Baltimore Museum of Art Does Another Ho-Hum Race Show

Black Earth Rising seasons oppression with the climate folly — the museum can do better.

After my dear friend Julia Alexander’s memorial service in Baltimore in late May, I visited the Walters Art Museum, which she directed for eleven years, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. I hadn’t been to the BMA in a few years but wrote about its full-blown embrace of woke ideology around 2020 and its subsequent scandals as it tried to use money from the sale of art in its collection to pay for its insane DEI program. An uprising among donors nixed the art-for-cash scam; Chris Bedford, the director at the time, fled to the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, now on life support; and sneaky trustees quit, whether ashamed or not, I don’t know.

I always enjoy visiting the BMA, which has very good European Old Masters, superb mosaics from Antioch, and hundreds of works by Matisse collected by two Baltimore sisters. Its American art is good, too, with galleries redone in 2022 to display paintings, silver, furniture, sculpture, and stained glass together. The building is a John Russell Pope gem from the 1920s, stately and commodious. The BMA also has a lovely sculpture garden. Baltimore, for all its problems, is a unique place with lots of spirit and no slouch when it comes to high culture.

Alas, the woke mindset, like a colony of cockroaches, doesn’t die easily, or with dignity. Black Earth Rising is the BMA’s new exhibition. It explores connections between colonialism, whatever that means, and the climate crisis embraced only by people who are ignorant, naïve, hubristic, delusional, or on the cult payroll. I’d call it the worst exhibition I’ve ever seen except it’s too small, only three or four galleries, minimizing the assault on common sense, aesthetics, scholarship, and the soul. The High Museum’s What Is Left Unspoken, Love, which I reviewed in 2022, still gets the poisoned-clunker prize.

In a way, I wasn’t surprised. The BMA and BLM are on the same page, though I wouldn’t say the museum is an institutional resentment-and-revenge pimp. Bedford’s successor, Asma Naeem, was his chief curator and on the same page. And Baltimore’s tony neighborhoods and its suburbs have more white, guilty Champagne socialists than the Chesapeake Bay has crabs. They’re true believers.

Putting aside the exhibition’s themes, Black Earth Rising isn’t original, and the art’s mediocre, not bad but banal. It’s another dollop of what’s served at each and every museum hosting the Victim Olympics — insistent, laborious, and rote. Taking it on the chin are racism, capitalism, global commerce, forced migration, environmental rape, exploitation, the Industrial Revolution, those wicked Victorians, Columbus, settler colonialists everywhere, enslavers and erasers, the patriarchy, Jim Crow, drill, baby, drill, and the baddies who killed the buffaloes. If only Eden still existed, Indigenous Eden, that is, everything would be delightful, delicious, delovely. The show is so old hat. It’s predictable and formulaic. Do the curators there know how to do anything else?

The artists are Native American, Latin American, or from the African diaspora, and the art is from our era. The show is based on a book called Black Earth Rising, by Ekow Eshun, a black British writer, journalist, and museum director, with essays by a professor at Princeton and a scholar who works on queer ecology — I’m not sure what that is — and decolonial theory, which, in practice, means we’ll all be living in caves, hunting and gathering and old at 30. I read the book. It’s all about intersectionality under the relentless sun, more scorching each day. The art illustrating the book is mostly good. Dawoud Bey, Kara Walker, Deborah Jack, Dawit Petros, Ellen Gallagher, and Archie Moore are fine artists, which means, insofar as the BMA’s project is concerned, I want to engage with their work.

None of these artists made it to the BMA’s galleries. Yinka Shonibare’s four sculptures from 2020 — Air Kid, Fire Kid, Earth Kid, and Water Kid — are hokey, each with features so cryptic that we’d have no clue where the artist is going without the long label explaining it all. The figures wear garments made from a popular Dutch 19th-century fabric based on ancient Indonesian textiles — colonialism and illicit appropriation read their heads and toss their curls — and the 19th-century fabric reminds us of the Industrial Revolution, which caused the climate crisis. Huh? Did Rube Goldberg pick the art?

Todd Gray’s Present History (1619), from 2019, is a big assemblage juxtaposing his photographs of African landscapes with photos of European formal gardens created from wealth made from the Atlantic slave trade. It’s big and obvious and reeks of the 1619 Project, so I immediately felt manipulated by a gimmick. Gray’s an artist-activist who specializes in race and colonialism, but in the 1980s he was Michael Jackson’s personal photographer, so he’s good with the iconography of celebrity but also of race. Present History (1619) lacks depth and elasticity. It’s a one-note work of art.

Juane Quick-to-See Smith’s Echo Map I, from 2000, is a collage map of the United States, with state names replaced by Spanish and French words for “hello,” referring to the gringos’ violent erasure of Native tribes and identities. It’s too one-dimensional. Alberta Whittle’s video from 2019 shows scenes from the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian, “the most powerful storm to hit the Bahamas since records began,” its ferocity supposedly caused by the manmade climate crisis. Memo to the BMA: Records began a hundred years ago. Accurate satellite records date to around 1970. The Earth is 4 billion years old.

