This Art Museum Tells Students to Protest the Government

Ann Arbor — The University of Michigan Museum of Art, known as UMMA, is no stranger to courting controversy with their exhibits. From giant phallic sculptures made of garbage to shredded paintings of former presidents, the institution has long seemed more interested in flagrant politics than fine art.

The museum’s latest exhibition, American Sampler: The Art, Language and Legacy of Protest, is perhaps their most overtly political display yet. It’s a brazen attempt to recontextualize the ephemera of left-wing protest movements from the late 1960s as art, with a clear impulse towards prompting the same sort of civic disruption today.

The exhibition displays pamphlets, photographs, posters, documents, video, and all sorts of other propaganda material sourced from U-M’s Labadie collection. Named after Joseph Labadie, an early socialist activist in Michigan, the collection touts itself as one of the oldest and largest collections of radical literature in the world.

Guest curator Julie Ault, in a sprawling wall text at the entrance to the exhibition, writes, “American Sampler is a branching composition of archival materials and art arranged in layered groupings that blur the distinctions between forms of cultural expression.” She further writes that the exhibition “explores how collective and personal histories continue to shape the present and inspire new forms of agency.”

This is curator-speak for: “I’m glorifying left-wing protest movements by putting their pamphlets in an art museum, and pushing today’s students to protest against the government too.”

Curators love to play this game where they offer a coy explanation of an exhibition, in this case about how these are merely “layered groupings” of “archival materials and art” simply placed on the wall to explore “collective and personal histories.” Yet they know better than anyone the power that museum institutions have in granting meaning and legitimacy to the items on their walls.

It’s a clever trick, in a way. By taking a simple pamphlet, for example, the Port Huron Statement, and placing it within a glass vitrine in an art museum, the curator renders it into an aestheticized object, at once disarmed from its ideological meaning, but now sanctioned by the institution.

The Port Huron Statement, of course, was written in Michigan’s own Port Huron by a group called Students for a Democratic Society in 1962. It was the product, in typical socialist fashion, of a bunch of U-M kids who gathered at a UAW summer camp to put down on paper what they thought the working class really needed.

It demanded the abolishment of all social and economic hierarchy in favor of mass direct democracy, rule by an endless series of committees—reminiscent of the early soviets before Lenin and then Stalin centralized power within the communist party.

SDS itself followed the same pattern, of course. At their height, they had 300-plus chapters across American college campuses and were instrumental in organizing the mass 1965 protests against the Vietnam War.

By 1969, the group splintered, with more radical groups like the Weathermen leaving the movement to start their own campaigns of terrorist bombings against the U.S. government.

A flyer from the Yippies “Festival of Life,” their 1968 protest against the Democratic National Convention, is placed nearby. A radical anarchist group led by Abbie Hoffman, the Yippies were in large part responsible for the street violence that broke up the Chicago convention.

Hundreds were injured in street fighting in an incident later known as the Battle for Michigan Avenue, as the Yippies fought with Chicago Police (or “pigs” as they called them) through a cloud of tear gas. The convention had to be surrounded by armed police and barbed wire just to protect the delegates inside.

Documents and video from the Black Panthers are featured prominently as well, another group from the 1960s that eventually spun out into a series of violent incidents and killings that overshadowed their racial activism.

Most of the exhibition centers on the Vietnam War and the protests against it. A slew of propaganda posters ring around the second floor balcony, with the usual lines about soldiers killing babies and such.

All in all, it’s an exhibition that aestheticizes left-wing protest against the government, and the context is so obvious that it slaps you in the face. This isn’t an exhibition protesting the long-ended Vietnam War—it’s protesting the Trump Administration, and pushing students to do the same.

The curators might as well have written in the exhibition text: “Protesting the government is cool, and you should do it too.” That’s the real meaning of this display.

Admittedly, on a purely visual level, many of the documents and posters are indeed aesthetically interesting. Leftists certainly have a knack for graphic design. But we can’t pretend that this is the reason for this show, when it’s so obviously a propagandistic display disguised as a mere historical archive.

There’s a broader hatred here, more than just the left’s current anti-Trump fixations. It’s a hatred of America, going all the way back to the 1960s movements and beyond. A hatred of this country because of its strength and resilience, a rabid desire to tear everything down to the lowest common denominator.

Fortunately, most students could care less about what happens at the campus art museum. The only protestors mustering across the country the last few years are the geriatrics with walkers at the No Kings protests.

Ironically, it’s the same generation who caused so much chaos in the 1960s, just now with grey hair and cripplingly low bone density. Boomers who are too brainwashed by cable news to understand that the current situation is absolutely nothing like Vietnam.

UMMA is careful to stop just shy of actually calling for violence against the government, but the real meaning of this exhibition is plain as day. It’s an insulting distillation of pure anti-American resentment, and not even a clever one at that.