de Young Museum

I'm pretty sure growing up I went to many museums with my family and on school trips, and didn't really understand the critical and analytical role that museums play in displaying history and information, and how curators make deliberate choices about what to highlight and present and how to highlight and present it, with respect to the viewers. Especially as a child, I just accepted museums as the source of knowledge, probably assuming it was clear and objective. So, revisiting the concept of a museum now is really illuminating from a critical perspective.

On that note, I chose to look at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. It is in Golden Gate Park, one of the main museum centers of the city and is part of the circuit of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. My friends and I went there this past spring break and it was my first visit to the museum. It is primarily an art museum, so it does not have a lot of interpretation and analysis to accompany the visual material it presents; it simply has artifacts and paintings and small descriptions for each one, unlike the museums we read about for this week's class. However, the overall narrative the de Young Museum presents is implicit through its use of exhibits.

"American Painting" and "American Decorative Art" present paintings of United States landscape, which are very beautiful, and furnishings from old-fashioned wealthy homes. Most of these items are pretty straightforward, but there is a hanging collection of wood that I interpreted as guns, right next to a small cathedral model made out of bullets and guns, which is an interesting juxtaposition. These two exhibits, which show off "fine art" are directly in contrast with the museum's collection of "African Art", "Art of the Americas", and "Oceanic Art". These three exhibits, which are right near each other and do not make much of a distinction between them, in my opinion, focus on things like masks which emphasize the "tribal" nature of these areas or cultures. There is nothing contemporary, as far as I could tell, from these areas of the world, and nothing is analyzed or contextualized. It is simply presented as exotic and tribal art from three very large and undifferentiated parts of the world ("African art"?). The website explains that many of the pieces were acquired from 18th century exhibitions, allowing Europeans to "discover" these cultures. Unfortunately, this narrative does not seem to have changed all that much, at least in the way the museum presents the contrast between fine, high "American" Western style painting and decorating on the one hand, and figures of masks and ceremonial headwear on the other. Perhaps I am being overly critical and the museum did present a more fair depiction, but that is my impression.