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This article is part of the Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on the art world stretching boundaries with new artists, new audiences and new technology.
It’s always nice to put a face to a name, and visitors to the new exhibition at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — “Power of the People: Art and Democracy” — will have an opportunity to do just that.
They will be greeted at the entrance by a perhaps-unfamiliar representation of a well-recognized name. You know his method, now meet the man, or at least a roughly 10-inch-tall, marble bust of him cast sometime between 170-195 A.D.
Socrates.
His presence at the Foster Gallery is a reminder that, while this exhibition is being staged during the presidential election season, it is not just about American democracy, and not even modern Western democracy. It tells the story of our representative form of government and how artists have interpreted it.
According to Plato, his student Socrates was skeptical about democracy. He worried about its vulnerability to tyrants, but he still preferred it to tyranny. “His nuanced critical thinking with respect to democracy’s strengths and weaknesses is precisely why I selected him to introduce the exhibit,” said Phoebe Segal, the museum’s Mary Bryce Comstock curator of Greek and Roman art.
The museum’s presentation on the art of democratic societies through the ages is not the only exhibition this fall pegged to the presidential election.
These shows range from the straightforward, like the exhibition at the Grolier Club in Manhattan on Abraham Lincoln and the role that books and printed materials played in his life and career; to civic-minded but decidedly nonpartisan, such as Penn State’s Palmer Museum of Art, which will offer visitors voter registration opportunities, while presenting the exhibition “Politics and Daily Life” (running through Dec. 15), a collection of prints, drawings, photographs and sculpture on political themes from the mid-1800s to the early 2000s; to programming that actually dives into the thick of the contentious politics of America today — as in the series of forums held this fall by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the UCLA School of Law. At the forums, experts debate the role of the Electoral College and the challenges of ensuring a fair and legitimate election.
Other museums are participating in the election, but as spaces for civic engagement. For example, the American Museum of Natural History in New York — specifically the museum’s newest wing, the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education and Innovation — will be an early (Oct. 26-Nov. 3) voting site.
“Art and Democracy” takes a longer, historical view of the democratic system of government. The exhibition is made up of 180 pieces — ceramics, coins, inscriptions, paintings, sculpture, prints, photographs, posters and apparel — the vast majority of them culled from the museum’s collection.
And while it includes artifacts from ancient democracies, the exhibition offers a wide range of art in many forms and from many societies: Paul Revere’s 1770 engraving of the Boston Massacre; a 1970 poster calling for a general strike after the Kent State shootings; a porcelain sundial produced during the French Revolution to promote a new “Republican” calendar; and a contemporary linocut series by the Mexican artist José Antonio Aguirre on the faces of immigration.
“It’s really exciting,” Matthew Teitelbaum, the museum’s director and chief executive, said. “We found things in our collection that people hadn’t thought about in this context.”
Whether they avoid, tiptoe around or fully embrace the heated 2024 presidential election, the responses of American museums raise the kinds of provocative questions Socrates might appreciate:
Should museums venture into politics? Should they function as political actors in their communities?
It’s something many museum directors have given thought to — and with good reason. According to a national 2023 survey of museum-goers, conducted by Wilkening Consulting, a Seattle-based audience research firm, about one out of five Americans said they believed museums should not be political in any way.
Museum officials agree — to an extent.
“We do not take political positions,” says Madeleine Grynsztejn, Pritzker director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. “But being a willful, intentional platform for bridging differences and creating dialogue, and by extension, understanding and empathy, is an essential role museums play.”
While the museum may not take a position, it does recognize an opportunity for timely programming. So when the Democratic convention came to the city in August, the museum was ready.
“We wanted to show up in a certain moment in time, when all lights were on Chicago,” Grynsztejn said.
The museum did so with showcases from Black and L.G.B.T. artists, and an exhibit on how ideas, artwork and artists migrated to America. “This was our way to create a counter narrative to the anti-immigration rhetoric in the election,” she said.
Is that a political statement in itself? Perhaps, but as she pointed out, while museums might remain politically neutral, artists were not tethered by that standard.
“Art changes minds and lives, and points us to the society that we wish to be,” Grynsztein said. “If you wish to call that political, that’s your choice.”
Randall Suffolk, director of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, has chosen to adopt a stance he calls “institutional restraint.”
“The High Museum is not a social justice organization,” Suffolk said. ”But we are an organization that is devoted to making positive social changes within our community by engaging with complex visual culture — meaning, artwork.”
While the museum will be a polling place for Fulton County voters on Nov. 5, it has no current programming related to politics, democracy or the election. But Suffolk draws the distinction between the art museum and the artists. The museum’s neutrality, he said, “doesn’t mean you won’t find objects in our collection where people are very forcefully taking a position in their art.” He added wryly, “We’re a platform for engagement, but the platform is not commenting.”
Others were quite happy to comment — if not about the presidential race, then about politics.
“It’s not an accident,” said Mazy Boroujerdi, curator and an adviser to the David M. Rubenstein Americana Collection, that Rubenstein, working with the Grolier Club, decided to exhibit hundreds of rare Lincoln items from his collection during this election season. Lincoln, said Boroujerdi is “heralded as a statesman not a politician. We’re not buying into that totally. He was also a shrewd and wily politician.”
“Lincoln: His Life in Print” includes material from his presidential campaigns, including the flurry of campaign biographies that were published to introduce the unfamiliar candidate to American voters (each of them featuring various artists’ engraved interpretations of a still clean-shaven Lincoln); election ballots (printed by the political parties then, and essentially advertisements for the candidates) and songbooks, with now obscure musical compositions extolling the man from Kentucky and Illinois (including the “Woodchopper of the West”).
Yet a focus on a political figure from the past — especially one as widely revered as Lincoln — is probably not the kind of content that’s going to prompt angry emails about museums being “political.”
“Certainly, a civil rights museum is going to have a different idea regarding this kind of content, than a children’s museum,” said Susie Wilkening of the Seattle research firm. “A lot of their programming is inherently political, and a lot of their audience self-selects because of that.”
The nearly one in five, her survey found, who don’t want to see politics of any sort, tend to be more conservative, she said. But they also see museums as a respite from the highly charged political society.
“They’re looking to get away from that,” Wilkening said. “They say ‘I’m bombarded with …’ fill in the blank, ‘I go to museums to escape that.’ There’s an assumption on their part that museums should be divorced from these issues, divorced from politics, divorced from their communities. They’re places where people can get mental respite among beautiful things or by stepping back into an idealized past.”
That wouldn’t fly with the pug-nosed figure at the entrance to the Boston museum‘s democracy exhibition. “The unexamined life,” Socrates said, “is not worth living.” In various ways, museums are adding to the lively examination and interpretations of the 2024 presidential election.
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