Ira Stoll writes for the Washington Free Beacon about one museum’s questionable approach to the nation’s 250th anniversary.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art—in the city where the Declaration of Independence was drafted and signed—is marking the 250th anniversary of the founding of America with an exhibit that harps on our country’s flaws so obsessively that the wall labels read more like an indictment than a celebration.
Slavery and brutal treatment of Native Americans are both indefensible, and neither should be sanitized out of the American story. Yet rather than finding some sensible middle ground that acknowledges America’s imperfections while also celebrating the 250th, the Philadelphia museum’s show of American art is heavy-handedly accusatory about America.
All the guilt-mongering in the wall label text is a shame, because there are plenty of gorgeous pictures on display, many of them on loan from John S. Middleton, the owner of the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team, and his wife Leigh, from what the New York Times describes as “what is regarded as one of the finest collections of American art in private hands.”
The guilt-mongering begins before you even enter a gallery to start looking at the art. In a hallway on the way into the American art is a land acknowledgment. “The Philadelphia Museum of Art recognizes Philadelphia as part of Lenapehokink, the ancestral homelands of the Lenape peoples. A long history of broken treaties, forced migrations, and fraudulent agreements such as the Walking Purchase of 1737 displaced many of the Lenape from this land. This museum and our staff strive to understand our place within the legacy of colonization….by committing to build a more inclusive and equitable space for all.”
Enter the gallery and a wall label asserts that “The arrival of William Penn in 1682 and the founding of the Pennsylvania colony launched an era of British colonization that dramatically increased the number of European immigrants who encroached on and stole Lenape lands.”
