Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / While there have always been easily discreditable philistines who dismiss abstract art as a fraud, many leaders in today’s art world marginalize it for other reasons. They see it as anachronistic, irrelevant, boring, or, most unforgivably of all, shackled to its white European origins. It’s not far-fetched to think that these hostile attitudes played a sotto voce role in the sudden decision of Amada Cruz, director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA), in January to cancel its exhibition “Three American Painters: Then and Now,” which had been curated by Eik Kahng, the SBMA’s deputy director and chief curator since 2009, in the works for three years, and scheduled to open in July. Cruz, who assumed the office of director last October, also scotched the show’s catalog, which was about to go to press, and notionally fired Kahng by eliminating her curatorial position.
Kahng holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of California at Berkeley and has several major exhibitions under her belt, including a blockbuster Van Gogh show that was impressively scholarly. This new show was to have been an updated and expanded version of the formalist critic Michael Fried’s bellwether 1965 exhibition “Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella, and Jules Olitski” that debuted at Harvard’s Fogg Museum and went to the then-au courant Pasadena Museum of Art. The SBMA show was conceived as a way to demonstrate how Fried’s ideas about Color Field painting had influenced artists, including photographers, over the past thirty years.
In defense of her decision, Cruz offered the following explanation:
“In reviewing the exhibition plan, the checklist of around 20 living artists and estates slated to be included in the exhibition, and the catalog essays, it was determined that it fell short from a diversity perspective. The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, like other museums of our size, has limited resources. So it was decided to focus our resources elsewhere.”
In an email replying to one of the artist’s inquiries about the cancellation, she wrote:
“As I mentioned, there are many reasons, but mostly I think this project is more suited to an academic institution. We serve a broader audience at the Santa Barbara Museum. I have suggested to Eik [Kahng] that she offer it to a university gallery.”
Cruz also issued a perfunctory apology for “the impact this may have had on those involved, especially Michael Fried, the artists, their estates, lenders and the talented writers who contributed.” The Museum naturally characterized Kahng’s subsequent departure as a “confidential personnel matter” while assuring skeptics (like me) that it was “unrelated to the show itself or its featured artists.” Hyperallergic, which first published news of the cancellation on January 26, also cited an anonymous museum board member as saying there were some concerns about a private letter Fried wrote in 1967 that included, in reference to some Minimalist works, the phrase “faggot sensibility.” If this played a part in the decision, however, Cruz did not say so.
In a joint letter of protest against the cancellation sent to individual SBMA Board members, several artists whose works were slated to be in the exhibition, along with a representative of the Jules Olitski Foundation, summarized the merits of the exhibition as follows:
“The ambition of the show was to facilitate a deeper understanding of a largely neglected moment of high modernism and to open a conversation about the ways in which some of the most celebrated art of the last thirty years – paintings, sculpture, prints, photographs, video – has continued to be invested in the issues raised in that moment though of course in new and surprising ways.”
The cancellation is now a done deal, consigned by most to the category of minor kerfuffle. But it remains a gut punch to abstraction, and the pain lingers with more than a few abstract artists. I’m not a particular fan of Color Field paintings, or Michael Fried’s critical stances. Like any serious abstract artist, though, I remain hungry for shows that plumb abstraction’s history and its meaning. In any case, an abrupt cancellation of any serious scholarly exhibition is a gross violation of a museum’s obligations to the curators, lenders, and writers involved in preparing it, not to mention the museum’s responsibility to visitors to not jerk them around. Moreover, Cruz’s suggestion that Kahng take the show to an “academic” institution is an astonishing denigration of the SBMA itself, implying that she aims to instill in it an anti-intellectual and ahistorical posture.
“Three American Painters: Then and Now” was to include abstract and some non-abstract work that, in its rich color alone, would have been eminently accessible to most viewers, and not especially controversial. Yet for many now in charge, beauty alone no longer suffices to justify an exhibition. Neither does art history. Cruz and the museum’s board members were clearly unmoved by various considered entreaties to see the show as offering a “deeper understanding of a largely neglected moment of high modernism” that would have “opened a conversation” about its continuing impact on artists. If anyone at the SBMA who appreciated abstraction had stepped up, its senior management might have been persuaded to do what museums are supposed to do: bring viewers to the art and reward their intuitive visual perceptions with informed and enlightened exposition, opening their eyes to a world with which they may be unfamiliar but could find edifying. Instead, in an act of abject presumptuousness and condescension, the SBMA assumed its constituency just wouldn’t get it.
