The Brooklyn Rail

The organizers of Making Home, the current iteration of the Smithsonian Design Triennial that is on view at the Cooper Hewitt through mid-August, gave their participants a challenging task: first, to explore the fraught concept of “home” across the United States, US Territories, and Tribal Nations; and second, to do so in the context of the museum’s own home, the Carnegie Mansion, an icon of Gilded Age excess and privilege. One project that digs deeply into the assignment is Amie Siegel’s Vues/Views (2024). Installed in the mansion’s Louis XV-inspired drawing room, it consists of a large double-sided screen that seems to float in the center of the low-lit space, with fragments of panoramic wallpaper on one side and a film on the other. The wallpaper, first produced by the French luxury manufacturer Zuber during the nineteenth century, also serves as the film’s protagonist: Siegel tracks its presence in historic homes, plantations, and private clubs across the southern and eastern US and considers how it has helped construct and convey power hierarchies both then and now.

From its inception in 1797, Zuber has specialized in panoramic scenes depicting exotic, picturesque locales, often with a colonial or imperial subtext. These scenes, among them “Eldorado,” “L’Hindustan,” and “Les vues du Brésil,” offered wealthy consumers the fantasy that they might bring the entire world to their doorsteps, while shutting them off from its violent realities—including, in the case of plantation landscapes, those that existed just beyond their walls. Several of these panoramas show up in Siegel’s film, which focuses on a series titled “Les vues d'Amérique du Nord,” first produced in 1834. Partially printed strips of wallpaper from that panorama are affixed to the screen’s opposite side; Siegel found them in a dumpster when she visited the Zuber factory in France.

Designed by the French artist Jean Julien Deltil, “Vues” can still be printed for high-end clients using the original woodblocks, now classified as “historical monuments” in France. The series portrays sweeping vistas of New York Bay, West Point, Boston Harbor, Niagara Falls, and Virginia’s Natural Bridge, and it offers a rose-colored vision of America during the Jacksonian era. By showing the proliferation of “Vues” in a range of historic interiors and homes that continue to be inhabited today, Siegel explores how such panoramic scenes construct partial, one-sided myths about history and national identity whose political and racial inequities persist today. But she also asks us to think about how we choose to maintain these myths, and how we might break or remake them in the present.

The film’s opening shot plunges viewers into the fairy tale slash horror show that is the American dream. As we gaze at an elegant hallway papered with panoramic imagery, a giant hand drops down from the ceiling and begins dusting the stairs with a paintbrush. We realize that we are actually seeing a miniature version of the entrance to Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage, the former president’s home in Nashville, Tennessee, which is part of the Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago. This Lilliputian interior is soon replaced by a shot of the actual hallway it replicates, which fills with a group of Hermitage tourists and their guide. He tells them the wallpaper is based on The Adventures of Telemachus, a didactic French novel that aimed to teach political leaders the virtues of wisdom, justice, and beneficence.

Jackson appreciated the aggrandizing first impression this wallpaper made, and he billed himself as a champion of democracy, a selective vision of freedom founded on the disenfranchisement and dispossession of women, enslaved and free people of color, and Indigenous people. Having recently visited the Hermitage, I can confirm that this flattering effect remains intact—at least for the part of the tour devoted to the main house, which is largely insulated from the tragic tale of the more than three hundred enslaved individuals who lived and labored on the grounds. Their stories are told through surviving outbuildings, archaeological remains, and a cemetery that was only discovered last year.

The paradoxes of Jacksonian democracy are on full display across the wallpaper scenes in Vues/Views. Crowds of people representing different classes, races, and genders gather to watch soldiers marching in formation, sailors unloading cargo, and Native Americans performing a dance. The panoramic landscape proposes a uniquely American vision of infinite possibility, but the portrayal of non-white people, as the historian Jasmine Nichole Cobb has noted, advances narrow-minded stereotypes taken from sources like Edward W. Clay’s Life in Philadelphia (1828–30), a series of racist caricatures that mocked the city’s free Black residents and their adoption of middle-class fashions and mores.

In Siegel’s film, we follow her suspenseful, slow-moving camera with a mounting sense of dread as she takes us on a tour of American interiors where this wallpaper still resides, accompanied by other luxury domestic goods (china, glassware, and silver), related paintings and sculptures of Founding Fathers and Native Americans, and signs of current habitation like family photographs and lounging dogs. The creepy sounds of ticking and chiming clocks, coupled with shots of cracked or decaying wallpaper, convey a sense of time passing but also folding in on itself. Apart from the Hermitage sequence, it’s never made explicit exactly where we are, an effect that adds to the film’s uncanny vibe and its desire to weave together larger narratives about power and taste across the American landscape. We are, however, given clues that skew toward the rural South and the urban East Coast, among them copious Spanish moss and kudzu as well as metropolitan skylines with recognizable landmarks.

One scene depicts an antebellum Virginia plantation known as Eyre Hall, whose identity is divulged via shots of family archives that inventory its furnishings and other “property,” including enslaved individuals. Another shows a former gentleman’s club known as the Pendennis Club in Louisville, Kentucky whose dining rooms are named after Zuber panoramas. The club’s motto, “Nec Tenui Penna,” refers to the “unfailing wings” on which its male members rose to the heights of power and wealth. The exploitation and exclusion that made their ascent possible is trenchantly underscored by Siegel’s footage of Black waiters and groundskeepers as well as women who carefully conserve the wallpaper and arrange furniture while the mostly offscreen male homeowners day trade and talk on the phone.

Amid these scenes of preservation, the artist introduces a few key disruptors through the presence of collaborators in her project. As we observe an empty parlor papered with “Vues,” the house’s door opens and the Sounds of Dyn-O-Mite marching band from Alcorn State, a Historically Black College near Natchez, Mississippi, process through the room. They serve as an animating counterpoint to the wallpaper’s depiction of West Point soldiers, while also trampling on the racial hierarchies of that institution. Later in the film, the artist and Lenape cultural leader Joe Baker appears in a lavish New York City apartment decorated with “Vues” and places cutout images of himself, members of his Lenape community, and ancestors over the scene of Indigenous Americans dancing for white onlookers. His intervention recalls efforts to cover up and contest the wallpaper’s offensive imagery at Brown University and, next door to the Cooper Hewitt, the Spence School, a private all-girls institution that opted to remove it in 2020.

Near the film’s conclusion, the opera singer Davóne Tines shows up (inside a Virginia plantation near where he grew up) and starts to sing. His powerful voice and presence become a fulcrum around which the room’s panorama begins to revolve, as its myths are exposed by his ironic belting of lyrics to American classics like “God Bless America,” “Dixie,” and TLC’s “Waterfalls.” As we continue to hear him offscreen, the camera switches to a shot of the White House’s Diplomatic Reception Room, where Jackie Kennedy had “Vues” installed in 1961. We then follow the camera outside, where it ends on a view of the White House facade. Siegel made the film before last November’s election, but it’s hard not to think about its conflation of past and present, memory and resistance, in light of recent political events. Will the proposed National Garden of American Heroes, if it ever gets off the ground, recall the fantasy of America preserved in “Vues”? Are we trapped in this panoramic nightmare or can we change the view?