Paul Gauguin's "The Yellow Christ"

1. Terms of Art

You may not like “deaccession” as a word. (Ah, I see my Spell-checker doesn’t like it either, or even recognize it. My Spell-checker suggests “decision,” “recession,” “secession,” “discussion,” or “decisions.” Sorry, Spell-checker, I’m afraid none of those will do, although this is a discussion about a decision. I’ll have to add it. Voila, I’ve just added it. Now my Spell-checker, like the rest of Buffalo, knows a new word.)

Anyway, you may not like it as a word. As a writer and former English major, I don’t much care for it myself. Admittedly, it’s not a beautiful word. It’s arguably even an ugly word (but so is caryatid, which sounds like some kind of chattering, tooth-rotting insect). Like you, I much prefer plain talk. But “deaccession” is not a euphemism, either, as some critics of both the verb and the action it denotes have charged. What it is is a term of art. (Yes, Spell-checker, I do intend that second “is.” Stop interrupting with your red squiggly underscoring!) The term “term of art,” of course, has nothing necessarily to do with art. All trades and professions have their so-called “terms of art,” not just the art trade. “Deaccession” is a term of art used in the museum trade (also by archivists and librarians), and like most terms of art, although it may be unfamiliar to a layperson, and clunky, it has a very precise meaning. The Web site of the American Association of Museums explains the concept thus:

“Museums are caretakers for the cultural, artistic, and scientific heritage of America. [They] hold their collections in trust for the public. Decisions about removing material from a museum’s collections are made with great deliberation and care. There are times when deaccessioning material is the most appropriate step that a museum can take: for example, if the material does not support the institution’s mission…. Many museums give preference to other museums as potential recipients of deaccessioned material. However, with almost 16,000 museums in U.S., it can be difficult for an institution to find the best new home for deaccessioned material. Deaccessioning involves consideration of the museum’s mission, planning, policies, ethics statements, and goals regarding interpretation and research.”

There is no doubt in my mind (nor do I feel the need to argue here) that the Director, curators, Board of Directors, and outside advisors of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery have exercised “great deliberation and care” in their decision to remove certain materials (call them works of art if you like) from its collections. There is no doubt in my mind that deaccessioning these works of art is “the most appropriate step” these caretakers could have taken. The works of art selected for deaccessioning clearly “do not support the institution’s mission” or “goals” as questioned, clarified, and reaffirmed by a lengthy, exhaustive, and broadly inclusive process of strategic planning conducted by the Gallery under its previous Director, a process, by the way, in which I was—literally years ago—invited to participate as a member of Buffalo’s art community, as well as of the Gallery. In short, this decision was not made overnight or hastily, despite the claims of its detractors.

But let’s drop the word if you dislike it so much. By all means let’s use plainer language. Instead of saying they’re “deaccessioning” these works of art, let’s say they’re selling them off, unloading them, jettisoning them (“jettison”: transitive verb, “voluntarily sacrifice cargo to lighten a ship’s load in time of distress”), dumping them even. In the latter two cases we’d be speaking figuratively, of course, since putting items up for auction at Sotheby’s at six- and seven-figure prices is hardly trashing them or casting them into the briny deep, as literal use of the words “dumping” or “jettisoning” would imply. None of these words bothers me in the least. (It goes without saying that the action they denote doesn’t bother me either: I’m all for it, and full speed ahead!) I do not shy away from even their connotations. So call it “dumping” or a “sell-off” (just not a “wholesale self-off,” as one self-anointed “Buffalo Art Keeper” called it at the February 22 hearing of the Community Enrichment Committee of the Erie County Legislature, since the objects in question represent only 3% of the collection, which is hardly “wholesale”). Whatever you want to call it, just get it done already, and move on. I can’t wait. (And while you’re at it, could you tear down the Skyway, build a signature bridge to Canada, and put car traffic back on Main Street downtown? No? Well, OK, then, one bold move at a time. Just keep ‘em coming!)

