On either shore of Turtle Island, a few well stocked public houses of art span the coast. To the honor of the East side where the sun rises earliest, the MET museum graces the lip of Grand Central Park like a well placed mole. It is demure, Etruscan against the French Rococo churches and 8 story brutalist structures of a 400 year old city. To the West, the moon is slower to recede, crossing the frigid pacific, swimming in the northern lights. The Seattle art museum is a stone columnar structure among the mirror and glass titans that crust the Coast Salish shore, in a downtown that is only about 150 years old.

What of these catacombs of artifacts, the greatest reflections on our existence? What of their curators, the donations of philanthropic billionaires, the treasures of pillaging archaeologists? How are museums contending with the undeniable consciousness shift that has placed demands upon them, their identities, their presentation, and their ethos? What of their responses?

We are, of course, so fortunate that many hands and soil deposits have protected some evidentiary shrapnel of our struggle to survive. How fortunate we are to walk through halls that house reassurances that dawn always returns after the long nocturnes of our cyclical, Sisyphean travails. That we live in a time that honors this need is some indication that hope is to be had. I believe this. I benefit from this. I travel great distances to be fed from this. However, something is to be desired in the contemporary museum complex: without some self indemnification, our intellect seems like a non-starter. Presented with mummies or ritual masks, displayed in glass and metal and guarded by security, do they think we don't know how these got here? What is the most demure way to contend with these issues, and maintain that dignified air of integrity and authority in which the institution can acknowledge the cracks in its veneer?

I must acknowledge that the MET and the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) have essential differences; the MET contains artifacts from all over the world, housed in these giants wings protected by layers of stone, feet thick. Egyptian architecture, ancient flint stones, oils from anonymous Byzantine monks, to a room full of El Greco, crowns never worn, dripping in emeralds; the MET is a warehouse of archaeologically miraculous acquisitions. SAM, on the other hand, is considerably smaller, is mostly a modern art museum, and has a huge wing of significant Salish objects, from Canoes to Totems to 8′ sculptural stacks of blankets. The reason I compare the two is that both have to contend with the social upheaval, reckoning with authoritarianism and how it appears in institutions, each in its own lane. In some ways, they did, or tried to, and the effect of one or the other is what I want to dissect here.

SAM is an art museum that houses mostly contemporary and post-modern art ranging from sculpture, to video, to social practice. While there are also artifacts(most under 200 years old, besides the european art), they were carefully paired with contemporary work to give context. Among my favorites were a fascinating exhibit of African masks, a brilliantly curated wing of European renaissance art, and a large Native American Art wing with a unique collection of Salish architectural elements, like carved wooden entrances to houses, totem poles, canoes, ans also contemporary sculpture and paintings. One of the unique features of this museum was an afro-futuristic installation near the collection of African Art titled Lessons from the Institute of Empathy. In this room three shamanic figures sit in front of projected lights, and before them, on the floor, is a spot to sit and take them in. To the right a description of how these ordinary beings became shaman(via ritual), and that their task is to survey the museum and assess whether exhibits were curated and designed with proper empathy.

Besides this room, the Shamans of Empathy had small placards throughout the museum providing commentary on displays of the african artifacts, as well as work by black artists. Next to the original placards, these purple plaques offered critical perspectives, questions to ponder, or directions for observation regarding the treatment of the culture that the artifacts were derived from.

We enter museum spaces with our own baggage of prejudice, bias, or bad education. To make for an engaging visit, museums should actually work to inspire us to question these preconceptions, selecting the acheivements of artists and art movements that illustrate the nature of humanity. As our culture evolves and builds on itself, the review process is an egotistical hurdle. One side calls for reckoning while the other demands respect. SAM's institute was able to bridge these two demands with humor, absurdity, and humanity. I appreciated that it wasn't heavy handed, damning commentary, nor was it full of neutralizing language that felt tense, like it was reviewed by a team of legal experts. The placards were dignified, witty, in turn light hearted and empathetic. So much of the way things were written and phrased were in the cadence and tenor of patience, a bestowal of wisdom. It seems rare to find recourse for our miseducation as colonizers that strikes this tone, both dignifying the artist and the viewer.

Beyond this, the museum had some curatorial idiosyncrasies that bordered on absurd (delightfully so). In one room a neon sign glowed over rows of astroturf doormats, and commanded that the viewer kneel and scream. After releasing my own shriek, I waited for museum staff to find and arrest me, but as I exited, the security guards seemed disinterested, though a woman nearby seemed incapable of keeping her thoughts to herself, bemusing aloud that my scream was ‘blood curdling'. The institutional embrace of a participatory art piece, the acquisition of it, and bearing its resultant shrieks…this seemed beyond the call of duty I think a lot of museums would place on themselves. To acquire social practice work is a saintly act. The act of shrieking in a place that is postured as a place for quiet contemplation, where one should be careful, slow, and uncomfortably serious, does break up the monotonous self seriousness of the white walled museum. For a museum to embrace and display something shows its desire to improve, widen, and liberate the viewers experience, at the expense of viewers who preferred the old guard. It called to mind the controversial Colin Kaepernikmoment where he refused to kneel for the American Flag, which he later described as motivated by honoring the lack of protetion for black people in America today.

