s law that allows police to request documents from anyone they consider undocumented; She took personal documents such as birth certificates and childhood awards and printed them on tamale paper, which she turned into underwear. Despite their opposing strategies (concealing and revealing), both artists playfully challenge a system that wants to catalog and control them.
In the end, “Incoming” left me grappling with a question that is also the title of a current book. Jaune Quick Sight Smith Edition from 2001-03: “What is an American?”. Smith’s work features a headless Indigenous figure with ordinary strides as a sort of rainbow of red, white, and blue erupts from a stigmata mark on his hand. It seems to indicate that the original inhabitants of these lands were sacrificed for the sins of the new nation. A recent photograph taken by Dorothea Lange, just after the attack on Pearl Harbor, attempts to answer Smith’s ever-relevant query: It shows a Japanese-American grocery store with a sign in the window that reads, “I’m an American.” This claim of belonging was futile; shopping centre closed and its owner was imprisoned in a concentration camp.
Smith’s title asks not “who” but “what” is American. For me, this takes home the artificiality of Americanism – it’s something you become a product of invention. The lesson unfolds in one of the show’s most striking works, Edward Grazda“I Remember Grandma Ellis Island” (1988). In a photo within a photo, there is an image of a woman wearing a feathered hood with one hand reaching out to a window. The surrounding text says: “My grandmother came to Ellis Island from Poland in 1912. He had his picture taken as an Indian.”
I dare say what it means to be an American: come here and re-imagine yourself, often at someone else’s expense.
Arrival
Until January 23, Katonah Museum of Art, 134 Jay Street — Route 22, Katonah, NY, (914) 232-9555; katonahmuseum.org.
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