05/24/2023 | 26m 46s | Video has closed captioning.
New Jersey’s largest museum established in 1909, The Newark Museum of Art, has more than 130,000 art objects. Today, the museum brings together community for education and social justice events, and recently unveiled its reimagined "Seeing America: 18th & 19th Century" galleries with highlights from their Indigenous, early and modern American works.
Aired: 05/24/23
[bright music] [bright music continues] - [Narrator] It's a museum with a message.
- We have to really lean in to show that the museum is for everyone and that access starts the very first moment that you walk in.
- [Narrator] The largest museum in New Jersey is connecting communities to its collections, building on a history that put art in context.
- The Newark Museum of Art was intended to be of the community, a space where people could come learn something, you know, about their community.
- [Narrator] Now the Newark Museum of Art is opening its doors even wider, celebrating and including the diversity that is Newark and New Jersey.
- I feel like when you are in a space where you can create change, that that's what you should do.
- [Narrator] "Treasures of New Jersey: The Newark Museum of Art."
[bright music continues] [bright music] New Jersey's largest museum, in the state's largest city.
Free to Newark residents, there is something for everyone.
Its collection includes more than 130,000 objects, the 12th largest in the United States.
Its campus now covers four and a half acres.
It even has a planetarium, in keeping with the words engraved over its front doors.
- [Linda] The words outside of the main building, science, art, and industry, inscribed in 1926, are actually still relevant today.
- [Narrator] That message is now meeting 21st-century Newark.
- If we added one thing, we would probably add social justice.
We cannot have all of these beautiful art objects and walk in the museum and walk past someone who is a resident without a home on the street.
The issues around fairness, the issues around equity, race, gender, we have to be engaged in these conversations.
- [Narrator] Linda Harrison became The Newark Museum's eighth director and CEO in January of 2019.
- One of the areas that I noticed that we had to look at evolving is the name of the museum, The Newark Museum.
What we found in our surveys and our data was sharing with us that people were a little confused on what the museum, is it a science museum?
Is it a museum about the history of Newark?
Well, it's both of those things, as well as an education center.
But people were not quite clear that, top of mind, we're a world-class fine arts museum.
- [Narrator] Less than a year after Harrison arrived, The Newark Museum became The Newark Museum of Art in November of 2019, part of a plan to raise the museum's profile.
- When I hear people say The Newark Museum of Art is a hidden jewel, I just about go crazy.
I do not want us to be the hidden jewel.
I want this to be the place that they want to come.
Oh, that's the museum that we're going to, whether I'm in New York or Philadelphia or Connecticut.
I'm going to take the train and pop over and got to see how the Newark Museum of Art is reimagining these galleries that we tend to see look the same all the time.
- [Narrator] Since 2017, Odili Donald Odita's vibrant, multicolored mural, "Gateway," has greeted visitors in the museum's welcome center.
The colors are a nod to the museum's global art that includes a Tibetan Buddhist altar.
It is the centerpiece of the largest collection of Tibetan art in North America.
- This is one of those hidden treasures that we want to really have it breakout and have people come just to see this temple.
[bright music] - [Narrator] The Global Asia exhibit features a small percentage of more than 30,000 artworks from across the region, including masks, miniature sculptures, metalwork, and stonework.
Steps away from the museum's front doors is the Arts of Global Africa Gallery, combining contemporary and historic works.
- This is usually a gallery that is deep in a museum, like, you know, second floor, third floor, in the corner, in the back.
And here it was up front and center.
And I think this was important because we happen to be in a city that's 75, 80% people of color.
And so to have that gallery on this level, very important in sending the signal that we want you to feel comfortable that you are seeing yourselves.
- [Narrator] Works by artists with ties to Newark are prominent throughout the museum, from Willie Cole's "Sole Sitter" to Bisa Butler's "The Warmth of Other Sons."
- I absolutely love this work by Bisa.
You think you're looking at a painting and you don't realize that you're looking at a quilt.
You feel like you almost know this family from what they're wearing, the texture of their skin, and, like, you're there.
[bright music] - [Narrator] From the beginning, The Newark Museum centered its sights on American artists.
- So this is a great piece by Childe Hassam, and Childe Hassam is an American Impressionist, one of the great American landscape painters associated with American Impressionism.
- [Narrator] Tricia Laughlin Bloom is the museum's senior curator of American art.