The European art wing is full of impressive work that seems to have been curated by virtue of its uniqueness. Some of the paintings had large, godlike proportions, or were latent with metaphors and facial expressions that registered actual emotions. On the walls were posed thought provoking questions that brought my mind away from the untouchable air we have been taught to regard works from antiquity. I am not an expert on religious renaissance art by any means, and usually my eyes glaze over when I look at anything pre-rococo, but I spent a lot of my time in this wing.

The collection of contemporary work contained so many of my favorite artists, and a few I have always wanted to view in person. It struck a perfect balance of colorful, loud, and appropriately manufactured, bold, angry, sad, critical, witty, and worldly. The funnest pieces were contemporary artworks out of Africa, which had a vocabulary of unique colors, street signs, vintage cars, and family portraits that were refreshing in that they were culturally idiosyncratic. Missing from their collection were the insincere works of artists like the infamous balloon dog guy, or the other guy who puts animals in tanks. God knows we didn't need another one of those.

Now for the MET: When people talk about the MET, they seem unsure of what to say outside of superlatives. At a loss for words, you understand that the museum inspires awe, and the experience can't be described, but should be experienced yourself. Maybe I went in a little too prepared.

Entering the MET, one goes past a black onyx fountain and up a 54 step staircase of granite, walks between tall grecian columns, and then through a pair of dark wooden double doors. The foyer has a left, right, and center entrance to different wings of the museum. To the right, mummies, tombs, hieroglyphs, recreations of temples with pools simulating the Euphrates, and miniatures abound. Staring at the remains of a person wrapped carefully in linen, safe under a sheet of glass in a room dimly lit and protected from UV rays, I sat with the dead for a moment. Feeling the presence of a body unoccupied for a little under 2,000 years, I had to marvel at the science behind their preservation. The death masks of the four mummies (yes, FOUR) had a byzantine look to them, similar eyes, noses, and ways of depicting the tight curls of their hair., and the beginnings of perspective. The expressions were rendered sensitively, with large eyes and noses turned slightly to the left or right, round cheeks, with small and dapper chins. I remembered that Cleopatra and Mark Antony married and faced scrutiny from the people of Egypt and Rome, respectively, during these peoples lifetime. Beyond this, a room with a heavy stone crypt also contained facsimiles of hieroglyphs from inside of tombs recreated by a team of married british archaeologists eurlogized in the room. I couldn't help but wonder what Egyptians think of this. Are we properly honoring their culture by sharing it, or is it stolen for the Grandeur of the American Museum?

Perhaps most impressively, an entire temple was shipped and rebuilt in a huge, light filled atrium that looked out at Grand Central Park. Before it a pool simulated the river Euphrates. A projector simulated the paintings that adorned the walls millennia ago. Patrons sat on a wall above the river and felt the cool air over the evaporating water, taking in the scene. Children ran and pointed. Europeans struggled over their maps.

I only had enough time for four wings of the museum out of 20: European Paintings, American Art, Egyptian Art, and the Robert Lehman Collection (European early 20th century art in a mezzanine with benches and plants).

The American Art wing spanned neoclassical marble sculpture, a range of paintings that spanned from Romanticism to Realism, stained glass in Art Nouveau and Art Deco Style. Walking through this collection, I realized how many museums model themselves and their collections after what The Met uses as a metric for what is important. The LACMA, the Getty, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, all have a similar collection to describe the past. Of course this isn't strange, its how a canon is created.

As for what is said about America: The valor of its discovery, the hope of its new inhabitants, the hardiness of its laborers, and the innovation of its abstractionists, along side stylistic achievements from the worlds fairs. The MET executed this with stunning landscapes, and I was pleased to see a few paintings that documented artists with a desire to herald Indigenous people and include them in a narrative about the incredible beauty of North American landscapes. I did leave feeling a sense of awe and recognition that America meant something to people, not so long ago. It symbolized rebellion, a successful attempt at escaping the monastic traditions of Europe, and a possibility for something novel. Its landscapes were pristine and its resources didn't belong to aristocrats, they were so plentiful, and there were no orders of ownership ordained by a regional king to control the successive inheritance of anything that held fast to the order of the caste system. Furthermore there were depictions of class struggle and civil war in America that perpetuated images and ideas of heralding anarchists, liberators, white saviors and the like. These portraits defied any art traditions out of Europe, with cartoonishly expressive faces, metaphorical symbols, hyper real landscapes. I think my perspective on America has genuinely been changed by the way it was presented in the eyes of artists that were included in this exhibit, and I particularly enjoyed the high yield of John Singer Sargent paintings.

