On Saturday, the first day of what, until a week ago, was called Black History Month, my wife, daughter and I visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Yes, you know this place, its grand entrance is reached by the Rocky stairs—the staircase that Sylvester Stallone famously sprints at the end of his street-training montage in the Academy Award winning film, Rocky. *
People like me who spend their entire lives in the Washington, DC area learn an obnoxious bias. We expect our art museums to be free to use like the taxpayer supported Smithsonian Institution we grew up with. The Smithsonian hasn’t yet, but certainly will, attract the cost-cutting attention of the Musk/Trump slash and burn committee. The Smithsonian will either start charging admissions like the thirty-dollar-apiece fee at the Philadelphia Museum of Art or shut down completely. I suspect shut down, because do you have any idea what all that prime real estate lining the National Mall must be worth?
We lucked out. The feature exhibit in Philadelphia was The Time Is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure—a phenomenal collection of paintings, sculptures and multimedia pieces created by twenty-eight contemporary Black artists. The exhibition was broken into three sections, the first being “Double Consciousness,” a reference to W.E.B. Dubois’s late 19th-century social research around the lived experiences of Black people in Philadelphia as a psychological double identity. This phenomenon concerns the tension manifesting in one’s autonomous selfhood with the alienating effects of the ever-present “white gaze.” **
The gallery showed painting after painting exploring dual self-images: those as seen by the painter and/or painting subject, and those as imagined from others (White people) looking in from outside.
Reading Dubois’s description and seeing these paintings unexpectedly hit a nerve for me—a White man in his sixties. I tried to view these paintings from a Black perspective, the artist’s perspective, and see the intended duality. The artist’s self-view of a complex, well-rounded figure: strong and fragile, perfect and flawed, fierce and frightened, intelligent and ignorant, combined with the two-dimensional White gaze layered into the artwork—sometimes depicting negative stereotypes.
Because I’m the most self-centered person alive, the exhibition made me think about how the White gaze lands on me, and how that compares with my own internal self-perception. My boss, new to the area last year, tells me she constantly hears positive things about me in my overwhelmingly White, rural community. “Everyone loves Jeff,” that’s what she always says.
This is at odds with what I think of myself. When I paint myself, with words instead of images, I depict a guy eight-years sober embarrassed by his past; a guy who twitches and grunts the tics of Tourette; a guy anxious he doesn’t meet the standards others set for him. My self-portrait is jagged and broken, the canvas torn.
I don’t see the competent, friendly, intelligent guy making the transition from middle-age into senior-hood. Like the artists in the exhibition, I see a complex individual with a depth belied by my stereotyped shell. Dubois’s Double Consciousness cuts both ways. For me, it offers camouflage, for those artists, contrast.
The timing of the exhibit couldn’t be better. For the past two weeks, I’ve obsessed over the direction of race relations in the United States. As Trump and his cronies whitewash America, I can only imagine the White gaze becoming more critical, more distrusting. This seems a giant step backward in time, a regression into a less enlightened era. Yet, the artists from the exhibit might tell me it’s just more of the same.
* Yes, of course, we ran the Rocky stairs. The three of us even danced around at the top with our fists in the air. Not the hardest stairs I’ve run, but certainly the most public.
** Blurb of The Time Is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure from the Philadelphia Museum of Art website.
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Previously Published on jefftcann.com and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Untitled (Painter) by Kerry James Marshall (photographed by author)