Alejandro Piñeiro Bello’s Viajando En La Franja Del Iris, from 2024, is rapturous and among the handful of works in the exhibition I’d call beautiful. It’s twelve feet wide, with swirling passages of oranges, yellows, and blues meant to evoke old Cuba, a place liberated from historical trauma. No mention of Castro, though. The title means “traveling to the fringe of the iris,” or “traveling to the edge of sight.” It has nothing to do with the climate, but I didn’t care. It’s too lovely.

Piñeiro Bello’s painting is big, and it catches and keeps the eye but most of the other work in the show is big and looks like so much filler. Lots of artists today hope that height and width will cover an absence of sound content.

There’s nothing to be done to make Black Earth Rising a good show, even with more art of the caliber of Piñeiro Bello’s work. The premise — colonialism led to climate change — is false. I’m open to ideas that, on first look, I find bogus. I’m not always right. But Black Earth Rising needed to build a case. It presumes too much, and much of what it presumes is fantasy. A few weeks ago, I wrote about magic realism in the work of Amy Sherald, who, coincidentally, is from Baltimore. Her work is a depiction of the mundane world that, inexplicably, takes a bizarre — or magical — turn. Black Earth Rising might have gone in this direction. Very little of it reflects reality or science or good history.

Speaking of history, Heavy with History, another new show at the BMA, displays a montage of blown-up photographs by Baltimore artist Devin Allen taken during the 2015 uprising and riot in the city after the death of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old black ex-con with 18 arrests for drug charges and assault. Five cops were tried and cleared of manslaughter and assault charges, with a sixth cleared of a second-degree murder charge. An entirely hagiographic show, it was curated by the editor of Baltimore Beat, a black newspaper, and the BMA’s director of public programs. In the most recent issue, which I read online, it touts the ways Baltimore students deplored “Gaza’s devastation” at this season’s graduation.

The Freddie Gray death was a convoluted event and, for those of us who remember Marilyn Mosby, the prosecutor, and Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Baltimore’s mayor at the time, an outrageously politicized one. Mosby was convicted of Covid-relief-fund perjury and fraud last year. Heavy with History might have used ten years of reflection to present something balanced. The BMA is, after all, an educational institution. Fat chance that was ever going to happen. Freddie Gray is an innocent victim of police brutality — that’s the storyline, much as Abrego Garcia is a hardworking Maryland dad.

The art is very good. Allen’s talented. Still, what we get is heavy on hype. Baltimore Beat counts among its missions the exposure of “the dangerous and racist roots of policing” in Baltimore. Its editor isn’t a curator. Neither is the BMA’s director of public programs. They’re both propagandists. A good curator is a good teacher.

In walking through Black Earth Rising and Heavy with History, I kept asking myself, What’s the point of shows like these? It seems the goals are to foment resentment, anger, and hopelessness, especially among impressionable young people, and to fluff the egos of staff and trustees too smitten by their own virtue. If I were a young visitor, I’d leave depressed. History’s one thing. Axe-grinding is another. It’s no way to run a museum.

The BMA has launched an annual political cause. This year’s is called Turn Again to the Earth. It’s meant to be a response to the planet’s “urgent and undeniable” distress signals, mostly related to the weather. The climate cult will stage interventions in every gallery by the end of 2025. I dread what this will mean for, say, the Old Masters. In the Antioch mosaic spaces, the curators, if they’re honest, might note that global cooling — the ancient world’s Little Ice Age — probably hastened the collapse of the Roman Empire. I’m not sure what a raffia-clad sculpture of an African woman made by Simone Leigh has to do with Courbet and Pissarro, but there it is among them, a sore thumb indeed.

I was depressed when I got to the museum, having just been to a funeral, but I left buoyed by Fragonard’s The Actor, from 1769, one of his fantasy portraits, and Rembrandt’s late portrait of his sin, Titus. And there’s Van Dyck’s flamboyant showstopper Rinaldo and Armida, from 1629. The Saracen sorceress Armida is about to kill the sleeping Rinaldo, a Christian hero on his way to fight in the Crusades. Just as she’s about to strike, she falls in love with Rinaldo, whisking him away in her magic chariot to her enchanted castle where whoopie’s on the menu, encore after encore. “Make love, not war” is the relevant ’60s protest slogan. And, thinking environmentally, she’s chariot-pooling.

Rinald forgets about the Crusades until his friends Ubaldo and Carlo free him, and he’s ambivalent about it. Looking at this picture, I forgot — almost — about how much I disliked Black Earth Rising, Some of the BMA’s galleries are that lovely. We can always hope for the best. Woke is waning, but the problem with the BMA is that the hard-liners ruling the roost will hire people who think just as they do, stretching the reign of error far into the future unless the trustees tug at their leash. If the climate cult and the oppression miasma and race-explains-everything actually go out of fashion among those who chatter, this might actually happen. I hope it does. The BMA’s collection is too good, and the place too distinguished, to offer the same old, same old year after year.

After we left Baltimore, we went to Washington, where I had a good visit at the National Review Institute’s office and then went to Mount Vernon. I also visited Woodrow Wilson’s house. I’ll cover both soon. On the way back home to Vermont, we stopped at the Newark Museum in New Jersey. I live to tell the tale.