Joan Miro's "Le Carnival d'Arlequin"

2. “Buffalo Art Keepers”: Ironic, Sad, Infuriating

It’s ironic that the acronym for the name with which the deaccession obstructionists have anointed themselves is BAK (pronounced “back”), since they want to turn back the clock on the Gallery’s purpose and mission, just at the moment when the Gallery has taken steps to move boldly forward into the future in fulfillment of its longstanding but newly reaffirmed and recommitted mission of collecting and exhibiting modern and contemporary art. In fact, BAK seems devoted to a definition of museums in general that is regressive and backward looking (literally): as repositories of treasured antiquities. There are museums (most of them, in fact) whose mission that is, and I’m glad there are. They have their place (including Olean, Toronto, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and NYC). But there are other museums (and Buffalo’s only museum of world art happens to be one of these), whose mission is to introduce, collect, exhibit, interpret, and even, at times, commission new works of art, by the artists

of our time, in the historical context (in this case) of Modernism (with a capital M), the succession of late 19th- and early to mid-20th-century art movements that unfolded concurrent with the Gallery’s founding and development from 1862 to the early 1970s. Since the mid 1970s—when then Director Robert Buck and the curators of the Albright-Knox (including Linda Cathcart, now a dealer in Santa Monica, and Charlotta Kotik, now Chief Curator at the Brooklyn Museum) offered early recognition, support, encouragement, and collaboration to a fledgling Hallwalls and its now internationally celebrated and influential founders—it has kept pace with post-modern developments (with a lowercase p) as well, never so much so since the early 1980s as now, with the arrival of its visionary and fearless new Director, Louis Grachos.

It’s sad (to me) that so many individuals I credited with being thoroughgoing Modernists have gone public with such a regressive and reactionary stand, including several I consider friends and one—UB English professor Marty Pops—an important former teacher of mine and serious critic also of visual art, from Vermeer (17th-century Dutch, none, appropriately, in the collection of the Albright-Knox) to Albert Pinkham Ryder (late 19th-century American, 1847–1917) to Giorgio Morandi (early to mid 20th-century Italian, 1890–1964). Unlike Vermeer, the latter two painters are indeed represented by fine pieces in the Albright-Knox collection: Ryder’s Temple of the Mind (painted before 1885, donated 1918) and Morandi’s Natura Morta Conscatola (painted circa 1957, gift of Mr. & Mrs. Armand Castellani, 1989). Marty can say better than I whether these two works are “masterpieces” (the Ryder oil may well be, this particular Morandi—a pencil drawing with watercolor—probably isn’t), but in any case they are first-rate works from the hands of underappreciated Modern masters, epitomizing both their creators’ bodies of work and their genres (allegorical landscape and modern still life respectively). We’re lucky to have them and to be keeping them.

With Marty, back in the early 1980s, I studied 18th- and 19th-century novels, specifically Gothic novels, and I would never deny the importance (in addition to enjoying reading them for their own sake, of course, which I did) of studying the novels of past centuries in order to understand the precursors and touchstones and inspirations of Modern and contemporary fiction that was the real focus of my critical and creative practice as a graduate student and writer. The same goes for visual art, of course. The difference is that, from a practical standpoint, actually collecting, owning, displaying (or storing), and (no small matter) securing and insuring valuable and even priceless art objects from past centuries (even the 19th and 20th centuries, which the Albright-Knox remains committed to doing) involves considerably more—more space, more staffing, more expense (climate control, special lighting, heightened security, insurance)—than just keeping books in library stacks or stocked on bookstore shelves.

Every library worth its salt should (and can, and does!) have The Castle of Otranto (1764) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Monk (1796) and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1798) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and the Brontë sisters’ Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre (both 1847) on its shelves. But not every museum can (or even should) have art works of the same vintage (let alone older) in its collection. Only Buffalo in all the world has the manuscripts of Huckleberry Finn (at its downtown Central Library) and Finnegans Wake (in the UB Libraries’ Poetry Collection), but every library and bookstore has copies of those books to borrow or buy. Is a lover of Twain or Joyce living in, say, Indianapolis or Green Bay (to name, for the sake of argument, only other small-market NFL cities) culturally deprived because their public libraries can’t display the original manuscripts of those world literary masterpieces as ours can? No, because they can take out and read the books. And if they’re scholars of Twain or Joyce, they’ll just have to come to Buffalo. (After all, Colts and Packers fans do it every time they play the Bills in Orchard Park!)