- From the beginning, The Newark Museum of Art was intended to be of the community, a space where people could come after work and see the fruits of their labor or learn something, you know, about their community.
The Newark Museum of Art is a different kind of institution than many because we don't have an active collection of European art, for instance.
- [Narrator] There are 10,000 American artworks in the collection here, with a rotating selection on view in multiple galleries titled Seeing America.
Among the contemporary treasures is Joseph Stella's "Voice of the City of New York, Interpreted."
- Joseph Stella was an Italian immigrant.
He came to the United States with a real background in Italian futurism.
Stella's possibly the most renowned, almost like a poet of the New York City skyline, and the Brooklyn Bridge is often maybe his most reproduced imagery.
- [Narrator] From its earliest days, The Newark Museum was collecting art that reflected a diverse America.
- [Tricia] In 1914, we started collecting Native American art.
And so we have a really pretty nice collection, about 5,000 objects.
- [Narrator] In the late 1920s, the museum began collecting the work of African-American artists and featuring works that depicted people of color, like Robert Henri's "Portrait of Willie Gee."
- [Tricia] Willie Gee is a newspaper boy who happened to deliver papers to Robert Henri and he captured this stunning portrait.
- [Narrator] Despite its early embrace of living American artists, in 2019, the staff began to reconsider what was missing, particularly in the galleries where 18th and 19th century works were on exhibit.
- It was really not representative of the community.
It was, with the exception of, I will say, three works, no representation of African Americans at all.
So when you look at 80 to 90 works and say, "Something's got to go.
We have to shift the conversation," it's a wonderful challenge.
It was also rather daunting.
- [Narrator] The challenge became reality with the opening of a newly-imagined 18th and 19th century gallery of American art that starts with Indigenous art.
Native American artist Jeffrey Gibson's sculpture, "Come Alive!
I Feel Love," stands at the opening of the Native Artists of North America Gallery, now on the first floor.
From there, visitors see American art from the 17 and 1800s, but with contemporary works added to include a missing history.
- For me, it was walking through and being really honest about what's missing.
You know, what's missing?
It's great to have the Gilded Age.
It's great to have the lure of Europe and the Hudson River School.
But this is a pretty homogenous story, a pretty art historical story from an honest perspective, that's missing the whole story of slavery.
- [Narrator] The curators spent several years planning the reinstallation of historical galleries, consulting community, historians, and experts about what needed to change.
- So Hiram Powers' "The Greek Slave", it was the most famous and popular piece of American sculpture of the 19th century.
It's this kind of very romantic, Victorian, 19th-century way of presenting the whole problem of slavery through a white protagonist.
So we discussed, should "The Greek Slave" move?
Should "The Greek Slave" go into storage perhaps, even though it's one of our great works of art?
And what we decided is that it's a major work, we wanted to keep it where it was, but that it really needed some talk back.
And so we found this pretty wonderful artist named Terence Hammonds.
- [Narrator] The sculpture is now surrounded with Hammonds' Black abolitionist wallpaper.
- [Tricia] I think it's really an intervention.
You've got your heavy hitters like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, but so many more that were brand-new to a lot of us.
[bright music] - [Narrator] Interventions continue throughout the new installation.
Leon Morton's 2022 work, "Freedom Word Portraits", which uses the words of Black abolitionists to create their digital images, joins 18th and 19th century paintings in a section called "Portraits of Power."
And to tell the story of the transatlantic slave trade, curators installed new content.
- We begin by explaining, what is the transatlantic slave trade?
What was the slave for?
What was the Middle Passage?
Those kinds of things that you would expect more often from a history museum.
We have wonderful works by contemporary artists that help express the intensity of those things.
- [Narrator] One of those artists is Adebunmi Gbadebo.
- Our family was enslaved on a plantation in Fort Motte, South Carolina, called True Blue Plantation, which was a former indigo and rice plantation.
It currently grows cotton.
- [Narrator] Her series, "True Blue," incorporates her family's history in artwork that uses paper, rice, cotton, indigo, and hair.
- Black hair is our history.
It carries our DNA.
It's our ancestry.
It's from our body.
It comes from us.
It comes from spaces that we occupy, our bathrooms, our barbershops.
I like to think that the materials I use now are connected to me.
There's a history in these materials that has everything to do with my own ancestry, whether painful or beautiful.
I like to think of these sheets as almost documents, right?
There's one layer of this document that has all information, which is captured in the hair.