The episode epitomizes art gatekeepers’ intensifying inclination to push abstraction into the role of a beefeater standing stiffly in a secluded corner of a raucous party mainly involving postmodernist socio-political art. As one abstract painter sardonically remarked to me after the show was canceled, “Museums want to get people through the door and SBMA concluded this was nothing but another abstract sleeper.” We are a pluralist society, or at least we should be, and good sense and fair play require museums to embrace diversity. Yet to conclude that a diverse community can’t appreciate an exhibition that addresses a particular moment in modern and contemporary art’s development because it is either too “academic” or doesn’t overtly address or embody diversity discourages that community from experiencing one form of beauty and comprehending its history.
About the author: Laurie Fendrich is a professor emerita of fine arts at Hofstra University and a Guggenheim-award-winning painter who writes both art criticism and fiction. She is a member of the organization American Abstract Artists and is represented by Louis Stern Fine Arts in Los Angeles.
Bravo Laurie, well stated, clear and pointed. It would have been a show I would have loved to see. I’m getting tired of diversity exhibits with marginal work. To build on the history of painting and introduce these artists to a younger generation constructs a platform to expand. In today’s world that expansion is limitless.
This sounds at least partially due to the influence of diversity inclusion politics in the art world. Has the museum world not hopped on board the DEI wagon early on and aggressively so? Not that it is not deserved in most cases but I have seen abundant representation of black artists in the last several years in museums and we are richer for it, but this seems like an over reaction for fear of being criticized as favoring “white” artists. Enslaved to fashion?
I was at the Rothko “Paintings on Paper” exhibition at the National Gallery of Art last weekend. The viewers I saw the show with were diverse in many ways, age, ethnicity, class, eye, hair and skin color, gender, etc. I could go on but you get the idea. Unfortunately, presumption and condescension are not so rare in the art world.
So well written, Laurie. And while you expressed no opinion of your own, I can guess where you stand on this unfortunate occurrence: where any sensible observer would.
The new director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art is not making the mark she might think. Her actions are grossly disrespectful to the curator and the artists. What a waste of talent and resources. The public loses immediately. I’m guessing the museum loses in the long run.
I too am sick of diversity driven decisions. Art is art. And I am quite sure Santa Barbare people, smart and sophisticated would have benefited from the original plan. I am most disappointed with the race to the bottom!
Hype-a and Laurie’s words sprite & insiteful/
Guess it would be about time to send Richard Jackson’s
“Bad dog” from the Orange County museum over next door to Santa Barbara museum to share on their wall…
Thanks for this discussion. It is a mistake to presume incompatibility between the projects of abstraction and diversity. Darby English’s 1971: A Year in the Life of Color, Christa Noel Robbins’s Artist As Author, Magnetic Fields: Expanding Abstraction at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the work of Jack Whitten, Mildred Thompson, and many others show that it is untrue, both here and now and historically, that abstraction was only by and for the white male. Yes discourse, market, and institutions were and remain exclusive, but that does not mean that diverse artists have not found abstraction to be a method of intellectual and bodily engagement, a way of encountering politics through perception and action. This is my clumsy way of paraphrasing the arguments of the above-mentioned scholars and artists. Anyone who marginalizes abstraction as stuffy and elitist is out of touch and stuck in the 90s.
I hope someone will mount the exhibition elsewhere, preferably where I can see it! and publish the catalog, too. How very disappointing and shortsighted.
A weird aspect of the SBMA Director’s [[fill in your own adjective here]] decision to cancel the exhibition on the grounds of diversity-lack is that it concerns a *temporary* exhibition–not a forever installation. Presumably, the Museum would have mounted another, different exhibition afterward, and another different one after that, and another different one after that, and…. In other words, plenty of opportunity for diversity.