When Marty Pops was moved to write on Vermeer, he had to leave Buffalo and go where the Vermeers are kept, or at least consult books with large, full-color plates; needless to say, he did both. Even when he wrote on Ryder and Morandi, the single pieces in the Albright-Knox collection—though nice to have close at hand to visit in person from time to time—were undoubtedly not sufficient in themselves: Marty had to go to cities whose museums had more Ryders, and to Italy (specifically Bologna) to see more Morandis, in order to write authoritatively on those two artists, just as a Dutch or Italian or French scholar of Abstract Expressionism or Frank Lloyd Wright—or Gauguin, for that matter!—would at some point have to travel (just like those Twain and Joyce scholars) to Buffalo. And I’m sure he didn’t regret having to venture out of Buffalo to make these cultural pilgrimages. (Truth be told, he has lived large parts of his life in Italy, so he has hardly been deprived of access to classical Roman and Italian Renaissance art by virtue of the Albright-Knox’s necessary neglect of those periods.)

It’s absurd (and, frankly, condescending) of the signatories of the BAK manifesto—all of whom are well traveled (some even émigrés from Europe itself!)—to argue on behalf of all the poor provincial slobs who can’t travel even so far as the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts of St. Bonaventure University, or Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, or Cleveland Museum, or Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, to see art from the periods represented on the Albright-Knox’s deaccession list, and much more of it and better examples than the Albright-Knox has ever had or could ever have. I submit that few (if any) Buffalonians not motivated or interested enough to visit those museums to see past treasures of art and antiquity would be motivated or interested enough to venture inside even the Albright-Knox itself, even if they drive by it every day! People who go to museums at all go to museums a lot, and go out of their way to go to them. The Gallery’s majestic back steps, topped by their anachronistic but beloved colonnade of faux-classical columns and caryatids, would be missed by way more Buffalonians as a backdrop for wedding pictures than will miss the deaccessioned, excuse me, sold-off works that used to dwell within!

Moving on from the literary and art critic of BAK to the poets of BAK, prizewinning and otherwise, whom I truly esteem, I say this: Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820) is one of my favorite poems of all time, an undisputed masterpiece of English verse. No contemporary poet worth his or her salt can call him or herself a poet without knowing and loving that poem. (No contemporary poet can stop with that poem, either, but that’s an argument for another day.) And had there been no Grecian urn for the 25-year-old Keats (he’d be dead a year later) to behold, reflect on, and versify about, we would not have that poem, and English poetry would be the poorer. From what we can gather from its evident effect on Keats, and from its description in the “Ode” itself, that Grecian urn (O Attic shape!…with brede/Of marble men and maidens overwrought”) must really have been something. (On the other hand, it may have been just any old Grecian urn, like Williams’s red wheelbarrow was doubtless just any old red wheelbarrow.) I imagine Keats holding it lovingly in his hands, turning it around, reading (and reading into) the narrative it depicts and which, later, recollecting in tranquility the emotion it has stirred within him, he translates into words. (I grant you that a plate in an art book of Greek antiquities, being but two-dimensional, might not have worked so well, but even that might be selling short the boundlessness of our boy’s Romantic imagination.)

In the opening stanza, Keats himself “humbly” acknowledges (pro forma) that the urn itself “canst…express/A flowery tail more sweetly than our rhyme,” but that’s just false modesty, rhetorical warming up. This ancient urn is important (i.e., more important than others of its kind, or vintage, or from the hand of its maker) because Keats wrote about it. And Keats knew that. Nevertheless, the urn was the inspiration and occasion of this poem, without which it would not be. And without the poem, we would not have these concluding lines:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Those quotes, by the way, are not Bartlett’s. Keats put them in the poem, to indicate that the urn itself is speaking, to the poet, to all of us. Those words are the urn’s message to the world, as interpreted by Keats. The poet gives the last word to the object itself. (Well, not quite the last word; the last words are all the words of Keats’s poem, but you know what I mean.) All of that being said, O Poets of BAK, let’s get real: although every library and every bookstore can (and does) have volumes of Keats, not every museum in every city can (or, more to the point, should) have its own supply of Grecian urns, and maybe (get used to it) not even just one. They take up space, they collect dust. Less facetiously, they must, at great expense, be secured and insured from breakage and theft, and conserved and interpreted by museum professionals who do not work for free. Most importantly of all, that is not this museum’s mission. Period.

