American Art in Flux

Bob Keyes, Colby News, November 1, 2024

The question was posed as part of a new initiative, Lunder Institute @, to encourage museums to respond to the prompt by first having internal conversations across departments and then sharing what emerged from those conversations through public programs.

That yearlong process culminated when curators, educators, and audience engagement specialists from each institution came to Colby this week for a three-day convening to share what they learned. Colby hosted a public discussion at the Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts, where representatives from each institution talked about their individual efforts, lessons, and takeaways.

The first-year cohort included the de Young Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, The Broad in Los Angeles, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

A question without an answer

The participants agreed, as Rachel Vogel, assistant curator at the Addison Gallery, said so succinctly: “This is a question that cannot be answered.”

But the conversations around it were revealing. A distillation of key takeaways:

American art is in a state of flux, as traditional definitions and assumptions about the genre evolve along with a larger cultural understanding of what it means to be an American. Museums are becoming more inclusive by “inviting in” and telling the stories of more underrepresented artists.

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