Women Reframe American Landscape - NBMAA, Part 3

So what is the point of this show again?

The pretense of this show - the excuse for yet another Guerrilla Girl sorority occupation of a major American Art museum - is that 19th century women landscape painters are somehow under-exposed under the curatorial framework of Hudson River School artists.  Untangling the poor documentation of the Hudson River School legacy requires also wearing wading boots through the further GG's swamp of obfuscation and convoluted misdirection.  

Who are the Hudson River School?

First understand school as if it were a school of fish.  It is a fluid and highly diluted term for an increasingly growing subset of all American landscape painters regardless of identity politic persuasion. However, money and subliminal political blackmail talk loudly and my earlier comments in Part One and in Part Two speak to my opinions and concerns.

Curatorially and traditionally, prestigious museums attempt to represent the finest examples of the subject(s) they may be exhibiting, researching, or promoting the discovery of. In more recent years, the assault on these institutions has crippled the ability of these institutions to ethically and professionally function.

So it is up to critics such as myself to research and educate patrons of the arts as to the veracity of shows such as these that smell of dubious quality.

Let's narrow candidates who belong on the short list of artists who can be recognizably identified as members of the Hudson River School (HRS) of artists as those listed in Wikipedia's short list. Susie M. Barstow, among other females (not that this show has anything to do with sex!). So that's not a bone of contention.

Something that is argued by the curators of this show however is that Barstow has been historically abused. This drips with irony as Barstow's work constitutes abut half of the third of the show dedicated to 19th century women artists who made art during that period. The aesthetic floggings continue - poor Susie.

So, What's the Geographic and Temporal Context for this Part of the Show?

More precisely, the historically bounded Hudson River School's important activity happens between 1825 and fading by 1875 - a fifty year run though many of the artists lived and worked longer to diminishing or changing interest.

The artists in question begin working not much sooner than 50 years after the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 is still a fresh memory. 

In 1825 there are 24 states in the Union.  In 1875, ten years after the Civil War, there are 37 states in the Union and by 1890 there are 44.

The effects of the Industrial Revolution arrive in America from 1830 to 1840. This includes the proliferation of tourist steamboats out of NY City up the Hudson River. The Catskills become early vacation and tourist destinations for the wealthy. In 1837, the Adirondacks are mapped and by the 1870's routine access to the Adirondacks broadens the geographic scope of these artists.

The temporal sweet spot for the production of HRS artwork by its most famous practitioners is 1830 - 1860.  There's nothing absolute about this as there is an original cohort of artists followed by a second-generation whose work is closely coupled to the HRS profile and prescription. The National Academy of Design becomes a proxy for the HRS artists during this time.

Portable metallic tubes for oil paint are invented in 1841.

Thomas Cole who starts the historically significant HRS landscape painting movement dies in 1848.  

Barstow would have been 12 years old at that time. By 1860, Barstow is 24 and so she is clearly a second generation artist in this category and any claim that she is being marginalized really needs to explain away how she could be confused with the first generation of artists who defined the genre. 

Nine years after Cole's death, in 1857, the 10th Street Studio is opened In New York City. This is where both male and female, famous and wannabe HRS artists establish studios. Cole spent most of his career living and working in Cedar Grove in the Catskills.

A publication called The Crayon is published between 1855 - 1861 and essays in it prescribe very specific instructions for the creation of HRS paintings. By now, innovation within HRS practice is discouraged and rejected.

It should also be noted that landscape painting is unrivaled during these few decades. Google has created a very good timeline of the scope of work.

The NBMAA HRS Collection

 Gallery 5 on the first floor of the museum holds a rich and varied collection of HRS works and it should be made much more obvious that these works complement the WRAL show upstairs.  For grins and giggles let's see what the museum has to say about them.

IMO, this is pretty thin gruel.  It reads like the summary paragraphs of a high school essay assignment.

And its very little help in attempting to ground any of the women artists upstairs. A more detailed timeline and nuanced explanation of likenesses and differences in style would be far more useful considering the richness of the collection.

Where Susie Barstow Fits

The body of work that we get exposed to in the Suzie Barstow section of the show is a sparse sampling.  The majority of pieces do not stand out even as HRS candidate pieces. They are plain, sometimes dull, and not particularly interesting nature snapshots.

The pieces that do distinguish themselves, distinguish themselves in aesthetic sweetness.  Barlow, unlike many of the other artists involved, seems to have developed a color scheme that amplifies the landscape colors.  Rather than sublime the landscape colors pop in both impossible and irresistible ways. Barstow's best work is well-crafted, commercial quality illustration.
 
And, based on the samples exhibited the paintings emulate the HRS look, they never achieve the spirituality that Cole, Church, or others succeeded in projecting.  Nor are her pieces particularly atmospheric (see: Inness or Bridges work in the galleries).  In fact, for Barstow and many of her circle the compositions and problem space are boilerplate, compositionally centered and predictable outdoor scenes.

The scenes consist of a stream or pool of water surrounded by banks of  paper birch trees. Light effects are redundant from one painting to another.  Whatever abstraction exists within the paintings appear to be the byproduct of efficiency and economy rather than experiment or improvisation. 

