The Only Patriotic Art in Museums Is From 50 Years Ago

Grand Rapids — America’s 250th anniversary was marked, for the most part, by shrugged shoulders across the art world. Museums aren’t exactly known for their patriotism these days. In fact, they spend most of the time angrily criticizing the country, without ever presenting a positive lens.

Credit where credit is due—the Grand Rapids Art Museum, at least, mounted a small exhibition of works dealing with themes of Americana.

The only issue is, the works are all from the last big anniversary in 1976. Turns out, that’s as far back as one needs to go to find institutionally accepted artworks that actually engage with America, instead of just bashing it.

It's clever framing, no doubt, to engage with this anniversary by looking toward the last one. It’s also a convenient use of works already in the GRAM’s permanent collection, which are easier to pull from and show than to organize a show of new works.

The exhibition has some pretty famous names from the 1970s. Robert Indiana, Ed Ruscha, Alex Katz. Landmark artists who have long been canonized across the institutional art world, whose works sit in major collections globally.

What’s interesting is that, while there are some subtle (and a few not so subtle) critiques of America, most of these artists simply engaged with American themes on their own terms.

Alex Katz’s lithograph of George Washington, for example, takes the recognizable figure of the man and transmutes it into the artist’s characteristic flat, posterized style. The concept is subtle—the iconic figure transmuted into fine art, aesthetically recontextualized for the viewer to engage with it in a new way.

Joseph Hirsch’s print of the Boston Tea Party is another interesting one, presenting the episode as a frenzied chaotic affair, savage and dark. Rebellion isn’t sunshine and rainbows, it’s men with hatchets violently throwing expensive tea off of a ship.

There’s a subtle patriotism in works like these. It might not be celebratory, but it assumes on a basic level the actual existence of an American nation and culture, with a specific cultural heritage, mutually intelligible to a commonality of viewers.

Most contemporary artists shown in museums these days would rather America didn’t exist at all. They deny the existence of American culture writ large. When they do engage with American cultural themes or icons, it’s to bash them, or literally rip them up.

Foreign cultures, or perceived marginalized communities, are what’s typically glorified within contemporary museum spaces. They are often presented in the context of victimhood and persecution, inherently blaming the nation (and thus the viewer) for a wide variety of sins.

There’s never an attempt to engage with America on its own terms, to actually try to understand or even portray the broader commonality of American culture in any way beyond critique. More than half the country voted for Trump, but the cultural elites of the art institutions would rather remain mystified as to why than engage with works on their level.

Some of the artworks in this exhibition, of course, are critical of America. Ed Ruscha’s America, Her Best Product, for example, presents a pointed critique of American consumerism and product culture.

The work is a chaotic multi-toned lithograph, with colored specks culminating in a central “Made In U.S.A.” Simultaneously, it positions the artwork itself as a consumer product, while slyly critiquing the way that American culture sells itself.

Other works in the show engage with the women’s suffrage movement, or cultural representations of Native Americans. This isn’t an exhibition just waving the flag around.

Yet, within those works, there’s still that simple acknowledgement: America exists, it has a defined culture filled with powerful symbols and archetypal figures, and it’s worth engaging with.

Fifty years later, on the 250th anniversary, America is still here. So is American culture, though our cultural institutions refuse to recognize it. Arguably, it remains our most powerful export.

This is the time for American artists to be American, to embrace our complicated nation in all of its manifest eccentricities. This doesn’t mean abandoning critique, but it does mean embracing its existence.

America isn’t going anywhere, and we’re all better off for it.