This wing was where I saw evidence of the MET acknowledging what works on display implied, as there were exploitative sculptures and paintings that the museum would have been remiss, at this point in the cultural conversation, not to address. It turns out it was born of a project not unlike the one at SAM, though comparably much more serious. The project, titled “Native Perspectives”, offered commentary on some 25 works in the museums collection that ranged from direct depictions of mexican and indigenous subjects which happened often to have had the intent to display Americas greatness. A painting of a ceremony in a round house in the Elem Popo territory by American French painter Jules Tavernier titled Jules Tavernier and the Elem Pomo, and a marble sculpture titled “Mexican Girl Dying” by Thomas Crawford stand out as the two strongest examples of the MET” Offering a multiplicity of voices and perspectives,” and “presenting alternative narratives and broaden our understanding of American art and history.” (taken directly from the MET website.) While this is an important step for the MET, the language they use to describe this project feels like something drafted by an attorney who carefully avoiding litigation. To read any of the native perspectives placards please click the link above and scroll through the works presented there. While the placards give patrons of the Museum an essential context for this work and the implicit messages that may have been obscured by the explicit ones, the further cement a demand of the patron. That is, this is a serious institution, to be respected and regarded highly. I can imagine a time when world powers were competing on a stage of aesthetic superiority, when craftsmanship influenced trade and had an impact on the economy. I can imagine a time where culture valued and perpetuated prioritising beauty, valor, honor, and a tradition in the arts. Our world has changed so much in 150 years, and production of high quality goods is relegated to a class that can only be experienced in the cold, steel and marble setting of a museum. The experience of the arts is no longer of something that belongs to you, inherently, by your nationality. Our Americanness is no longer associated with the honor of our artists and their depictions; in this regard an insistance that we commission indigenous people the write narratives of these works that can not represent our honor any longer seems like more of the same. The words of people who try to explain being exploited are of utmost importance, but what about when they are not used constructively? Is a museum displaying placards alongside the art enough? Or can a museum like the MET dare to allow indigenous critiques to critique in a way that enobles them, exhibits their talent, brings them joy, exposure, and highlights their cunning in a post modern contemporary art world? I think of James Luna enclosed in a glass case, immortalising his body in the style of a museum, with a placard desbribing his relatable passtimes and lifestyle; like any american, he liked to drink beer and watch sports. Surely there are artists living today who can engages visitors viscerally, and allow them to do the work of applying their analysis to uncovering the meaning behind exhibiting these kinds of works along side each other?

To be clear, the Native Perspectives project isn't without merit. These palcards are important insights into a nations reckoning with a genocide of its people depicted so wantonly. I just think on behalf of the MET, it was lazy and risk averse.

Considering the ethos of a small art museum like SAM versus one the projects authority like the MET, of course it seems logical for the two museums to go about trying to acknowledge some of the collection as problematic in the ways that they did. No less, one felt less like it was pandering, projecting guilt, or perpetuating a tired narrative of tragedy onto brown people, than the other. SAMS tackling of this objective was done by commissioning a creative team to create an imaginary world that fits nicely into the Afro Futurism movement, which adds an edge to the museums offerings as a forward thinking, innovative, respectable art institution. By comparison, the MET limits these acknowledgements to the American Art wing and fails to aknowledge the unfathomably huge collection of goods that were more often than not, taken without permission.

The European wing had paintings from all the Masters, but my favorite were the mannerist paintings of El Greco, which had a room to themselves interspersed with a few Picassos. I had to rush out the door at the cajoling of the more-abrupt-than-most security and was only able to glance at the Reubens, Rembrandts, Vermeer's, and Caravaggios while other excited tourists shoved me aside to get last minute pictures.

Growing up, I remember how we still talked about rap music as brash, violent, overly sexual, disrespectful to women. Walking through the museum, you recognize these qualities in much of the American and European art, which, it is worth mentioning, was mostly made by men. The dismissal of an art form by black people goes hand in hand with a suppression of black presence in the art canon or Hollywood. I am left noticing that at one time, considering rap a respectable art form was fringe. Just last year, Kendrick Lamaar received a Nobel Prize for his album DAMN for depicting black life in America. Walking through the halls of the METs American Art wing, I see more examples of institutions that work so hard to create a sense of what is considered high minded, worth preservation and canonical elegy, has broken some ground.

The material consequence of our(white peoples) lifestyles, and the resultant guilt, has crept up like a ghostly monocle, blurring our perception. Everything feels tinged by whether it acknowledges the concerns of our time, unless it is one of those timeless works that transcends an epoch of difficulty and reminds us that all things pass. Because of decades of insistence that black and brown people deserve a place in the canon, there is evidence of progress in institutions highly regarded. Barring a nuclear war, global communication among the oppressed and a snowballing contingent of intellectual, queer thinkers can only bring us closer as we demand spaces that don't make us feel like history is being written by propagandists. However small, it is something to smile about.

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