The larger issue is that much of the pedestrian HRS look and feel is being produced at the end of the century seems to be homogenized. This may speak to the demands of the remaining patrons who had not yet abandoned the genre or it may simply speak to a long tail commercialization that in scarcity required ever sweeter and domestic cosmetic changes.

And the rhetorical descriptions that bookend her work as well as the others is that they were outdoors doing all the same stuff the male artists were doing.  That's true. But is it exceptional for women at the time and the answer is no. In fact one of the accusations about the HRS painters is that their work became a tourist magnet to the area that eventually despoiled the landscape.

In other words, *everybody* who could afford it vacationed or traveled up the Hudson, into the woods, and, because photography was a new and not ubiquitously available, people either sketched or bought prints of the places they visited - a perfect storm for the commercial success of the HRS cohort.

Barstow simply conducted a train the trainer business - teaching teachers the HRS principles and selling the resulting craftwork.

Unpacking the Rise and Fall of the HRS

Thomas Cole and those he influenced most greatly were romanticists first and foremost with a heavy dose of, let's call it Dark Nouveau - darker mythological themes found in the more decorative Art Nouveau genre.

His paintings would include American Indians who were no longer occupying the territory, fairies, Biblical allusions, and dystopian visions of nature trampled by the march of progress. While the GGs argue that there is no Eden and Eden never existed, they disparage the evidence of Cole's art.

Cole and others shared a sacred vision of nature - a religiously colored gaze. Cole is not painting actual representation - not plein air. Sketching Clubs (male, female, and coed) existed because sketching was the more effective and efficient way to capture scenic information.  And these paintings were taken as the best knowledge available for urban populations to actually see and dream the New World.

Cole's paintings are exercises in transcribing his sketches through his religious memory gaze of the, now, composite landscape scene. There is little botanical accuracy involved in his work and he will be criticized for these very reasons much as he is aesthetically valorized for the same reasons. 

In this context, Barstow and her generation of landscape painters explore the same intellectual territory as Cole's cohort with the added advantage that the geography is well documented, the ability to paint plein air is much easier due to tube paints, and the formula for the HRS landscapes is already baked.

For patrons then and now, the accuracy of Barstow's botanical studies, her craft of picture-making, and her understanding of the formula are as good, better, and good enough to admire and love regardless of their historical or intellectual ranking.

The Fall

There's an unfortunate generalization about the demise of the HRS genre and that is that a criticism of the work appearing in a New York newspaper unexpectedly and conclusively diminished the value and prestige associated with the work of these artists.  More truthfully, the piece was a broadside by Impressionist challengers to the status quo.

A second, far more important, complementary barometer of change, can also be found in the NBMAA collections and that is the art of Marie Cassatt whose conversion to Impressionism is compelling and disruptive. The artistic changes in her art signal as well as anyone's the advent and ubiquitous conquest of the French Impressionists and multiple waves of Modern Art that will submerge and swamp any market for previous generations of American art - HRS being no exception.

The stagnation and relatively old-fashioned landscape narrative gives way to figuration at home and aesthetic revolution abroad.  The women exhibited in this show remained forever anchored to this fashion. The as now, American educators are the last to learn or change.

The Pyramid Scheme

HRS paintings are rebounding in value by leaps and bounds.  As with so many mediocre women artists who are disingenuously being promoted as individuals far more significant than they really were or are - buyer beware.  The wake of GG advocacy seems to be a pump and dump aesthetic behavior that really needs some examination.  Museums who should and in many cases do know better are selling off masterworks to acquire work out of the car trunks of less than credible dealers who manufacture and depend on identity politics to leverage their wares.

Barstow has been compared to Jervis McEntee. The art of the two is distinctly different. What is worth noting and comparing is the fact that McEntee is a lesser known HRS artists and that he, like Barstow, continued painting well after the HRS declines in popularity.

His journals deserve research funding more than another GG episode of Mr. Peabody and Sherman rewrite American Art History.

Women Reframe American Landscape - NBMAA, Part 2

 Part two of this review of the Women Frame American Landscape will examine how the Guerrilla Girls character assassination of the Hudson River School white male painters in Part One attempts to justify the inclusion of the Contemporary artists whose relationship to anything having to do with  landscape is a brain teaser in addition to being a challenge to artistically critique.

A summary statement for this division of the show includes the following context.

Landscape Today Claims

The first paragraph can claim that the cohort of Contemporary art solicited for this show are outstanding artists and yet anyone with a set of clear eyes and even a small exposure to art history can see that the actual art objects were either mailed in as an after-thought or thoughtlessly manufactured to satisfy the thirst to justify the political narrative. Nothing here indicates a deep interest in landscape art or even a sustained body of dedicated work to create a new vision of landscape.

The phrase "Reimaging the single point perspective and horizon line" in relation to the politics of any painting is pure nonsense.  The Hudson River School paintings are largely romanticized (atmospheric and :luminous") woodland scenes in which architecturally obvious perspective is absent. And horizon lines are defined by natural ambiguity rather than consistent and uniform horizons.

This word salad is an excuse to include an disproportionately large inkjet print of a digital photo rendering of an I Spy-ish collage of forest floor artifacts by Tenya Marcuse. The wall label description sugar coats it as having something to do with the Hudson Valley where she lives, weaving, and the ecosystem. Oh yeah, something, something... perspective.

Okay. So what?