It's also the presence of us, like, we're quite literally in this work.
And then there's documents that I've been finding through my own research of True Blue Plantation of wills, of enslavers and maps and names of people listed to be passed down and inherited.
So I guess I was interested in combining all of that to kind of create a new type of document or archive that talked about this space.
[dramatic music] - [Narrator] There are objects from the museum's collection juxtaposed with artworks.
- We had a lot of discussions about whether the whip and the manacles were appropriate for this context and our conclusion was that it's necessary in order to have the conversations.
Some people will not be pleased by it, and other people, I think, will just appreciate having that honesty about the whip.
This is a tool that made the plantation that's known as Mt.
Vernon possible.
- I just feel like The Newark Museum of Art went all the way.
You know, they didn't shy from the pain and the trauma of slavery.
They didn't make it too pretty.
You know, like, it's just, they just went all the way with it.
Like, we're going to bring in the ugly, bring in the pain, bring in the beauty, bring in the skill, bring in the community voices.
They just put it all on the walls.
[bright music] - [Narrator] The Newark Museum's intention, beginning in 1909, was always to challenge visitors to look more carefully at art and to involve the community.
Its founder, John Cotton Dana, flipped the script on what makes a museum.
- Dana was sort of an intellectual gadfly.
I mean, he did all kinds of things.
I think he was what we would call a public intellectual today.
He came in 1902 to be director of the Newark Public Library.
And in 1909, he became director of The Newark Museum.
The museum, for the first 17 years, was on the fourth floor of the Newark Public Library.
- [Narrator] William Peniston retired as The Newark Museum of Art's librarian and archivist in 2021 after 25 years, but still consults on special projects.
- So many museums at that time just catered to the elite.
It was a, you know, it was this temple in the park for the wealthy, cultured, educated classes of America.
And Dana certainly wanted it to be something other than that.
And I think he certainly made it into something other than that.
- [Narrator] Newark in the early 1900s was home to industry and a growing population.
- Charles Cummings, who used to be the city historian of Newark, said, "Newark, you know, it made everything from asbestos to zinc."
So it had all kinds of things.
There was a major shoe manufacturing industry here.
Tiffany had a factory here doing jewelry.
There were other jewelry makers here.
- [Narrator] John Cotton Dana celebrated those industries and the people who worked in them with displays of New Jersey-made products.
- He was very interested in showing what the city made, what the state made.
One of his early exhibits was on the clay industries of Newark and New Jersey.
That included, you know, porcelain and ceramics, recognizing that these everyday objects of good design are everywhere and you should, don't think of art as simply masterpieces of European painting or marble sculptures and that sort of thing.
It is everywhere and you can see it in your daily life.
Textiles of New Jersey and Newark were another exhibit.
He did an exhibit called Nothing Takes the Place of Leather.
- [Narrator] Dana often placed his own thoughts in exhibit cases, sometimes signed with initials everyone in Newark knew.
- J.C.D.
is a quote from John Cotton Dana, "Beauty has no relation to price, rarity, or age."
And it's his slogan for those exhibits that basically say art is all around you, just look for it.
You can find it in the department store.
You can spend a dime or a quarter or 50 cents and get objects of good design for your home.
- [Narrator] The museum moved out of the library and into a grand new building on Washington Street in 1926.
- [William] He established the Junior Museum where students of all ages would come to the museum and participate in their own club activities.
- [Narrator] Junior Museum activities carried on for decades, one of the foundations of the museum's education programs.
By the time of Dana's death in 1929, the museum was growing quickly.
It bought the neighboring 1885 Ballantine House from an insurance company in 1937.
The mansion is now a national historic landmark.
- [William] It has just gotten a restoration, a third restoration, to deal with some real issues with the sandstone and some other things, wear and tear on a building that is almost 140 years old now.
- It is our largest art object and it happens to be one that you can walk in and experience it.
And we want to be able to tell not just the stories of the Ballantines, who were very important to the growth of the city, but now tell the stories of those who helped the Ballantines build that house, keep that house running.
It was the Irish community, the Jewish community, the Black community.
We want to be able to tell those stories as well when people come back to the House.
- [Narrator] Two more buildings acquired during the 20th century are now the North and South Wings, and there are plans to upgrade the sculpture garden and renovate a carriage house and a 1784 stone schoolhouse.
The 21st century Newark Museum of Art and its staff mirror the legacy of John Cotton Dana: to be of the community.