Thank you for this, Laurie. Unfortunately, everyone loses when quality and history are marginalized in favor of currently trending agendas.
A missed opportunity. Seems this puts this museum on alert in a negative direction. Is this the new director’s idea of leadership?
Laurie’s take on this is, I believe, is accurate, fair, articulate, pointed and long lasting. The sentences that hit home the most for me was her insight into the “reasoning” of what “type” of venue would be best for this exhibition proposed by Cruz, “As I mentioned, there are many reasons, but mostly I think this project is more suited to an academic institution. We serve a broader audience at the Santa Barbara Museum. I have suggested to Eik [Kahng] that she offer it to a university gallery.” This is indeed a slight to SBMA, their curators, staff members, & donors, that the exhibit was far too “intellectual” for their audience. I would suggest more care when trying to “justify” a decision by giving an overt “rip” to the very institution she represents. Thanks Laurie for setting the record straight in your always fair and important manner.
I totally agree with Laurie. Many people seem to be intellectually weak in bending backward to diversity limiting our access to art history.
Outstanding and on point. I teach a continuing education class on Abstraction that fills within days. Art audiences are hungry for this work and it is not fully accepted culturally even in 2024. I also make it a point to use the exclusiveness of its mostly white male, early practitioners to teach post-structuralist concepts as well as antiracism and intersectionality. What a huge opportunity this institution missed. Ignoring the value of contemplation and the notion of universality in an age when people are glued to phones and tribalism and war threaten to burn the planet up is… well it’s pure negligence.
I grew up at a time when these painters (along with Fried) were on everyone’s radar, and I thought some of the work–especially Olitski’s–damn near sublime. I would have loved to have seen this show, or witnessed it from afar, as an important milestone in the history of abstraction, as well as (perhaps) a powerful visual feast. Too bad the SBMA backed down, cowed by ever more annoying “diversity” politics, and thank you, Laurie, for your eloquent defense of the still-vital role of abstract art in our culture.
I work at SBMA, and find this all to be an interesting controversy. This is the first time an SBMA art show has been cancelled since I’ve been working at the museum. Listening to the reasons given and the reasons supposed has been a great source of amusement to me.
As far as any hit to the cause of modern abstract art is concerned? Well, we see.
This may be a tempest in a teapot, but its still a black eye for SBMA. Nothing like underestimating the museum audience, and in the cause of diversity.
Is not ‘diversity’ by its very definition a programme of exhibitions over a given period, each covering a specific and if necessary narrow topic, all of which contributing to a ‘diverse’ dialogue?
I would have loved to have seen this show! I would have driven up from LA to see it. I find the kind of historical perspective it offered really edifying and exciting, and I would have loved to have seen the work. As a sometimes-art writer and philanthropy reporter, I also might have written about it, expanding awareness of the work and the SBMA. The abrupt cancellation sounds disrespectful to so many people, damaging to them and to the reputation of the SBMA, and like a junior-high-level bid to be in the “in crowd” of diversity supporters, executed in a blatantly top-down, non-inclusive, inequitable power display—just the kind of action the DEI movement seeks to end.
Santa Barbara has already seen one of it’s art museums go through a long decline and closing (MCASB). Nice to see SBAM pick up the playbook. Poor executive decision making has real implications. You lose your audience, then your donor support, and eventually you close. As F Scott said, it happens slowly, then all at once.
Look at that fusty catalog cover design. Look at the four white men—two dead, two well into their 80s—at the center of the exhibition concept. Look at the seemingly anachronistic concept that the past has much at all to tell the present. All these point to a ripe opportunity for historical revision and intellectual bravery that any adventuresome director might champion and profit from. Cruz has thrown away her shot.
In 1971 Peter Bradley curated The De Luxe Show in Houston, Texas. This is abstract art, based on “quality” and equality.
I was just in Paris. There was a line around the block to see the Mark Rothko show. When I was . on the plane in transit, a woman told me she was going to Paris to see the Rothko show. So give me a break . Museums should get behind these abstract artists! People want to see these paintings.