 The claim that this work "holds economic, historical,-snip- spiritual and personal realities" is no different today than in the nineteenth century. Only the opinions have changed. As an artist, the political identity politics that saturate this work add zero value to its aesthetic contribution to the show.

As I said in Part one, the Guerrilla Girls assertion that they upturn male-dominated histories is nonsense.  They don't have a clue about that history as is obvious by their so-called contribution to the show.

Plesset's piece is cheap appropriation of Thomas Cole's original work.  She turns it into a coloring book learner's copy of the work.  The reason?

The assertion that art historians (who, when, and with what frequency) criticized copies by women more harshly than anyone else smells funny. Copies are rarely original art except with forgeries and the idea that anyone in their right mind might spend the time criticizing copies rather than the originals makes zero sense.

Some reference:

"Sarah Cole (1805-1857)

Sarah Cole was an American landscape painter and the sister of Thomas Cole. Although she did paint some original compositions, many of Sarah Cole’s surviving paintings are copies of her brother’s paintings, including her painting View of Catskill Mountain House. "

 

Does this seem harsh?

Plesset suffers from the same intellectual deficiency that afflicts the Guerrilla Girls. There is very little veracity to the claim that she or they are doing anything artistic at all. They don't do the research or do it so incompetently that that its worthless.  There is no historical recovery in appropriating Sara Cole's need to cash in on her brother's popularity to earn a living. And every woman artist of the time who painted in the Hudson Valley (and there were multitudes) isn't a Hudson River School peer by magical thinking association.

This show, if it illustrates anything, makes clear that rather than adding clarity to art history - a sludge of belligerent advocacy of woman artists whose work needs to be independently promoted on their own merits is instead being shoehorned and distorted into categories they don't belong to and strains credibility.

The Invasion of Private Space

Another repeating and identifiable pattern of political bullying that has become a recognizable trademark of Guerrilla Girl interventions is the act of violating either the space, integrity, or belongings of their intended targets.  This is not an act of virtuous pursuit of truth or anything high-minded. There's a sociopathic fascination with, for lack of a better word, molesting the subject.

Plesset's grooming of Cole's sister's knockoff is intended to cheapen the original as if anyone can manufacture these things with a well articulated grift.

Likewise two another artist's offerings,  Shin and Mattingly, somehow acquired some of Cole's belongings and there's a necrophiliac ambiance to the readymade application of these artifacts  to their art. In both cases there's an implied indifference to the sanctity of their belongings as if being indifferent to the objects entitles the individual to be indifferent to the art  (just another object) and finally indifferent to the history involved.

Whatever spirituality the artist invested in their work can be rationally dismissed.  After all, if the posthumous loot of an artist's estate can be re-appropriated to disparage their reputation then no one will object to a disingenuous tweaking of their historical character.

The Conflation of Landscape with Land Ownership Claims 

The Gorilla Girls sorority is careful to curate shows that are always representative of their enablers. Antone who agrees with their particular viewpoint and will add another iconic letter to their alphabet parade is eagerly enlisted.

And so a number of works by indigenous women is included.

One piece by W. Red Star is an organized collection of signs from the midwest relating to navigating through Native American labeled destinations.  Personally I'm not offended by useful signage and maybe this is a comment that the Hudson River School painters had unobstructed views of the landscape. So true. AND... it takes a woman to really drive this point home!

The art of Jaune Quick To See Smith has become a de facto sidekick of GG sorority infused gallery shows. She represents the politically correct, wise noble native archetype whose virtuous virtues are, well, native.

Her work claims that the existing government, its monetary system, and the rule of law governing property ownership are just an inconvenient social trapping.

Unfortunately, Smith's "critical questions" are, quite honestly, juvenile as is the imagery and exercise of her messaging. She makes a broad unsubstantiated accusation that that all North America is stolen land from cultures whose own claim of ownership is dubious at best or profoundly different from the rest of humanity. Her myopic opinions include the idea that historical confrontations were always maliciously one-sided and then she sugar coats all that in GG sorority virtue slogans [woman, race, commerce, ad nausea].

Your eyes aren't deceiving you.  Diversity metrics require little more than a non-white skin tone and a claim to a cultural charm - in this case beads. The irony is that she charts the United States of America with Western civilization's cartography (hat tip: Columbus). By now it should be obvious and compelling that no trespassing signs were ignored by colonial settlers, money is bad so why bother paying for anything, and don't forget grammar and gender. Got it? Bonus observation - north is north and south is south.

But that's not all.

In this piece North is south and south is north - "a thing of Indian power".  Sorry, I'm not buying it (too soon?). Have a look.

Jaune "Quick to See" enrolled (who knew???) in an Indian tribe and what she sees, in my opinion is a window of opportunity to pass off some crafty art that more appropriately belongs in a 12 x 12' tent at an arts and crafts show than a museum. This is not the stuff of representative fine art produced by Indians - this is just opinionated, self-serving propaganda.

Even the most average middle school child knows that Columbus was the first of many, many previously failed attempts to navigate the Atlantic ocean west to the North American continent.
Navigational errors? Really? In addition to being pathetic art its historically as useful as driftwood.

And confusing the map with the territory is a long learned lesson from far more authoritative sources than Smith. Oh well.