Besides what’s ironic and personally saddening, what’s infuriating to me about BAK, who have caused two wholly unwarranted legislative hearings to be held, and are now resorting to litigation (Marty, remember Bleak House?) is this: As is their right, they have spoken out and organized with admirable passion and purpose (albeit misguidedly, in my opinion, as well as misleadingly) to save “precious” antiquities and other sundry objets d’art from conveyance to other communities (hopefully other museums) via auction. But where, I ask you, were they to speak out and organize when living institutions in our community, and therefore living artists (including poets) supported by those organizations (i.e., artists living, trying to make lives, trying to make a living, in Buffalo), were threatened with massive loss of Erie County funding, let alone City of Buffalo funding lost long before that. We asked for their support (them and people like them, our own members.) We tried to rally them. But for the most part they did not stand behind us, certainly not with anything like this level of outspokenness, organization, and visibility. Evidently that threat was not real enough to them, or they didn’t care enough. Evidently, only the fate of “wonderful treasures” like Chinese export porcelain is real to them. We who work in the arts, who live and breathe art every day, were on our own. And the funding was lost, for most of two years. Hallwalls alone lost $102,000 in Erie County Arts & Cultural Funding over those two years (2005–2006). (No thanks to BAK, we got some back this year, no pun intended.)

Presumably, as long as these “wonderful treasures” remained safely in storage within the marble walls, the fate of the museum itself, the living institution, its staff and future operations and exhibitions and educational programs, not to mention all the rest of our organizations (arts centers, galleries, theaters, architectural sites, media arts centers, a literary center, an orchestra, arts education organizations, etc.) was not a concern of theirs. Only the precious artifacts in their (frankly) coffin-like crates in (mostly) darkened storehouses matter to them, if the stark contrast between the non-response then (to the threatened and actual loss of public arts funding) and the inordinate response now (to a long-overdue, well-thought-out, judicious, orderly, and mission-driven deaccessioning) is any indication. All of which reveals to me, at bottom, a profound antipathy toward not only contemporary but even 20th-century art, an antipathy which has (we now see in retrospect) been bubbling below the surface, but which has now erupted into the controversy in which we find ourselves embroiled today.

I’m surprised and disheartened to see such apparent antipathy toward contemporary and even modern art being vomited up (yes, I mean vomited up, by people who have evidently been made sick by contemporary art, but who have heretofore managed to keep it down) in the city I have made my home for half my life (26 years) precisely because I do see Buffalo as a world-renowned hotbed of contemporary visual art, media art, new music, and creative writing, as well as a treasure-trove of Modern architecture, from Sullivan to Wright to the Saarinens. I would not still be living here if I thought otherwise; I would have finished graduate school and moved on long ago, like so many others. (I didn’t come here or stay for the antiquities; no one comes to Buffalo for the antiquities, which would be like Humphrey Bogart’s “Rick” going to Casablanca for the waters.) That the people so contemptuous, dismissive, and afraid (in the sense of risk-averse) of contemporary art are themselves mostly poets, critics, art historians, and the like—even some practicing artists (do you disdain your own art, too?)—is the most disheartening thing of all. If UB art history professor Vance Watrous, who laments in this Sunday’s Buffalo News that this deaccessioning renders the Albright-Knox Art Gallery no longer a teaching resource for him (his specialty is “Greek Art and Archaeology” and “Bronze Age Aegean Art”), was, up to this point, relying on it as a teaching resource in those areas, he was doing his students a grave disservice, since the Gallery’s holdings in those periods have always been thin, haphazardly acquired, and incidental to its core mission. I suspect, therefore, that it’s not so much what the museum is deaccessioning (which it really never had in the first place to any meaningful degree) that Watrous has a problem with, but what it’s keeping and planning to acquire, indeed, what it has always acquired since its inception in 1862 (before Watrous was even born!), which was and is contemporary art, including the once contemporary art now designated historically as “Modern” (“a general term used for most of the artistic production from the late 19th century until approximately the 1970s”—Wikipedia).