[drums beating] In March of 2023, directly across from the museum's front doors, the city of Newark unveiled a monument to Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman in the square now named for her.
The museum helped add community-based art to the sculpture.
- We literally had tile-making sessions that happened throughout the city of Newark and every single ward that is here in Newark, the South Ward, the North Ward.
It just underscores how much we value the community we serve.
- [Narrator] Darryl Dwayne Walker, began his career at The Newark Museum as an educator, working with students in schools before the changes to the historical American art installation.
- One of the biggest moments for me as an educator, there was a young girl I'll never forget.
We were walking through our early American gallery and in our early American gallery space, she looked at me and she said, "Mr. Darryl, I don't see anybody on these walls that look like me."
And it was an aha moment for me.
It was one of those moments where I had to step back and be like, "You're right.
There are no works here that reflect who you are or look like us."
And so my response to her ultimately was, "Maybe one day you will change that," And she literally smiled and, you know, said, "You're right, I am, I will."
- [Narrator] Just like that young student, artist Adebunmi Gbadebo also has a story to tell about The Newark Museum's programs for children.
Hers begins as a three year old.
- The beginning of art for me started at The Newark Museum.
My mom was a single mother and was looking for kind of things to keep me busy and engaged, and they had classes for toddlers and their parents to make art.
So every Saturday, we would come here and spend the day and make art in the classrooms, in the galleries.
- [Narrator] She had one of her first artistic aha moments as a middle schooler in the Global Africa gallery.
- The first time I saw an El Anatsui work, his kind of tapestry made out of bottle caps, it stopped me in my tracks.
It really opened my world to the possibilities of what constitutes art, what materials can become art.
[bright music] - The shape there.
- [Narrator] Young artists today get hands-on experience with activities scheduled almost every weekend.
During the daytime, weekends have a family feel with activities from robotics to drawing and painting, and rotating sky shows in the 50-seat planetarium.
[bright music] Following in the footsteps of its founder, who set up a Junior Museum and urged young people to study science, today's museum combines science with technology and art in multiple exhibits called Animal Kingdom.
- The cool thing about this exhibition, ultimately, is that you're able to create artwork.
They're able to create fish or create animals and then they're able to insert them into the immersive art that scrolls across the wall.
- Right there, Grandma.
- Ah!
- [Darryl] It's like walking through a meta digital aquarium.
- [Narrator] The Sketch Aquarium is one of the most popular places in the museum.
And popular might be an understatement when The Newark Museum of Art opens its doors to events and programs the community helps to choose.
[crowd chanting indistinctly] [drums beating] - We've had choirs, we've had tap dancers in the museum space.
I know when you're thinking about the tapping and the stomping and, you know, around, you know, millions, or, I should say, billion dollars worth of works of art, you're a little, you know, maybe leery about programing that we are coming up with, but we're disruptors, right?
[drums beating] I feel like when you are in a space where you can create change, that that's what you should do.
[drums beating] Honestly, museums in a lot of ways historically have been known to sort of push away the community that they're embedded in simply because they are aspiring to an elitist group of people.
- [Narrator] The Newark Museum of Art plans to continue to turn its gaze outward to engage communities.
- So the history of Newark and the history of the museum I think run parallel trajectories, right?
And when I think about the founder of our museum and his intentions on creating a space that was community-centric, despite the growing pains of museums as a whole and even the growing pains that Newark itself has experienced, that part of it being a welcoming space has not changed.
I think we're always going to be in a space to where we can continue to evolve and continue to be just as dynamic as we are today.
- Good job, there you go.
[drums beating] - Museums, we must be relevant if we're going to be open.
People have walked past museums, and they have walked past this museum.
Oh, it must be for someone else.
It's not for me.
We have to really lean in to show that the museum is for everyone and that access starts the very first moment that you walk in.
[bright music] - [Narrator] Each evening since 2021, the museum's historic front windows have offered a welcoming glow as Philip K. Smith III's "Three Half Lozenges" installation reaches out to passersby.
The Newark Museum of Art is looking beyond its 115th anniversary in 2024 with plans for more art, more events, and more visibility, continuing what they are calling an era of transformation.
- [Linda] For us, seeing people in the museum every day, being able to even expand our hours because we are just that deeply embedded as an anchor here in the city and in the region, that's my goal, and our vision of being a destination museum really hits its stride.
[bright music continues] [bright music] [bright music continues] [bright music continues]