The Kitchen Sink

The rest of the GG sorority contributions are nothing to pay good money to see if you're looking to enjoy or broaden your love of landscape.  It's a mixed bag of tedious videos, climate warnings less effective than no littering signs, and an unimpressive litany of readymade woke, bumpersticker virtue signaling.

As an artist I find the abuse of museum gallery space for this kind of nonsense aesthetically sinful. As a critic I wonder how curators, in good faith, get away with selling this artistic malware. For artists and wishful young artists this set of galleries has nothing positive to be learned and in many cases flaunts a systematic weakness toward political bullying as curatorial practice.

This section of the show abuses the Hudson River School fraternity of painters for being citizens of their time. And by GG sorority word salad definitions the show is an act of violence and bigotry toward long dead historical actors who can no longer accurately contextualize their "lived experiences".

 In part three we'll examine the rest of it.

Women Reframe American Landscape, NBMAA - A Review, Part 1

 The Women Reframe American Landscape exhibition at the New Britain Museum of American Art is yet another in a litany of Guerrilla Girl muggings of vulnerable and weakling American Art institutions. In this case, they co-opt valuable museum wall space with disingenuous curation and intent.

The pretense of this exhibition claims that Suzie M. Barstow is  having a first retrospective (woo hoo!) and the reason is that, well, she provides the plausible pretense that the Ever-Victimized American Woman Artist can be tightly coupled to a male group of painters who became known as the Hudson River School.

The problem with this disingenuous marketing backbone is that Barstow's art constitutes less than half of the show though her work recognizably has something observably having to do with what I hope we can agree upon is landscape.

The lion's share of this show however is a crapscape of identity politic drivel that no legitimate aesthetic gatekeeper for a museum should ever allow this junk pile of nonsense to occupy.  This is not a recentering of women anywhere.  This is a multi-gallery spaced petri dish for the cultivation of the Woke Mind Virus whose anti-intellectual tentacles are strangling fine art appreciation on a global scale.

By now our shared bullshit detectors are all tingling at the same time.  We are are being told straight faced that George Orwell warned you about these weasel words deployed from the mouths of politicians.

Everything the project claims not to attempt, it attempts pathetically to accomplish over and over and over. Let's put a clothespin on our noses and start with the Guerrilla Girls entry.

Yes. Yes. We are led to believe that the GGs"were galvanized by research and statistics" on women *in* the Hudson River School and something about reality. One can only image a bat-signal like beacon shining from the campus art building declaring "Guerrilla Girls Assemble!" - we need a poster!

And so a poster was manufactured. These posters represent one of a number of defamatory techniques that are standard fare for projects such as these. The white male artist(s) who will get mugged need to be softened up patriarchal style. They must be held responsible for 21st century progressive Democrat, politically correct expectations about neo-history. The ritual dry-humping of their previous reputations by the Guerrilla Girls is perfunctory to make the neglected, historically abused, and otherwise victim's victim to look that much more *marginalized*.

In their "poster" they take an axe to the HRS artists.

The allegedly criminal behavior of the Hudson River School painters were that they were an all-white, all-male, who shared a cohort of patrons. Aiiiiieeeeeee! This was about the time of the civil war.

So Edward Mitchell Bannister lived and worked in the Boston, MA/Providence, RI geography not the Hudson.

Robert Duncanson is considered a second-generation member of the Hudson River School (typical of GG "research"). He too might be geographically challenged in having a beer on the Hudson because he worked in Ohio. From Wikipedia before the thought police eliminate the reference: "Inspired by famous American landscape artists like Thomas Cole, Duncanson created renowned landscape paintings and is considered a second generation Hudson River School artist.^["

The Guerrilla Girls successfully use race-baiting to promote the smashing of the patriarchy that is point of these projects.  But their poster couples even more allegations worth deflating.

Again, Guerrilla Girl scholarship is nonexistent in these allegations. The Hudson River School art is more or less a romanticized vision of an American Eden along the river. The *noble indigenous indian* rhetoric is a magical thinking, manufactured historical narrative.  The American continent was not populated by millions of nation park natives who performed any such inhabitation, cultivation, or protection (from what?). 

Indians, like all of the rest of humanity, exercised their culture and governance all over the Americas. the migration of Europeans to the Americas changed that. The unspoken truth is that innumerable wars have been fought on this continent against fellow European governments and against Indian populations. The art of Hudson River School painters has nothing to do with any of that.

Indians were not relocated to the moon.  They relocated to continental reservations where they run casinos, watch TV, and vote.

Nobody is immune to disease.  Sexually transmitted diseases from Indians afflicted Europeans. The likely disease being implied by this photograph is malaria that sickened everyone it afflicted.

The United States judicial system is better place than an art museum to established claims of ownership.  The GG unsubstantiated allegations that these claims have any legitimacy is based on a romantic fantasy that history can be unwound to somehow undo what's done.   To criticize the romanticism of the HRS painters for human progress is a fool's errand but the Guerrilla Girls are promoting this grift as plausible truth.  It's not.  

The photograph used in this indictment poster is by Seneca Ray Stoddard who photographically documented the industrialization of the Hudson not necessarily its eventual degradation at the hands of masses of tourists and commercial arts and crafts landscape painters such as those featured in this show. A show of his photography would be a breath of fresh air here.