Charles Burchfield's "Winter, East Liverpool"

3. Masterpieces & Cultural Diversity

Two final points about which the “Buffalo Art Keepers” are wrong and wronger: First, they talk about all the “masterpieces” being dumped in the deaccessioning, but they fail to give due recognition to the collection’s true masterpieces, the art it’s keeping, those works (mostly paintings, but by no means all) for which the Albright-Knox is justly world renowned. And second, they argue (insincerely, even cynically, it seems to me) that by deaccessioning works of (especially) Pre-Columbian, Asian, South Asian, and African tribal art, the Albright-Knox becomes less “culturally diverse.” Some of my friends in Buffalo’s African-American and Hispanic communities have even bought this rubbish. But let me quickly dispose of both of these red herrings, because they stink.

There may well be a few—maybe even more—true masterpieces amongst the works being sold off—i.e., works produced by masters of their disciplines, no less masterful for being anonymous; works that epitomize their periods, genres, and/or mediums; treasured objects of rare beauty that are simply exquisite in their own right—they just happen to be of the wrong periods for this museum. In fact I hope there are masterpieces among them, the more the better, because they’ll garner higher bids if so, bringing in more dollars for the museum’s new art purchase fund. (That may sound mercenary, which anyone who has ever seen a pay stub of mine will vouch that I am not, but the fact is that if it were just about the money, infinitely more money could be earned by selling off any one of the masterpieces listed below than all the deaccessioned antiquities put together.)

Here, in no particular order, are just some of the true masterpieces remaining in the collection (most but not all on view right now in REMIX The Collection), which not only fit but fulfill, epitomize, and define the museum’s mission, which make its reputation in the world, which bring visitors from the world over to Buffalo just to see them, and of which Buffalonians can be justifiably proud when friends and family visit from out of town, or when, as is frequently the case (more frequently than I would like) the other great museums of the world borrow them temporarily for major exhibitions of their own, their wall labels emblazoned with the name Buffalo, New York:

Seurat’s Study for La Grande Jatte (circa 1884, purchased 1949) and Study for Le Chahut (1889, purchased 1943). Strictly speaking, of course, the much larger La Grand Jatte (a day’s drive away in Chicago at the Art Institute) and Le Chahut (in the Krüller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands) themselves are the masterpieces, but these studies, especially the latter with its relatively large size and blue inner frame painted by the artist in his signature pointillist style, are nonetheless priceless.

Two of the most famous works Gauguin ever painted (maybe the most famous): Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892) and The Yellow Christ (1889). The latter’s reception by the Academy—the “Art Keepers” of their day, or more accurately “Art Keeper-Outers”—was not as the masterpiece we know it to be now, but as crude, garishly colored, and blasphemous. Now neither one of these paintings could be bought for any amount of money that could remotely be raised in Buffalo. I’ll join the Art Keepers myself if they ever try to deaccession these. But why would they?

Delacroix’s small but exemplary Street in Meknes (1832), purchased 1948. (By comparison, the David portrait hanging to the left of it is undistinguished.) Renoir’s Little Blue Nude (circa 1878–79), purchased 1941. Camille Pissarro’s post-impressionist Peasants in the Fields (1890), purchased 1940. Degas’ Mlle Fiocre in the Ballet “La Source” (1866–68) and Portrait of Rose Caron (circa 1885–90), purchased 1943.

Winslow Homer’s Croquet Players (1865), purchased 1941, and Charles Burchfield’s Winter, East Liverpool (1927), purchased 1927.

Picasso’s La Toilette (painted in 1906 when the artist was just 25, acquired in 1926 when he was still just 45, slightly less than halfway through his long life). As we learned at the recent legislative hearings (at least they were good for something!), this painting’s brazen nudity so scandalized the conservative majority of the Albright’s board of directors at the time that they ousted its donor, A. Conger Goodyear, who took his money and fine collector’s eye to NYC, where it was put to good use establishing the then new Museum of Modern Art. Thankfully, the Albright-Knox’s current board (hardly a reckless or radical bunch) has behaved not only responsibly and with due diligence (as all Boards of Directors are legally bound to do) in the current deaccessioning decision, but boldly and progressively as well.

Italian Futurist Giacomo Balla’s famous, epitomizing, and locally justly popular painting Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912), currently on loan somewhere in the world.

(If I never see another, less justifiably local favorite, The Marvelous Sauce, again, it will be too soon, unless it’s on the cover of a cookbook called Marvelous Sauces! To me it’s like Norman Rockwell, only not as loose. For a true masterpiece of food-related painting featuring the color red, see Chaim Soutine’s Carcass of Beef, painted in 1925, acquired in 1939, one of my very favorite paintings in the collection.)

