photo: lyle ashton harris

SUICIDE THREAT FORCES CLOSURE OF MUSEUM
Race Named As A Major Factor


DETROIT - "It’s suicide," William Hunter let loose on his curatorial staff. The director of  Detroit’s Museum of New Art (MONA) was talking about an exhibition still in the planning stages entitled NIGGER: The American Experience.

With that one loud salvo, the exhibition was dead. The museum was soon to follow. And Hunter was already out the door.

"What this show hoped to address were those very issues that are forcing its closure." explained Jef Bourgeau, exhibition curator. "Which is the power of contemporary art to create real dialogue with its audience, not to simply relate art-historical footnotes or annotations."

By the end of the day, however, Hunter had leaked his anger to the press and cleaned out his desk at the museum. The press in turn had telephoned the owner of MONA’s building and notified her of the situation. Asking for comments, the owner’s response was to order the immediate eviction of the museum.

The odds were always against the exhibit ever happening in this town anyway, where such head-on race issues have been censored two other times in as many years.

First, in 1999, the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) removed Kara Walker’s A Means to an End (1995) a few weeks before its opening when artists and collectors protested its presence. According to the DIA, there was "no clear art-historical perspective" to the work.

Then again, when Art Until Now (a series of 12 installations) was shut down by the same museum just three days into its first installment. The DIA said it closed the exhibit not in response to public outcry, since there was none, but because it "wasn’t willing to support the work" which the museum felt was potentially "offensive to the community." Most notably the work Nigger Toe (1999), which featured a white iconic metaphor for racism - simply a Brazil nut suspended in a glass container -  and which the DIA deemed "unacceptable."

The most recent venture into this contentious territory, NIGGER: The American Experience, like the two previous attempts here, was intended to focus on questions of identity, racism and social injustice in our current culture and in our nation's history. It meant to gather together a handful of uniquely American artists "who deal with shocking images that still lurk in the national subconscious, and whose art exposes the contradictions and tensions of race in America. Issues that have grown up over centuries of insecurities, exploitation, vulnerabilities and lies."

Some of the artists chosen for the show were Kara Walker, Robert Colescott, Murry Depillars, Renee Cox, Michael Ray Charles, Kerry James Marshall, Margo Humphrey, Lyle Ashton Harris and Carrie Mae Weems.