And their conclusions about the area becoming a mess is predictably inaccurate as well - profoundly so. A Bill Moyers PBS show on the Hudson documents the GG inaccuracy.

NEFA - Don't Bother Applying If You Are a White Male

This Monday, Dec. 4, 2023 was a NEFA grants and programs deadline to apply for a "Public Art for Spatial Justice" grants. The grants are sizable and are constrained to Massachusetts based artists only (this usually means that all kinds of nod and wink exceptions abound but let's pretend its true).

Website to clarify:

Eligibility Criteria

Eligible

Lead Applicant must be based in Massachusetts.

Lead applicant may a be…

• Community-based anchor organization in Massachusetts, working in collaboration with a particular artist(s); organizations may be a 501c3 or fiscally sponsored
• Massachusetts-based Artist(s). Individual artist applicants must be 18+ years old. Artistic collaborations may be a group of artists informally working together for this particular project, or an artist collective that regularly works together on projects.

Recognizing the intersectionality of identities, we acknowledge that artists may also identify as cultural practitioners, activists, and community-rooted collaborators, and may be self/community-taught, institutionally trained, or a combination of both. All are welcome to apply.

Proposed public art projects must:

• Be located in Massachusetts.
• Engage the public realm and/or be available to the general public to happen upon.
• Cultivate expressions of and/or embodiments of spatial justice through public artmaking. Projects of all artistic disciplines –visual, performative, rooted in ritual, etc.-- are eligible.

Not eligible

• Lead applicants based outside of Massachusetts.
• Proposed projects based outside of Massachusetts.
• Current PASJ grantee (lead applicant) who has not completed their respective grantee report.
• Past PASJ Grantees are not eligible to apply to PASJ again for a full calendar year from completing their grantee report (e.g., If you submit a PASJ grantee report on June 1, 2023 that is approved, you are not eligible to submit a new application for PASJ till June 1, 2024 or after). 

Note: If you are applying for a Collective Imagination for Spatial Justice and a Public Art for Spatial Justice grant in the same grant round, each application will be reviewed independently and funding is not guaranteed (i.e., you may be funded for one but not the other).

So what the hell does any of this have to do with NEFA (the 'NE' presumably representing all New England artists (tho this cohort is rarely if ever the beneficiary of NEFA funding)?

NEFA serves as a social engineering platform to launder Arts funding into the coffers of political operatives who let's face it represent a unitary interest and that is the national DNC Democrats. By monopolizing the grant specifications and definitions, art no longer belongs to artists but to the political puppet masters at NEFA and nationally at the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Arts community was once dedicated to a profession of making art as was the choosing of the artist. Today the most marginalized and underrepresented group of art makers are artists themselves. Social engineers, sociology craftspeople, talent challenged political activists, and money changers far outnumber artists. It is this administrative overhead that poisons the aesthetic experience.

Let's take a look at the "reimagined" specifics:

NEFA (2018 - 2021 strategic plan (who knew?) on Public art:

Vision and Values

Guided by NEFA’s organizational values, articulated in the 2018-2021 strategic plan, NEFA’s vision for our public art programs is rooted in the beliefs that: 

• Public art has the power to shift public culture and change the future.  
  • Public art can help us all see, feel, experience and imagine decolonized and/or indigenized places. These tangible experiences are essential on the journey towards realizing more just futures for our public spaces and public culture.  
• Diverse cultural and artistic expressions of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) are essential to more equitable and vibrant public spaces. 
  • Addressing the intersectionality of spatial justice and racial justice is critical to cultivating a more vibrant public art ecosystem. 
• Context is important in public artmaking.  
  • NEFA aims to support public art that honors the integrity of the people, places, stories, and ideas – past, present, and future - engaged in the artmaking.   
  • Disrupting harmful historic narratives that uphold structural inequities requires understanding context.  
  • Public spaces are not neutral. And public art made in public spaces is not neutral. 
  • Public art practices that reduce people, places and stories to tools for artmaking are harmful.  

NEFA acknowledges that the arts sector has a legacy of benefiting from and perpetuating white privilege, and therefore we are committed to working towards racial justice. 

The Public Art Team at NEFA aims to uphold and hold ourselves accountable to these values through our public art program design and grantmaking.  

Program Goals

Through our public art grantmaking and field-building opportunities NEFA aims to: 

• Invest in artists and the creative process. Foster public art practices that are dynamic and aesthetically impactful, and authentically honor the integrity of the people, places, stories, and ideas that are engaged in the process and presentation of the artmaking. 
• Cultivate artists as civic leaders. Support public art that positions artists to directly inspire, disrupt and engage the public sphere to strive for greater equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility in our public culture.  
• Strengthen a community of practice by fostering partnerships that facilitate knowledge building and sharing to support the evolving field of public art throughout the New England region. 

Does anyone else detect a disconnect between NEFA's values and goals?

• "Public art can help us all see, feel, experience and imagine decolonized and/or indigenized places. These tangible experiences are essential on the journey towards realizing more just futures for our public spaces and public culture. "
   

Art isn't going to "decolonize" anywhere. Fact of the matter is that public art can be separated into two categories: nationally specific art and everything else.  NEFA disingenuously conflates the two to promote an agenda of recrimination and political division.