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Portrait of a Woman (1911), purchased 1957. Franz Marc’s The Wolves (Balkan War) (1913), purchased 1951, more relevant than ever in the aftermath of the Bosnian-Serbian conflict of the 1990s.

Brancusi’s exemplary polished bronze sculpture Mademoiselle Pogany (1920), purchased 1927. Georges Braque’s Still Life on a Mantelpiece (circa 1923), purchased in 1941, as good an example as any in the world of the second-most important Cubist (1882–1963). Jean Metzinger’s Dancer in a Café (1912), purchased 1957, a major painting (i.e., masterpiece), equally exemplary, albeit by a lesser Cubist.

Modigliani’s The Servant Girl (1918), purchased 1939, around which an entire exhibition was built. Matisse’s La Musique (1939), purchased 1940. Look closely at those dates. That’s right, it was contemporary art! Whoever could’ve known then that it would still have value today?

Joan Miró’s Woman and Bird in the Night (1945), purchased 1958, and, earlier and even more important, Le Carnival d’Arlequin (1924–25), purchased in 1940. Marc Chagall’s The Flying Fish (1948), purchased 1949. Max Beckmann’s Hotel Lobby, painted in 1950 and purchased in 1950, the same year the artist died. Beckmann is one of my favorite artists, and if you want to see more, I urge you to go to St. Louis. If you’re stuck in Buffalo, like under house arrest or something, this one’s enough.

Jackson Pollock’s Convergence, painted in 1952, when the artist was 40, and purchased in 1956, the year of his untimely death. Mark Rothko’s Orange & Yellow (1956), purchased the same year. (See Matisse, above.) Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic (1953–54), purchased in 1957. Two of Franz Kline’s greatest paintings: New York, NY (1953), purchased in 1956, and Requiem (1958), purchased in 1959. Jasper Johns’ Numbers in Color (1958–59), purchased in 1959. Carl Andre’s Lead-Copper Plain (1969), purchased in 1972. Richard Serra’s gravity-defying steel sculpture Kitty Hawk (1983), purchased in 1991. (Recall that another great Serra work, Tilted Arc, 1981, was torn down in 1989 by roused public opinion of the kind being rallied here now by BAK, or by the demagogue Jimmy Griffin when he bulldozed Billy Lawless’s Green Lightning a few years earlier. Just as Goodyear took his money and went to NYC in the 1920s, Lawless took his art and re-erected it, as it were, in Chicago in the 1980s.)

I could go on, but instead I urge you to visit the Gallery and go through its REMIX The Collection show, where most of the works listed above, and many more, are on view.

In REMIX, besides seeing (or re-seeing) these masterpieces of Modern and late 20th-century art, you will see amazing works of equally impressive (and well chosen) contemporary art by artists working today, a good half of them women, purchased in this century (that would be the 21st), which among other things will demonstrate the growing inclusiveness and cultural diversity of the collection. It’s insulting to imply, as BAK has done in numerous public forums lately, that global cultural diversity only resides in the past, that Latin American art can be satisfactorily represented by Pre-Columbian artifacts (a single stone Aztec figure for Mexico, for example), and not by modern and contemporary Latin American artists; or that Chinese art can be represented by tables full of export porcelain, but not by the recent groundbreaking, mind-blowing, eye-popping blockbuster exhibition of contemporary Chinese art The Wall; or that only African tribal masks (however influential they may have been on Picasso) can represent contemporary African or African-American artistic sensibility, and not all the art constantly being added to the collection by such celebrated contemporary African-American artists as Laylah Ali (a Buffalo-born artist who had her first solo show at Hallwalls), Michael Ray Charles, Robert Colescott, Ellen Gallagher, David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Lorna Simpson, and Kara Walker.

These artists all acknowledge, have been influenced by, and make use of (or work against) the traditions of both their ethnic heritage and all of the western and non-western art that preceded them (exclusion, exploitation, stereotypes, and all), along with contemporary pop culture and mass media. But what the Albright-Knox is interested in, and what I’m interested in, is what these artists are doing with them now, and what they’re going to do next.