Reopened Art Institute Of Chicago Balances Needs Of Global Audience With Needs Of Local Community

Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Grant Woods’ American Gothic. Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on the Grande Jatte.

All of them among the most recognizable images in art history.

All of them in the permanent collection at the Art Institute of Chicago.

All of them from the hand of a white male artist depicting white people.

As art museums nationwide commit to becoming more welcoming to black audiences, the Art Institute of Chicago faces a question: how does it best balance continuing to highlight its treasure trove of art history’s greatest hits from white artists – Monet, van Gogh, Chagall, Picasso, Pollack, Warhol–with work from black artists, depicting subjects more relevant to the 30% African-American community it serves locally?

“The awareness with which we consider what we're showing in our galleries and how we're interpreting artworks in the gallery has become more important, instead of being on the list of things to do it's, number one,” Sarah Guernsey, Deputy Director and Senior Vice President, Curatorial Affairs at the Art Institute of Chicago told Forbes.com.

The museum reopened to the public following its coronavirus closure on July 30, several years into multi-faceted efforts to be more inclusive of black voices. Importantly to the Art Institute, that inclusion starts from within.

“For us, it's not just an external approach to audiences, but it's also about our internal staff culture,” Guernsey said. “We want to make sure that our internal culture is supportive in the way we want to invite external guests.”

One new initiative in that direction is the development of a department titled “people and culture.”

“It is meant to work on having a better staff culture with equity, inclusion and anti-racism at the core, emphasizing the need for our staff culture and engagement to impact how we're presenting art in the galleries,” Guernsey explained.

The museum, additionally, has an equity forum, employees who volunteer to take positions pushing the institution’s anti-racism work forward. Within the equity forum is a group called “narratives and content.”

“This is a group of people that as we hit on some of the issues of social identity in the exhibitions or in acquisitions, if we have questions we want to consider more broadly, they're willing to work through challenging topics without it just being one curator who thinks he or she knows what to do,” Guernsey said.

The efforts continue with staff color affinity groups, providing employees of color a space to gather and talk, “and we're working to create another place for dialogue where we're putting together meetings with the director and black staff to talk about their concerns because we realize that everyone is reacting to the brutal murders of George Floyd and others, but that it impacts our black staff more than anyone else,” Guernsey noted, adding that, “we are working really hard to center black voices inside the museum, to make it a welcoming place for staff where they feel supported… really thinking about black staff and not speaking for black staff.”

One of the museum’s longest running efforts toward inclusion is its “leadership advisory committee” dating back to the 1990s. This group of black supporters consult with curators and the learning and public engagement department on acquisitions, exhibitions and programming in an effort to decentralized decision making.

Subtle, but significant, tweaks to guest services have also been undertaken to place black artists on a more equal footing with their celebrity white counterparts. One such example takes shape in the visitor guides highlighting what to see in an hour.

Hundreds of thousands of tourists annually stream into the museum. Many of them are looking primarily to breeze through for an in-person glimpse of the images they’ve read about in books and seen on posters before moving on to the city’s next attraction.

“Years ago, you’d look at the ‘what to see in an hour’ (guide) and it was all 19^th century masterpieces by Seurat, Monet, and we have very intentionally moved away from just listing those same 10 objects every time in the ‘what to see in an hour’ suggested tour,” Guernsey said. “As much as it's our job to share with the world the famous artworks, we want also to educate people on artwork they may not have noticed or considered.”

One such example is Archibald Motley’s electric, jubilant, purple juke joint utopia Nightlife, a previously less-celebrated painting from a black artist now elevated to the stature of Monet’s haystacks or van Gogh’s bedroom.

“There are ways that artwork becomes famous and part of it is putting it in the public eye and letting people learn about it,” Guernsey said. “We definitely take that seriously, we can't just share the most famous objects that everybody expects, we want to share more to broaden the cannon and broaden our visitors understanding of art history.”

To that end, the Art Institute will be presenting a rich exhibition schedule of black artists through the remainder of 2020 and 2021. Richard Hunt, Joseph Yoakum, Bisa Butler and the Obama presidential portraits–his by Kehinde Wiley and hers by Amy Sherald–all take center stage. Hunt is a Chicago native, Yoakum lived there later in life until his death, and the Obama’s, of course, arrived in Washington, D.C. from Illinois.

“We are a major national art museum, but we are Chicago-centric,” Guernsey said. “It's our civic role, but it's also just a proud part of who we are to look to Chicago voices.”

While not a Chicagoan, a mostly-unknown black artist taking center stage as the museum opens with an exhibition alongside El Greco and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, two traditional art history stalwarts, is Malangatana Ngwenya (1936–2011).

“Malangatana: Mozambique Modern” brings together over 40 key paintings and drawings, serving as both the first survey of the artist’s early work since his death and the first solo exhibition of a modern African painter at the Art Institute.

The museum vividly describes his work as, “an aesthetic defined by a dense assembly of figures; phantasmagoric depictions of animals, humans, and supernatural creatures; and a palette of both bright and dark colors.”

“Our exhibition is looking at the early part of his career alongside the backdrop of the social, cultural and political conditions in Mozambique that in some ways he was commentating on,” Felicia Valentine Mings, Academic Curator, Department of Academic Engagement and Research, told Forbes.com. “It’s a tumultuous moment as it was the height of the anti-colonial struggle.”

The exhibition covers the period 1959-1975, 1975 being the year Mozambique was finally granted independence from Portugal, one of the last African nations to realize its freedom from colonial rule.

Malangatana’s unforgettably gruesome figures fall nicely into an art historical through line connecting him to Hieronymus Bosch, Goya and Dali.

“He would have most likely absorbed some of that material while also really looking to his Ronga cultural background and bringing in the monstrous forms, the dense composition, the fantastic themes pulling from culture and folk lore and bringing that together,” Mings said. “It’s really exciting to think about how we can see his work in dialogue with modern African artists who were practicing on the continent at that time as well as European artists who we see resonance with.”

“Malangatana: Mozambique Modern” is on view through November 16.

Richard Hunt’s exhibition is tentatively set for an opening date of September 18, 2020, followed by Bisa Butler on November 14^th. In 2021, both the Joseph Yoakum and Obama portrait exhibits are scheduled to debut in June.