The United States cohabits a part of North America with tradition Indian populations who are no more indigenous than anyone else born here. And being born here doesn't magically endow anyone with a right to claim more of an insight on nature than the next person. The United States is not decolonizing. And Indigenous places exist within the country, are self-governed, and nobody tells them how to make, present, or sell their art (and they sell a lot of it).

Public art (not nationally specific) must be judged on quality to ensure that it is an aesthetic experience being promoted  regardless of WHO the artist is or WHO they claim to speak for.  But my guess is that NEFA is doing the speaking and aesthetics have nothing to do with any of it.

What about this rancid word salad:

• "Diverse cultural and artistic expressions of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) are essential to more equitable and vibrant public spaces. 

  • Addressing the intersectionality of spatial justice and racial justice is critical to cultivating a more vibrant public art ecosystem."

Here the word justice is used to discriminate against artists who don't belong to these insider curated institutions. As I've documented previously, the organizations that get these grants largely subsidized the recreational funding of elite educational institutions whose diverse constituency is limited to the wealthy and their guests.

The undefinable term, 'equity' is nowhere on the horizon and that ensures that the race-baiters have a never ending supply of grift to mine.  And for artists this means never being granted the opportunity to express a universal or loving ambient artistic vision that doesn't pander to the political narrative.

And, if that's not toxic enough there's always context:

Context is important in public artmaking.  

• NEFA aims to support public art that honors the integrity of the people, places, stories, and ideas – past, present, and future - engaged in the artmaking.   
• Disrupting harmful historic narratives that uphold structural inequities requires understanding context.  
• Public spaces are not neutral. And public art made in public spaces is not neutral. 
• Public art practices that reduce people, places and stories to tools for artmaking are harmful.  

"Disrupting harmful historic narratives" is quite a mouthful. These are code words for distorting the civil commons with subliminal interpretations of political truths.  Again, a conflation of nation and state sponsored art with public space art that represents the aesthetic, shared human experience.

The assertion that "public spaces are not neutral" is  false. Public spaces not only can be neutral but often are in the United States.  Furthermore they are more often diverse, inviting, multi-cultural, and democratically representative than these misguided administrators would have us believe.

And their last bullet point is pure irony. NEFA's entire narrative is an exercise in reducing all artists to political pawns and there's nothing in their literature that implies anything but a predetermined guilt by skin color for male artists and an obvious disinvitation to any artist who isn't  selling myopic, progressive politics.

Funding the National Endowment of the Arts is national suicide. And the NEFA administrators who advocate these hate-filled, discriminatory policies can't be shown the door fast enough. 

Public Art Fraud Sponsored by the NEA

 Federal Arts funding for public art is being subverted unscrupulously.  The sugar-coated rhetoric that advocates and excuses the practice is the well-known, disingenuous Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) rhetoric.

The scam is shamelessly performed in broad daylight. It involves a number of tightly coupled techniques that ensure that local funding for the arts is used as a proxy form of reparations toward local arts organizations that no longer represent artists but instead act as cash cows for exclusively self-serving political action groups. Naturally, the labels these organizations use claim to be arts organizations but the administrations of these organizations has been largely co-opted by individuals whose agendas don't honor the intent of public funding for the arts.

The National Endowment for the Arts is blatantly in need of an auditing of their funding and organizational integrity.  The lack of accountability as to how Arts money is spent and how its regional branches operate is negligent if not criminal. Following the fraudulent practices requires navigating a maze of clever and deceptive techniques that both distort the scam and obfuscate the network of deception involved.

What is "Public Art"?

You may think you know what "public art" means but its definition is the first casualty in the misuse of federal and local funds.

Most Americans will recognize that citizens move freely and often and that neighborhoods, towns, and cities routinely evolve with changing times. And therefore, one requirement of government funded public artwork must be that whatever the artwork is must reflect either the country or a common, shared trajectory that can stand the test of time and cultural change.

Today, that common sense expectation is no longer the case. Arts organizations nationwide are more likely to solicit public arts projects that immediately gratify the politics and cultural footprint of the current (and often temporal) cohort of residents who disproportionately influence, if not control, the arts organization in question.

In fact, the NEA spends federal arts funding on highly biased, advocacy, consulting firms who provide plausible deniability, gamed statistical polls and materials, and academically white-washed cover for the obviously unConstitutional funding behaviors. 

Forecast is one such consulting firm.  Their firm is entirely female yet they claim to represent a shopping cart of social justice goodness. 

This redefinition of public art is often sold as a re-imagining of public art funding as if its a rainbow of new and wonderful fairy dust the public can expect coming its way. 

Contrary to that salesmanship, this redefinition moves the goal posts for artists who hope to participate and share in the public arts spaces.  First, it codifies the bigotry required for the creation of "community" art. In other words if the arts organization that dispenses funding for an arts project insists on a specific identity politic artist profile to complete it, then not just anyone can apply.  Equal opportunity be damned. And quality and long term viability of the piece are compromised at best and reinforce racial and social stereotypes regardless. 

In New England, the New England Foundation for the Arts buries all visual arts grants under a public art subterfuge.

Wait. There's More

And public art's definition isn't the only thing under attack. Traditionally, an artist could apply for a public art commission by submitting a response to a "Request for Proposal" (RFP) that would describe and detail the submission the artist was proposing. 

