The Brooklyn Rail

Perhaps the most arresting exchange between two objects in the exhibition Past as Prologue: A Historical Acknowledgment, Part I takes place between a Lilliputian bronze sitting on a pedestal, The Freedman (1862–63) by John Quincy Adams Ward, and his (by comparison) gargantuan and larger-than-life great-grandson, a faceted cardboard construction by the artist Roberto Visani, Cardboard Slave Kit, Freedman (2021). Both works embody the theme of the exhibition—that the kernels of meaning embedded in certain art objects have fruited an ongoing, and consistently more intense, intellectual discourse and bounty than the included nineteenth-century artists would have imagined. Quincy Adams Ward made The Freedman as a visual protest against slavery and in support of the Union cause. Visani, who has been creating a series of do-it-yourself flatpack cardboard slave kits, has created a mechanism for continuous discussion on the matter—not just considering the successes and failures of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights Movement, but also analyzing the commodification of labor and suffering; and he’s done it in a snappy and blunt way that anyone who’s ever sat down to the rainy-day “organized fun” and distractive activity of a jig-saw puzzle or model train set will understand. (Visani even coordinated a construction workshop at the National Academy of Design of his white slave flat pack kit, Cardboard Slave Kit, H Powers Blend (2021), which stands in an adjoining gallery.) As with Quincy Adams Ward and Visani, most of the older images and objects by long-gone National Academicians offered a hopeful sentiment that has matured into situations that remain unresolved, or have even soured.

This is especially the case regarding the works of Albert Bierstadt, Asher Brown Durand, Frederic Edwin Church, and Louis Rémy Mignot, whose glorious renderings of a pristine American utopia from 150 years ago have degraded substantially at the hands of their new colonial custodians—a rebuttal we see in the works of Gamaliel Rodríguez, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho Nations), Sonny Assu (Ligwiłda’xw Kwakwaka’wakw from Wei Wai Kum Nation), Enrique Chagoya, Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and Anglo), Darby Raymond-Overstreet (Diné/Navajo Nation), Mary Miss, and New Red Order collective: Adam Kahlil (Ojibway), Zack Kahlil (Ojibway), and Jackson Polys (Tlingit). The nineteenth-century bucolic and dramatic landscapes abound, and Chief Curator Sara Reisman has presented the exhibition from an artist-friendly standpoint: most of these older works are honest adorations of the natural beauty of the United States, and frequently present Indigenous peoples as the rightful custodians of the land, except for a few buffoonish paeans to the discredited now-villains of history, such as Moseley Isaac Danforth’s undated but mid-nineteenth-century engraving Landing of Columbus (n.d.). The paintings of Durand, Landscape (1850); Bierstadt, On the Sweetwater Near the Devil’s Gate (1860); and Mignot, Sources of the Susquehanna (1857) stand as markers of gorgeously executed work and as perhaps rhapsodic gestures toward a future that went quite badly. Alfred Thomas Agate’s Cocoanut Grove and Temple, Fakaafo (Bowditch Island) (1841) and Church’s Scene Among the Andes (1854) depict far off paradises and straddle both imperial ambitions and healthy curiosity. The responses of contemporary artists in the exhibition are at times equally positive—and witty, as in Chagoya’s boatful of a variety-show of Indigenous characters in Detention at the Border of Language (2019) or Assu’s landscape appropriated from Paul Kane, in which abstracted forms drawn from Indigenous imagery float unabashedly and triumphantly overhead in Home Coming (2014), or Raymond-Overstreet’s photograph of the Southwestern mesas inscribed with Indigenous woven textile patterns. The heavy presence of collage in the service of critique is also present in Mel Chin, Firelei Báez, and Fred Wilson’s contributions. If anything, nineteenth-century landscapes serve as a springboard and welcome historical record for contemporary declarations of autonomy and appropriation. Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds’s monoprint Renew For Every One Dance Water (2018) embraces a universal demand for a better life.

Wit and satire are what shine through in Past as Prologue. Perhaps enlightening us to uncomfortable truths is best accomplished through laughter, through tears. The maquette for Kara Walker’s monument to America from her Tate Turbine Hall commission, Fons Americanus (2019), eschews the dour gravitas of a civic public sculpture, instead choosing to invest her cruel avaricious colonialists and their enslaved workers with a William Hogarth-ian or Honoré Daumier-esque cartoonish exaggeration. It works: we don’t roll our eyes but instead look more carefully. Yet it wouldn’t look the way it does without the formal, backward-gazing neoclassical works of Charles Keck, whose bronze bust of Stonewall Jackson from 1921 is certainly a worthy target of pushback. Annette Lemieux’s pair of black feather-festooned women’s footwear, Boots on the Ground (2022), offers a delightful infusion of camp positioned next to Visani’s pasty nude pale figure Cardboard Slave Kit, H Powers Blend (2021). Even Dread Scott’s recreation of Nat Turner’s rebellion has a strong absurdist element—not in itself, but in the ridiculousness of the pastime of numerous middle class people recreating wars they never fought in and which their ancestors were most likely on the wrong side. Howardena Pindell and Mira Schor aren’t in the mood for humor, but instead lure the eye with muted understatement in Columbus (2020) and Past Future (2020), respectively. Reisman and the National Academy of Design have embarked on a daunting odyssey to glean lessons from past to present in Past as Prologue (the second installment arrives in early February, 2025), but they have chosen the welcome carrot rather than the abhorred stick in order to enlighten us.