That was before a a very sneaky and insidious change is being recommended to the application process.  The recommendation is that the RFP be replaced with something called a "Request for Qualification" (RFQ). In other words, the applicants will be selected or eliminated based on WHO the artist is rather than the quality of their proposal. And here, "who" is the equivalent of passing a bigoted litmus test of identity qualifications being judged by out-of-control arts administrators who think social engineering is a legitimate function of their responsibility.

This, just one more way artists are stabbed in the back.

Time for Accountability

The NEA has been off the chain for many years now.  Arts funding is either being diverted to elite college student activity slush funds or being used to pay off local social justice advocates who bum rush arts organizations as easy, territorial marks. In the meantime, nationally, artists of all kinds are not being funded and believe its their fault alone.

When will the NEA and its regional proxies be held accountable?

How NEFA Cripples the Visual Arts and Its Legitimacy

 The oxymoronic New England Foundation for the Arts does virtually nothing to fund or expose the Visual Arts in New England. "That can't be", you say. Wrong.  Wrap your head around the fact of the matter.

Having a Hard Time Getting Funded, Go Away

An argument can be made that just because visual artists are treated like unworthy and unwanted competition for funding consideration in the New England region - there is always the opportunity to apply for grants and funding from the National endowment for the Arts (NEA) directly.  And that's true but missing some critical context.

All of the other regions at least pay lip service to funding the Visual Arts and its aesthetic ecosystem of related practice. Artists who receive even perfunctory recognition at the regional level can also apply nationally and have something in their back pocket as a local reference. NEFA offers no such opportunity.

And for New England artists this means that they are not only competing for national recognition but that they are doing so against artists who already have a foot in the door.  If there is a complete disrespect for one's art at the regional level the why oh why would the NEA give you the time of day?

And While NEFA is at It, F.uck the Galleries Too

The local Art Gallery scene in America consists of seat-of-the-pants funding and all-hands-on-deck volunteerism.  

All of the aforementioned funding recipients have in-house, payrolled, grant writers. Few, if any, galleries and community venues have anyone who qualifies to help (see Rule #1).

The monopoly of dance, theater, and performance funding by NEFA is nothing short of money laundering.

The majority of funding is awarded to first, private school programs, occasionally State programs, and lastly the occasional, politically connected smaller venues. These well-endowed or tax-payer funded  University entertainment venues usually have budgets that fully fund the next year's offerings.  NEA funding is cycled back into their program funding priorities.  This is an obvious windfall for performing arts programs.

Woo hoo! Rule #1: Life. Ain't. Fair.

Pragmatically, that leaves ALL of the Visual Arts, Writing, Conservation, Folk Art, and myriad other galleries left to go fish for funding elsewhere.

For the record, art galleries are where all the platitudes are either practiced or ignored. The word community is synonymous with local art galleries.  Patrons looking for cultural mirrors of their community will find it here or not at all.

Body Blows

The NEFA Resilience Funds that were awarded as a consequence of Covid were feeble at best. The funding largely targeted arts administration. The description of the grants and amounts awarded sound like pissing in the ocean to change the tides.

*TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS!*.  All they want to do is continue stable employment for a diverse full-time staff as well as 18 teaching assistants, provide technology, and reach 400 lower income kids. Ambitious?

The diversity of the staff is irrelevant to receiving funding.  Reaching 400 lower income kids is irrelevant to the funding. The biggest question here is that this example is a copy of numerous such requests.

The obvious need is for a virtual presence from which to broadcast arts programs. Period.  What was required is that NEFA itself would negotiate, fund, and train all New England Galleries with an autonomous web footprint, a paid subscription for social media meeting spaces, and some single source technical assistance. That would have been a cost-effective, ever-so-virtuous solution under the circumstances. Missed opportunity.

Resiliency Revisited

The concept of Disaster Capitalism is ubiquitous these days when natural disaster suddenly and unexpectedly shuffles the deck of normalcy.

NEFA's malfeasance in regard to Visual Arts extends much further. The New England States are home to thousands of historical and socially significant artifacts that range from buildings, functional institutions, burial grounds, and other social treasures.

Extreme weather, misguided natural resource management, and self-inflicted incompetence are compounding the risk that all of these cultural assets are in danger.

Visual Arts funding is one aspect of sustaining a healthy aesthetic infrastructure but promoting healthy gallery practices, restoration and future proofing of all of New England's brittle treasures, creating feedback and fundback loops so that local artists and artisans participate in the funding is critical.

Resiliency funding must be an ongoing program dedicated to the New England gallery infrastructure.  The Private Universities and State Schools should not be skimming these funds away from non-profits and individuals who enrich the region.

So at least one question is, "Why is NEFA so incompetent and mismanaged?"  Administration is not an art.   

American Art, Hostage to the Political Opportunists

 Some Context - Hostage to Whom Exactly?

Professional artists live in a state of near constant precarity. The immediate and long term viability of making a living or even continuing to make a living is always in question.  And so, applying for available grants and other funding opportunities is always an option assuming the artist or artist's assistants can navigate these murky and duplicitous social currents.  In this particular article, I'm constraining the discussion to government funded opportunities.  The broader range of potential funding will be addressed in a future entry.

Government involvement in the Fine Arts aesthetic realm by definition is a surrender of artistic autonomy to a bureaucratically directed, ingrown, unaccountable, and cluelessly tasteless crony appointees. The proof is in the funding pudding that includes, administration of the program, dispensation of funds, and the wholesale incompetence of the program's design.

While the artist suspends their misgivings and doubts their surrender to the system of application and subsequent processing is largely an exercise in self-denial.  The sordid history of the program, if one bothers to look, can be summarized as "Don't go away mad, just go away!" The program is a slush fund for large arts organizations, unscrupulous academic fiscal dippers, incestuous connections, and the shadow suggestions of prima donna influencers.

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

There is occasional evidence of trickle down funding that slips through the cracks but it is loose change compared to the institutional takeaway bag.

Rather than rehash the arguments that are eternally recycled about the waste of actual money, the more important contagion that the National Endowment for the Arts succeeds in infecting into the very framework and self-acknowledgement of Fine Art is the political not-so-subliminal suggestion of what the art must represent either in presentation or in descriptive, documentary genuflection and specificity.

Artist and organizations are put on notice whether they score funding or not that they must and will modify their behavior, their aesthetic advocacy, and their administrative demeanor to conform to the presumptive Big Brother authority of government funding for any consideration. In other words, even the tease of available arts funds is plenty enough to bend the aesthetic arc of creativity in the arts to politically imprint the needy artists attracted to the fiscal honeypot.

The 'F' in NEFA Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means

The Visual Arts Screwing in New England

Forgive the obvious.  The world is changing.

New England, once famous for Yankee Ingenuity has been abused and maliciously plundered by NEFA.  

The Visual Arts, Design and Design Thinking, and the inheritance of Folk Traditions, craftsmanship, and our past artifacts and architecture are the essence and and visionary influence that stimulate growth. (More on all of this in a future article.)

Today the vaudevillian painted faces of Woke, forever navel-gazing, self-traumatized performers are prioritized over vision and ideas that sustain the creative engine of ingenuity. New England is being dumbed-down and entertained into a creative coma. This has got to stop.

Actual Samples of Previously Funded New Work New England Projects

"Young students wear N95 masks and sit at their desks."

and 

"Two folks sit on the floor and caress between two speakers."

and 

"A screen shot of a bunch of images on an iphone. Pictures of a woman dancing in a field in a red wrap."

Huh?

Okay.  If the only qualification for the concept of new is, "I recently pulled this out of my keister" then, sure... "new work". I don't mean to pick on these alone, there's tsunami of this stuff you can look up.

OTOH, aren't there bigger fish to fry when it comes to art, curation, museums, galleries, and so on?  I think so.

Most obviously is that whoever is judging the quality of this stuff is working in a sensory deprivation chamber because we should be hearing a scream by now.  The goal of NEA funding no matter who administers it should be to ratchet up the quality of work being funded and not encourage recursive mediocrity.

That can be fixed by employing individuals who actually know and study art instead of mind numbing, sociological pathologies. Couple that with a feedback loop and some transparency as to the criteria that these works qualified for acceptance and we are that much closer to honest brokerage of the actual art submitted. I'll circle back to transparency before too long.

The Humiliation of Practicing Art

The NEA is in LOVE with the word "equity".  Hugs and kisses to all the artists that embrace equity and repeat the slogan over and over and over in their submissions. MmmmWah! Equity!

This and two handfuls of politically correct platitudes are required of everybody and as James Joyce noted years ago, "H.C.E., here comes everybody!"

Part of the hostage scenario is that artists are being held responsible for social ills and being made human sacrifices for society's real and imagined debt to the masses who think reparation checks are in the mail.

The practice of art has nothing to do with politics.  Let me repeat. The practice of art has nothing to do with politics.  You don't believe it because the NEA and the special interest propaganda advocates have convinced you otherwise.

A cook at a famous restaurant is not intimidated into insuring the equity of the meal purchases and preparation. The cooking staff need not compete with the United Nations. No.

Yet artists are expected and, let's face it, required to salute this Woke whoreshit and somehow incorporate it into their proposals. Makes us all feel so, um, free.

Instead

Instead, after NEFA is metaphorically administratively flushed, something along the lines of a re-imaging of the organization must take place.

First, foremost, and somewhat shockingly the organization must commit itself to art and - gasp - artists. And not just any artists - New England artists, architects, designers, imagineers, art writers, historians, public speakers, museum consultants, gallery rescues, and so on. Yes. All of that and more (More to come).

And Universities with huge endowments, say Wesleyan -

"In fiscal year 2022, Wesleyan's endowment dropped by 4.6%, ending the fiscal period at $1.56 billion. 

This was the first year of losses since fiscal 2016." - need to tap that slush fund (FIRST) long before applying for arts funding.  That drop though, so sad.

And the artists who must be given priority must be New England artists for exposure within the region and in other regions.  Likewise, other regions should be promoting their local artists nationwide.

Another high priority order of business must be transparency, ease of application with a bare minimum of intimidating rhetoric about somebody's latest political itch.

Whatever takes the place of NEFA needs to define equity as the recognition that art is a profession and NOT a social services agency. And it is not a slush fund for insiders.  Administrators need term limits not lifetime life rafts to float downstream for the rest of their lives."  

Add your own ideas to the comments.